Flood Legends
Authors: Charles Martin
Tags: #History, #Biblical Studies, #World, #Historiography, #Religion, #Chrisitian
Flood Legends
Global Clues of a Common Event
Charles Martin
Copyright Information
First printing: May 2009
Copyright © 2009 by Charles Martin. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations in articles and reviews. For information write:
Master Books
®
, P.O. Box 726, Green Forest, AR 72638.
ISBN-13: 978-0-89051-553-2
Library of Congress Number: 2009923590
Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture is from the New International Version of the Bible.
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Dedication
To my mom, who, no doubt, has already asked Him where the vessel landed. You'll have to tell me when I get there, Mom.
Acknowledgments
How can I even begin to sum up a lifetime of inspirations in just a few short paragraphs? This isn't easy, so if I have forgotten to mention you by name, I'm sorry; I hope you can forgive the slight.
First, I want to thank my loving wife, Virginia. What could I possibly say to make up for all those evenings you spent alone while I feverishly worked on draft after draft? Thank you for your patience and support. I love you.
And I'd like to thank our cats for
not
eating the pages we had strewn across the house for the better part of a month.
Thanks, also, to my father, Charles, for always encouraging me to follow my passions. This ranks pretty high on the list of things I'm excited about.
I owe an enormous thank-you to the "Young Professionals" class at Bethany Place. You guys have spent the last five years challenging me to always dig deeper into the Word. Thanks.
And where would this book be if it weren't for the intellectual giants who have come before, and on whose shoulders I have merely stood? I am indebted to the work of the late Sir James Frazer and Theodore Gaster. Their collection of world mythology is unprecedented. I am also deeply indebted to the work and studies of the Institute for Creation Research and the Answers in Genesis organization.
Thank you to Tim Dudley, Laura Welch, and the rest of the staff at New Leaf for believing in an unpublished author with an unpolished manuscript. I — literally — could not have done this without you. Thank you.
Lastly, thank You to my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Despite my doubts and disobedience, He still
likes
me, and even calls me "friend." For that, I am eternally perplexed ... but thankful, nonetheless.
Contents
Chapter 1
Myth: History or Legend?
Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear
.
1
— William Shakespeare
Mythology
. The very word conjures up different images for different people. Some picture the gods and goddesses of ancient Rome: Jupiter, Mercury, and the bloodthirsty war-god, Mars. Some picture the Minotaur of Greek mythology, hiding deep in his labyrinth lair, waiting to devour his next victim. Others may picture the slightly more obscure animal spirits of Native American legends, or the tree-spirits of Celtic lore. Regardless of what we may picture, nearly everyone, in some way, is drawn to mythology.
With the popularity of movies such as
Jason and the Argonauts
,
Ben-Hur
,
Troy
,
King Arthur, Alexander
,
300
, even
Finding Neverland
, film companies and moviegoers have long attempted to discern the difference between reality and fiction. We all seem to have the desire to find — are perhaps even obsessed with finding — the fine line that often exists between history and legend. What is it that draws us to mythology? What makes ancient folklore so irrevocably attractive to us? Do we simply love a good yarn? Are we drawn to it for the entertainment, or do we sometimes feel the tug of a memory — a feeling that our history is, somehow, embedded in the stories?
In the past, mythologists have approached ancient literature with a certain amount of skepticism: myths, they felt, were nothing more than fanciful literature — imaginative inventions of creative minds — and therefore could not, and
should
not, be taken as literal history. But is this true? Is a myth nothing more than a child's bedtime story, a fable to be outgrown? Not every mythologist feels that way, however. The last century has seen a shift in how we regard mythology. Since the late 1800s, mythologists have come to see myth as not
wholly
fictional, but instead as
embellishments
of truth. In other words, a "complex" myth may, in fact, have a perfectly "reasonable" footing in "reality."
There are two basic approaches to interpreting myths. The first approach is one of utter disregard for the tales, legends, and recorded history of a group of people. The second approach is an attempt to "symbolize" the stories by discounting the telling of them as distorted and exaggerated versions of the truth. What mythologists who take this approach believe is that the mythical event happened, but not necessarily as it was told. The events, they argue, may have been "real," but the interpretation — the version passed down — has been exaggerated and distorted well beyond the "true" event. A perfect example of a myth that suffers from both of these interpretive styles, and one we will be looking at in more detail later, is that of the global Flood.
