Troll On

[shipperx]

So, I saw this posted on ONTD:

The producer of the movie “Noah,” says he is proud of the fact that he’s taken a story inspired by {the Bible} and turned it into something so secular.

Director Darren Aronofsky called his movie “the least biblical biblical film ever made,”




Which in turn reminded me of reading this yesterday (there were some interesting  comments to it as well).   Excerpt:

There are few databases in science more comprehensive than weather. Mention of floods and droughts appear in ancient hieroglyphics, engraved symbolically on everything from clay pots to stone-tipped spear shafts, and can be inferred by images on cave walls millennia earlier. Temperature and pressure data were written down starting the very day those first crude instruments were created. {...} Which brings up a soon-to-be-released motion picture and the depiction of a notion discarded long ago by scientists. The flood of Noah.

Could it have happened? Could it rain so hard and long on a terrestrial world that the tallest mountains were under water? Sure, it could ... just not on Earth and especially not in the last few thousand years. There are plenty of reasons why, starting with the fact that there's not enough water held in the atmosphere at any given time and, unless the planet's air was converted into a thick, broiling steamy version of Venus that would sterilize the entire surface of land and sea alike, it's not possible for our atmosphere to hold even a tiny fraction of the necessary water vapor required to produce thousands of feet of rainfall.

We know this. It's not a matter of opinion, it's a matter of well-established and tested physical properties of heat, pressure, water and vapor. Not to mention some simple geometry.

Bear in mind, the water has to come from somewhere besides the ocean. The reason sea levels are what they are is a combination of how much liquid water exists on Earth and the fact that the ocean basins are the lowest parts of the planet. No matter how that liquid is distributed initially, it will quickly fill up the lowest points: water runs downhill.

The Earth is so close to round that we can use a circle or globe to stand in for it when figuring out how much water it would take to reach the summit of various mountains. We'll spare you the math and provide the simple answer: over half a billion and a billion cubic miles of additional water would be needed to submerge the peaks of the more modest mountains in Noah's region or the Himalayas, respectively. At any given time and averaged over the entire planet's surface, the atmosphere can hold ... mere inches of the wet stuff at the most.

To get our atmosphere to hold even the equivalent of a few feet of additional water, enough to raise global sea levels measurably, it would have to be very hot and very dense and composed almost entirely of water vapor. As the old saying goes, Noah would have been poached long before he could move, let alone work on a big wooden ship for 70 years. It also couldn't have come from space in the last few thousand years. An object or objects representing that volume of water would be equivalent to an icy asteroid hundreds of miles in diameter striking the planet. It wouldn't matter if it was fluffy snow, it wouldn't matter if it were super light Styrofoam—that kind of mass hitting the surface at orbital velocity would be the end of life.

If one needs a basis for legend, in this case a massive local flood, there are more likely explanations. If we presume Noah lived around 5,000 or 6,000 years ago, he would have been smack dab in the middle of the last stages of a great global warming trend caused by the retreat of the most recent glaciers. In some places weather would be chaotic, sea levels would have been rising, maybe fast enough for a Neolithic tribe living near the coast to notice in the course of a single lifetime. Myths might have sprung up to explain this, and in that cultural environment, when the inevitable flood of a lifetime came and one family managed to ride it out, it would have made quite an epic story to tell and re-tell.

All that being said, as a modern movie-going people, there's no reason to insist on perfect scientific accuracy in a film based on legend. Such criteria would eliminate virtually every sci-fi flick ever made, let alone some of the best fantasy and adventure films ever recorded...

Comments

[elisi]

People should just study a bit of archeology. Like this book here: The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood by Irving Finkel. He is EXACTLY what you'd expect - very old, white beard, fascinating.

Anyway, the whole 'the mountains were covered with water' is probably down to a translation error. Back then, cities in that area were often loacted on hill, as this made strategic sense. *These* could be covered by a major flood (as indeed, there are records of - see the book above).

:)

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Considering that in those times for most people the length and breadth of "the world" is what they could walk, I have no doubt that they could be convinced that the 'world' flooded and it didn't need to cover the Himalaya's.

Given the way that oral histories were passed down, there would by necessity be epic hyperbole and yeah, there were a lot of floods in the post-ice age Neolithic world that would have made quite the impression on a number of cultures and early civilizations.

[elisi]

Here is a good article about the book I linked to, with a fair bit of background info. :)

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I may pick up the book. I love ancient history.

