Hacker News Reader

Comment by pryce | Hacker News Reader

People who take the story literally today (largely American evangelicals), are usually also pretty adamant that they should take the dimensions in Genesis 6:15 literally - "The ark is to be three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide and thirty cubits high"[1] and made of "cypress wood" coated in "pitch".

Can you tell me where the "round wicker basket" description came from?

[1] NIV Footnote: That is, about 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high or about 135 meters long, 23 meters wide and 14 meters high

View on HN

I'm not that commenter but it's actually really interesting! There's a Babylonian tablet that predates Genesis by some time and has very similar instructions. A group in India actually built one following the tablet's instructions!

https://www.telegraphindia.com/7-days/the-ark-that-finkel-bu...

A key excerpt from above link:

> So was there an actual flood of biblical proportions in Babylon? Finkel believes that there was a real fear of flooding and stories of death and destruction that arose from these anxieties. 'The myth of the flood story, to build the boat, is an antidote to this very fear.'

I love rational explanations for mythology and it makes so much sense to me that periodic flooding would have been a problem since the dawn of agrarian civilization, and it makes sense that our forebears would have aspired to this idea of having the doomsday raft ready to go when the big one hits.

my personal theory based on nothing but it makes sense to me for the time period, is that if there is truth to the story, it was actually referring to saving domesticated farm animals so Noah and fam could start over.

There's a lot of ancient stories about a massive flood in that area with someone building a boat and saving animals, so maybe that's a thing that really happened. But it's most likely a massive river (Eufrates & Tigris?) flood or possibly even the filling of the Black Sea deluge[0], and involved mostly farm animals, not lions and kangaroos.

(As a Christian I'm totally comfortable with the idea that some stories in the Bible are just stories and don't have to be literally true.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis

Hmm.. the ‘myth as an antidote to fear’ idea only makes sense if humans were on the ark. It makes more sense interpreted as a warning as to the coming future. The earth will survive no matter what, you may not. Making minds and hearts fear, not fear antidote.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com