The story of the Flood permeates nearly every culture of the world in some way, shape, or form. While some of the details vary between the different cultural versions, the same basic plotline occurs in all of them: a god becomes angry and destroys the earth with a flood but preserves the human race by selecting a certain number of people to survive the catastrophe. These people are saved from the flood by a vessel, which carries them throughout the duration of the event. In the stories, it is this same group of people that is then responsible for repopulating the earth.
Despite these striking similarities, some mythologists have looked at the
differences
in the various versions and declared: "This never happened!" The differences, they often claim, are too great, and the premise is too far-fetched. They may look at the fact that Noah builds an ark, while a group of aborigines in Australia build a raft and claim that the differences make the story impossible.
On the other hand, many claim that a flood did indeed occur, but that it was a "local" flood and its occurrence was merely misunderstood and overstated. "Noah's flood" and the "Aborigine flood" were not so much global catastrophes as they were local disasters. I feel both of these interpretive styles stem from an unfortunate mindset: the belief that we know better than the people who came before us.
We believe we live in an age of "progressive" thinking. Personally, I prefer to call it "contradictory" thinking. We contradict ourselves in that, while we wish to be open-minded and rational, we stop using our minds if stories seem too "illogical"; we dismiss them outright as fairy tales. In other words, we close our minds just when we should be opening them more, and in the process disregard what may, in fact, be truth. This is not to say that ancient cultures were more technologically advanced than we are today — after all, they did not have computers, cars, or electricity — but it is not fair to say that they were less
intelligent
. Does owning a car translate into having a better grasp on "reality"? Does having a computer mean that we understand events of the past better than the people who may have experienced them? Two extremely cogent examples of this thinking spring immediately to mind. The first involves the myth of Troy and a blind bard's tale of war and betrayal. The second example involves the myth of the Kraken.
Of Wars and Cephalopods
Prior to 1870, most scholars regarded Homer's
Iliad
as pure fiction. However, in the early 1870s two archaeologists, Heinrich Schliemann and Frank Calvert, excavated several artifacts in the Turkish desert, including a city that had been burned to the ground just as Homer had reported. Even more importantly, however, they uncovered within the ruins a coin engraved "Ilium," the ancient Latin name for Troy (and the source for the title of Homer's
Iliad
). Sadly, while historians did
eventually
begin to take a more serious look at Homer's work, it took until the late 19th century for the battle of the
Iliad
to even be acknowledged as
possible
. In essence then, Troy had been destroyed twice prior to the excavations — first in battle, and then in the minds of the educated. Today, we still do likewise. We believe that if a story or historical account does not mesh with practical sensibilities, we cannot accept it, and we want everything to be proven before we will believe it. I've found, however, that lack of
proof
does not necessarily mean lack of
truth
. Another example of this idea, made popular in recent movies, is the myth of the Kraken.
The Kraken appears most notably in Norse and Icelandic mythology, but its stories were also popular with American whalers, who brought many of the legends with them from the Old World. This is not to say, however, that the whalers were responsible for
every
tale of the Kraken on this side of the Atlantic, because similar tales already existed here. In Peru, for example, Native American fishermen would tell tales of a water demon that closely resembled the Kraken of Norse mythology.
2
The beast was said to be a form of cephalopod, like the common octopus or squid. Descriptions of its size varied, but it was reported to have tentacles long enough to drag a ship under the waves. In the middle of the 1700s, Bishop Pontoppidan, a well-known but often criticized biologist (or "naturalist," as they were then called), described, at length, the Scandinavian Kraken. He wrote that it "looks at first like a number of small islands, surrounded with something that floats and fluctuates like sea weeds." He then described that, as one nears it, the "sea weeds" look more like "horns [i.e
.
, arms] …which grow thicker and thicker the higher they rise above the surface of the water." He finishes by asserting that the "horns," when jutting straight up out of the ocean, "stand as high and large as the masts of middle-siz'd vessels."
3
Pliny the Elder discusses the Kraken at length in his
Naturalis Historia
, written sometime in the first century A.D. Pliny actually calls the creature a "polyp," but his description matches that given of the Kraken in other literature. He describes it as a fierce beast with a jelly-like body, long tentacles, and a sharp, parrot-like beak.