The Great Flood
To be interpreted literally or as hyperbole?
The Great Flood
To be interpreted literally or as hyperbole?
Amongst Christians, you’ll find a vast range of interpretations on what verses in the Bible should be taken literally or taken as allegory or hyperbole. Among the southern Evangelicals I grew up with, for example, the majority seemed to lean towards a literal interpretation.
The Great Flood is a myth that predates the Bible actually, the Sumerians even wrote about it in their creation myth, although the flood didn’t last as long, and the one who saved mankind from extinction was actually the same one who gave man wisdom in the garden…
This myth shows up all over the world, which I find interesting. Its detractors will say that any large flood of even a river that occurred anywhere in the world would’ve been recorded by primitive people as being a “great flood”, but I feel like this doesn’t give enough credit to history keepers of the time who described something extremely cataclysmic, or the fact that this is in fact a worldwide myth.
One more recent theory that did pique my interest is the “Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis” that there was a meteor impact around the end of the last ice age, somewhere in Greenland, and that the rapid melt-off of glacial ice caused a rapid increase in ocean levels and huge amounts of water to spill over and create areas like the badlands of the U.S., etc.
As time has gone by there actually has shown to be more evidence for this theory, and it’d explain many of the sunken ruins we see around the world, as well as myths like that of Atlantis sinking, if this was some sort of sudden catastrophic event.