Episode 10 – The Story of the Story

Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. In John 14:6, Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” The goal of Anchored by Truth is to encourage everyone to grow in the Christian faith by anchoring themselves to the secure truth found in the inspired, inerrant, and infallible word of God.

Script: (dramatic opening music)(music under voice over)

After forty days Noah opened a window he had made in the ark and sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth. Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground. But the dove could find nowhere to perch because there was water over all the surface of the earth; so it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark. He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth. He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him. By the first day of the first month of Noah’s six hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth. Noah then removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was dry. By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was completely dry. Genesis Chapter 8, verses 6 through 14

I have given them your word and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world. 15My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. 16They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. 17Sanctify them by d the truth; your word is truth.

The Gospel of John, Chapter 17, verses 14 through 17

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VK: Hello! I’m Victoria K welcoming you to another episode of Anchored by Truth. I’m in the studio today with RD Fierro, author, Founder, and as we have seen part time humorist for Crystal Sea Books. RD, I understand that today we’re going to hear the last in the Life Lessons with a Laugh series about the story of Noah and the flood. My big question is whether in this Life Lesson you’re going to be any more successful at getting Jerry’s name right – or Noah’s for that matter? And if you are where will we go from there?

RD: Well, there’s no point in ruining the suspense about the name game. But as to where we go from there, today I’d like to spend a little time thinking about what I call, “The story of the story.”

VK: Hmmm. All that sounds a little intriguing and scary at the same time. Ok. Let’s listen to you and Jerry unearthing – so to speak – one more lesson from the story of Noah and the Genesis flood.

---- NOAH 5 – Strength in the Storm

VK: Ok. There were two big surprises in that lesson. First, you got Jerry’s name right, not once but twice. Second, that you pointed out that a detail as seemingly insignificant as God’s direction to coat the ark with pitch actually helps confirm the truth of the entire account.

RD: Well, the fact that I got Jerry’s name right might be a surprise but the value of adding the pitch to the ark is a detail that many others have noted. There’s a good article that gives more detail about the pitch’s role in ship building on creation.com.

VK: So in the last three Life Lessons you covered the fact that the Biblical description of the ark makes sense in the real world, right? As described in the Bible the ark would have had the size to carry the animals and their food. It had the right dimensions to remain stable in rough seas. And the nature of the wood available in Noah’s location combined with the coating of pitch would have produced a very strong vessel. All these factors help increase our confidence that Biblical story is a true story. But you said that today you wanted to talk about the “story of the story.” What in the world do you mean by that?

RD: Well, let’s start by thinking about other kinds of stories especially the kind that old guys like me like to tell.

VK: Uh, oh. This is starting to sound scary too…

RD: Not really. You’ll like this illustration. Let’s suppose that there’s a high school athlete – we’ll call him Jermajesty – who was a baseball player and one year Jermajesty’s hits a single late in the day that drives home the winning run. His team goes on to make it to the playoffs in part due to that win. That’s the kind of story that Jermajesty would likely repeat many times during the rest of his life, right?

VK: Well, if Jermajesty is like you …

RD: Exactly. If Jermajesty is like a lot of us he’s going to tell that story a lot of times...

VK: Every time he meets a new neighbor, goes to the barber…

RD: Yeah. The story is going to be repeated a lot. But, will it always be told in the same way? Or will it grow a little over time?

VK: You mean by the time Jermajesty is in his 40’s now the single has become a double or a triple?

RD: There you go, or at least there goes Jermajesty. By the time Jermajesty’s kids are entering school the single is a double and by the time they graduate it’s now a home run. And after Jermajesty’s retirement it’s now a grand slam and he hit it with two outs and a full count in the bottom of the 9th.

VK: Which is why Jermajesty doesn’t tell it when his high school sweetheart and wife of 50 years is around?

RD: Fair point. I told you you’d like this one. But you get the idea. Stories don’t always end up where they start out, even when there is a completely true story to begin with. So, it should not be surprising then, with an event as catastrophic as a Biblical flood that as Noah’s descendants began to repopulate the earth and move around the flood story would go with them. And over time, as the Noah’s children and grandchildren moved, aged, changed, and had children of their own, the original story also moved and changed. Some observers have counted almost 200 different variants on the flood story around the world and just about every culture on earth has one.