I did know that the Noah story is essentially a relative of the backstory to the Babylonian myth of Gilgamesh (actually a lot of Genesis is related to Babylonian mythology. Heck the the Bible states up front that Abraham is from somewhere in Sumeria). And I knew a bit about Paratti's point about the Bosphorus/Black Sea/Aegean overflow flood.

A great deal of early Sumerian and Assyrian culture is linked to flooding as the floods of the Tigris and Euphrates were frequently catastrophic and unpridictable. Sumerian myth in particular is often about the capriciousness of gods and their culture's frequent experience with flooding.

And, again, when ice dams melt and sea levels rise coinciding with the establishment of early civilizations it has a way of residing in the cultural memory for a very long time.

[elisi]

Interesting. I may pick up the book. I love ancient history.
It looks fascinating, doesn't it? The main thing about this 'new' tablet being the actual instructions for the ark - and the fact that it was ROUND. I love that.

And, again, when ice dams melt and sea levels rise coinciding with the establishment of early civilizations it has a way of residing in the cultural memory for a very long time.
*nods* I wish I had time to study it all...

[paratti.livejournal.com]

Filling of the Black Sea after the sea broke through. Nuff said.

[speakr2customrs.livejournal.com]

I think it should have the subtitle 'The Stupidest Story Ever Told'. The Noha story is a badly plagiarised version of a section of the Gligamesh story with the serial numbers filed off and, with them, all the literary merit and sense. If a Fantasy or SF film breaks my suspension of disbelief by as much as the Noah story does then I don't go to see it.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

I don't know. Several oral mythologies from the dawns of civilization have amusing aspects. For instance(one of my fave moments from Red Dwarf):

"The Greeks have been camped outside of Troy, kapowin', zappin' and kersplattin' the Trojans for the best part of a decade, yeah. Then they wake up one morning and the Greeks have gone. And there outside the city walls they've left this gift, this tribute to their valiant foes, a huge wooden horse. Just large enough to happily contain five hundred Greeks in full battle dress, and still have adequate room for toilet facilities.

Are you telling me not one Trojan goes, 'Hang on a minute, that's a bit of a funny prezzie. What's wrong with a couple of hundred pairs of socks and some aftershave?' No, they don't. They just wheel it in, and all decide to go for an early night! People that stupid deserve to be kapowed, zapped and kersplatted in their beds.

And do you know what the funny thing is? From this particular phase in history derived the phrase - Beware of Greeks bearing gifts. When it'd be much more logical to derive the phrase - Beware of Trojans, they're complete Smegheads!"

[eilowyn.livejournal.com]

My dad is having us see it as a family, a "good, Christian family," based on an interview with the writer he heard on right-wing radio. Apparently they deal with the Nephilim, which he thinks is cool.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

And rather creepy. But then, that might be the X-Files Nephilim episode talking but I always found the Serephim and the Nephilim creepy

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

See? This is why the metaphor blind (aka literal minded) shouldn't interpret the Bible. It doesn't make any sense to them.

The whole Noah story was a fable, not history.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Seriously.

Metaphor. Analogy. Parables. These are things, people!

And it's possible to be religious and to understand that.

Back when I was having to convert to Greek Orthodox to be my neice's godmother (the Orthodox church requires god parents to be ostensibly of the same faith, so to I had to convert and be chistened in the Orthodox church, which amounted to going to six weeks of Bible study classes with the Priest and being re-christened.

At one of these Bible studies my sister outright asked Father Emmanuel (the priest) whether we were intended to take Genesis literaly or metaphoricaly. I remember being quite impressed with Father Emmanuel's answer. Don't remember the words exactly, but he was a highly educated man who studied not only religion but history. He gave thoughtful answer. At any rate he flat-out stated that you have to take Genesis in a metaphorical light. And he was an Orthodox priest. (I really liked Father Emmanuel, may he rest in peace).

Some of these modern evangelical sects have edged into not only anti-modernity but also anti-education.

There is no commandment "Though shalt be willfully ignorant."

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Catholic Priests used to think the congregation could not be trusted to study the bible, that only theologians could interpret it - because the congregation didn't have the capacity or scholarly training to understand it.
(I sometimes think they have a point when it comes to some, ahem, evangelistic fundamentalist sects of Christianity.)

Although there are Catholics who interpret it literally too. I used to get into fights with them in college.

I don't know why people insist on interpreting the Bible literally as a historic text. Has always bewildered me. And it gives religion a bad name.
Most religious people don't do this. It's just the loud nitwits that do.

[txvoodoo.livejournal.com]

I fucking love science. :D