Babel, also to Georgia Purdom

Survival, Not Leisure, Georgia? · Babel, also to Georgia Purdom

Same video as previous:

Noah’s Ark and the Flood with Dr. Georgia Purdom @ 46:19
Answers in Genesis | 2.VII.2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ma-LP0UDtw&t=1847s

Minor quibble : she places Babel at c. 101 after Flood, I'd place it at 401 (or possibly, not quite improbably 529) after the Flood.

Major quibble : she is considering garbling of the Flood account as due to telephone game.

Now, the telephone game is very apt to illustrate what can happen when rumours spread on telephones, not by the link to one account going viral on the internet part of a smart phone, but on telephones, wall phones or smart phones.

A news seems urgent to spread to neighbours, it is retold orally in haste without any time to back-check, and therefore it is accumulating inaccuracies.

This is not how traditions over several generations change, since the transmission is so very different from the telephone game.

First of all, they did not go away from the eye-witness account, because they were not all in the business of transmitting it as formulated by Noah or his sons. Therefore, they did not all have it as early Evolutionists all had their Bibles in Protestant England.

Second, the transmission was made with such care that the telephone game cannot explain inaccuracies, they are from other sources:

• inadvertent conflations;
• conflations made by artistic liberty (like fan fictions on Incredible Hulk meeting Batman, when neither DC or Marvel Comics are authorising it - but in this case more like making Bob Banner and Bruce Wayne the same person);
• outright lies, by omission or addition or both;
• the one item which resembles telephone game, sth is incomprehensible and you try to restitute the original message.

Whether a conflation is inadvertent or deliberate art cannot always be known.

A lie would become a fair ingredient for political and religious reasons due to Nimrodian tyranny (on my view technolatrous, not idolatrous as in Hindoo like or Shinto like religions), and (later on) rise of idolatry. It would also become an ingredient when certain sins became fashionable or acceptable among certain peoples.

The Greek Flood account for instance includes a conflation with destruction of Sodom coupled with a probably very deliberate omission of the exact sin for which God judged Sodom.

• Deucalion and Pyrrha are an old couple who have no children descending from both of them - like Abraham and Sarah.
• Three "gods" come to them - like three angels to Abraham and Sarah
• They foretell a disaster to them - like the three to Abraham and two of them to Lot
• They rescue - like angels rescued Lot or like God rescued Noah.
• After the disaster, the couple has a trouble about repopulating - like daughters of Lot.

We can very well imagine a first stage where Greeks were asking "was it fire or water" and then a second one, in which the decision on water is made because the "fire" account says that a habit Hercules seems to have had with Iolaus was very displeasing to "the gods" ("or whatever") and as they were idolising Hercules, this was not good news for them.

Hence, the accumulation of Genesis 18-19 traits to an overtly mostly Genesis 6-9 story. Because one wanted deliberately to leave out the moral essence of Genesis 18-19 : monotheism, old childless woman miraculously getting pregnant by her husband in old age, and, most of all, condemnation of the last of the sins enumerated of Jerusalem and "her sister Sodom" in Ezechiel 16:49-50.

Condemning pride and inhospitality - sure, why not? But condemning gluttony, idleness and - well, the last of these sins, that didn't feel to well to those arguably already Hercules worshipping Greeks to whom we owe an account of Deucalion and Pyrrha which is found in very early (I think incomplete) versions or allusions in Homer and Hesiod, in 750 or 700 BC, near 5 centuries after Troy fell in 1179, by which time Hercules was already dead, which was 736 years after the Genesis 20 event, birth of Isaac, nine months after destruction of Sodom, which in turn was 1042 years after the Flood of Noah.

A bit like certain people want to use rainbows referring to diversity of kinds in Noah's Ark in a metaphoric sense that also doesn't quite match what we should conclude from the destruction of Sodom.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Pompidou Library
III:d Lord's Day after Epiphany
26.I.2020