VK: What are some of the best known of variants?

RD: One of the best known of the variants and probably the one that most closely tracks the Biblical account is the Babylonian flood narrative. In the Babylonian narrative their Noah is called Utnapishtim. Utnapishtim is warned by a friendly god in advance that a great flood is coming and orders him to build an ark to save not only his own family but also a group of representative animals. The ark finally grounds on a mountain named Nisir in a mountain range northeast of Babylon. Similar to the Biblical account, Utnapishtim sends out a dove, a swallow, and a raven to check out the conditions. Finally, Utnapishtim and his family are able to emerge where they offer sacrifices to the gods, but in the Babylonian epic the gods are famished because they couldn’t receive altar-food while the flood waters were on the earth.

VK: Quite a difference from the God of the Bible who is completely self-sufficient and never has need of anything from the hand of men.

RD: True dat. Because of the extent of the similarities between the Biblical account and the Babylonian account some observers have suggested that the Biblical account arose from the Babylonian but this seems highly unlikely given some extremely significant differences between the two.

VK: Such as.

RD: Such as the design of Utnapishtim’s ark. In the Babylonian account the ark Utnapishtim built was a perfect cube with six decks. It goes without saying that - in complete opposition to the stability of the Biblical ark - a cube-shaped vessel would roll and capsize quite easily in open waters. Such a vessel could never have remained upright in the roiling seas that would have been present in the initial flood conditions. Any passengers of such a vessel would have likely been beaten to death – literally – even if the vessel itself continued to float. No modern boats from kayaks, canoes, or ocean going vessels ever use a cube as a basic design shape. Furthermore, the Babylonian account contains many dramatic details, but says nothing about specific dates. Notice that the Biblical account is very specific about the details of time. Noah was 500 before he had children. He was 600 when the flood started. It rained for 40 days and it took 150 days for the water to recede. The ark rested on Mount Ararat on the 17th day of the 7th month. On the 27th day of the 2nd month the earth was dry. It was almost like God was filling in a day-planner with the dates he did things.

VK: And even though there is uncertainty about how those dates might translate into the Gregorian calendar we used today, 3,000 plus years ago when Moses first wrote the account those dates would have been well understood.

RD: Yes. There is a popular tendency today to doubt the veracity of a historical account if we don’t see how it immediately fits into the reference marks we use in our world. If we can’t assign a precise Gregorian date to an event some people will deny it could be true, but this obviously makes little or no sense. The Gregorian calendar only started to come into popular use in 1582 and there are still countries that don’t use it. When you think about it, the majority of the world’s history occurred before our current calendar even took effect. But when it comes to ancient calendars there is some tantalizing confirmation of the Biblical dates from a surprising source.

VK: This sounds interesting.

RD: It is. Lxtlilxochitl,

VK: Easy for you to say.

RD: Yeah. No. Not so much. Anyway, Lxtlilxochitl was an Aztec native historian who wrote that the world lasted 1716 years before it was destroyed by a flood. What’s so fascinating about this is that this figure is only 60 years different from the 1656 years which the Bible gives by addition of the ages in the geneology presented in Genesis 5 when you take into account the overlapping of each subsequent generation by birth.

VK: Well, that is a fascinating coincidence if that’s what it is. Have you come across any other tantalizing tidbits?

RD: There are some truly interesting hints that either the Genesis story or even Noah’s name has been preserved in surprising ways around the world. As most people know the traditional Chinese language uses symbols or characters for words as opposed to the way Western written languages use a combination of alphabetic letters to form words. Well, the Chinese character for a large ship is a combination of three radicals which individually mean “boat” or “vessel”, the number “8” and the symbol for “mouths” or “persons.” Remember that the Bible says that eight people were saved from death by the ark: Noah, his three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth and their wives.

This is particularly fascinating because a lot of scholars date the existence of the written Chinese language to the general time frame of twelve hundred or so years before the birth of Christ which is about the time orthodox Christian scholars believe Moses wrote the book of Genesis. Some scholars believe that the Chinese characters predate the existence of a written version of Genesis meaning that the character was derived from another source not an early version of the Biblical book. One distinct possibility is that the Chinese character’s origin just harkens back to the original story.

With respect to the potential preservation of Noah’s name the Hottentots of South America believe they are descended from “Noh.” The Hawaiians report a flood from which only “Nu-u” and his family were saved.

VK: Those are intriguing details. But you say that some of the variant flood narratives also point to distinct differences with the Genesis narrative that lend more credence to the historicity of the Biblical one.

RD: Yes, just a couple of quick examples before we close for today. An Ojibwa Indian legend from around Lake Superior tells of a great snow that fell one September at the beginning of time. A bag contained the sun’s heat until a mouse nibbled a hole in it. The warmth spilled over, melting the snow and producing a flood that rose above the tops of the highest pines. Everyone drowned except for an old man who drifted about in his canoe rescuing animals.

There is another Native American tribe, the Havasupai, attributes the Grand Canyon’s carving to a catastrophic flood down the Colorado River that occurred when the god Ho-ko-ma-ta unleashed a tremendous rainstorm. A more benevolent god, Pu-keh-eh, put his daughter in a hollowed-out log to save her from the monstrous current. After the flood receded, she crawled out and became mother of all humanity.

It’s easy to see that these kind of legends contain mythological elements that are quite different from the reserved and historical character of the Biblical account. Obviously, the Biblical narrative describes a flood event that no one today has ever seen, or ever will see. But we see the correspondence of everything in the story but the size of the flood all around us every day.

VK: I see what you mean. The details of the Bible story make sense in the real world. A boat with the ark’s dimensions would be stable in an ocean environment even one being racked by huge waves. The ark’s size meant that it had a cargo capacity of up to 3.5 million cubic feet. We all know that boats need proper ballast for stability and the ark would have had the most ballast when the seas were roughest. As the year in the ark went by the people and animals would have eaten the food so the amount of ballast would have gradually decreased.

It made sense that God told Noah to coat the ark with pitch inside and out. People made sturdy wooden boats and covered them in pitch and sailed them for hundreds of years. Doves and ravens still fly in our skies today. It made sense that the raven could survive outside the ark even before the water had completely dried because ravens are carrion eaters. So, the raven could have landed on pieces of a floating carcass and survived, whereas a dove couldn’t. Doves eat fruits, seeds, and vegetables so the dove had to come back to ark until it could find food.

There are massive geological formations on the earth’s surface that were once underwater but today those formations are nowhere near an ocean. The list of details in the Bible story that make sense in the real world goes on and on. But the details in most of the variants don’t make nearly as much sense in the real world. But the existence of those stories themselves are evidence that at one point a real event took place even if some of the details have gotten mixed up over time.

RD: Yes. Just like Jermajesty’s story of baseball heroism which grew over time, the spread of the Bible story as generations came and went around the world still harken back to an original story somewhere. It’s up to us to consider the evidence and then make a, hopefully, intelligent judgement as to which story is most likely the true one. I believe that, on the basis of the available evidence, the Biblical narrative demonstrates the strongest claim to historical authenticity.

VK: We’ve covered a lot of ground in the last few weeks and our listeners have probably heard things about Noah’s story they had never heard before. For next time I think you want to do a review and summary.

RD: True dat. Our goal is help the listeners to the broadcast or podcast have a solid basis upon which they can continue their own pursuit of the truth.

VK: Today for our closing prayer how about if we pray for the renewal of the worship of the God of the Bible who is our one sure anchor to truth.

---- Prayer for friends, radio version.

VK: We hope you’ll be with us next time and we hope you’ll take some time to encourage some friends to tune in too, or listen to the podcast version of this show.

If you’d like to hear more, try out crystalseabooks.com where “We’re not famous but our Boss is!”

(Bible Quotes from the New International Version)

The Book of Genesis, chapter 8, verses 6 through 14

Philippians, chapter 4 verse 8

https://creation.com/the-pitch-for-noahs-ark

https://discovermagazine.com/2012/jul-aug/06-biblical-type-floods-real-absolutely-enormous

https://considerthegospel.org/2014/03/28/the-noah-controversy-could-that-flood-have-happened/?gclid=Cj0KCQjwjpjkBRDRARIsAKv-0O13H95aNEtfy54OtzCKypQNTJ_88M6sLzW4qVoFXoqy4BqDZrincmoaAneMEALw_wcB

https://creation.com/cmi-misrepresents-ancient-chinese-language