Noah's Ark was round?

[Silvertusk]

Thank you for those links Jac, I will get on to them.

[Furstentum Liechtenstein]

I happen to have The Epic of Gilgamesh in book form in my home...but it is in French. The flood story is in chapter 11 (or tablet 11) and the story is very different from the Flood in Genesis. Here is my translation of a few verses (word-for-word) from the French:

Man of Sourippak*, son of Oubara-Toutou,
Destroy your house, build a vessel,
Abandon your riches, look for life,
Hate your riches and preserve your life,
Call the seed of all life into the vessel!

Measure carefully the vessel's dimensions!
The vessel that you will build!
The width and the length must correspond!
On the ocean, put it!
Me, I understood and said to Ea my Master:
Lord, what you have said,
I will accomplish and will be proof of my dedication,
But what will I say to the villagers,
To the ancients, when they ask?

(...) The god Ea answers that he will not stay any longer with the inhabitants of the village but will sail with 'the man of Sourripak.' The vessel was completed by sundown that day and 'the man of Sourripak' filled it with all that was his: money, possessions and his family.

I haven't read anything in the rest of the chapter similar to the biblical narrative. There are vague similarities, vague because we are talking about a sea voyage and the techniques used then were probably common to all seafarers (such as letting a bird out to see if it would come back). Gilgamesh's trip lasted 7 days and he let out 3 different birds: a dove, a swallow and a raven. The raven never came back. Gilgamesh landed on Mount Nisir, and set up 14 ritual goblets filled with some sort of potion ''which the gods gathered round like flies''.

At the end of this adventure, Gilgamesh (the man of Sourripak) and his wife are transformed into gods and Gilgamesh is given a new name: Outa-napistim.

FL

*I have left all proper names in the French spelling.

[PeteSinCA]

It's hard for me to point you to any particular source, as the criticism is so widespread. Just Google "criticism of the documentary hypothesis" and related terms and you'll find more material than you could ever read in a lifetime.

Some material you want to start with, though:

https://www.biblearchaeology.org/post/2 ... px#Article
http://carm.org/documentary-hypothesis
http://www.doubtlessfaith.com/uploads/5 ... archs2.pdf
http://www.sbts.edu/media/publications/ ... 1fall4.pdf

And on and on and on and on . . .

If you want a book (though somewhat dated), Gleason Archer's Survey of Old Testament Introduction is good. I'll close with a comment from William Lasor, who is no conservative scholar (which you can see from the quote itself), mind you, from his book Old Testament Survey: The Message, Form, and Background of the Old Testament:

• It is doubtful that the documentary hypothesis will survive the critical labors of contemporary scholarship. What new hypothesis will receive wide acclaim is far from clear. Certainly, the Pentateuch is an anthology of a wide variety of literature, accounts, laws, rituals, exhortations, sermons, and instructions. How were these texts preserved before they were canonized? How did an ancient text address a later audience? These questions are crucial to understanding the complexity of the Pentateuch. They lead one to conclude that it was not written by one person in a given decade. Rather it is the product of the believing community through many centuries. Of much more importance for interpretation is the final result of this long process, produced by the inspired authors, editors, and tradition-bearers of God’s chosen people.

Again, all this is the basis for arguments about the OT account of the Flood coming after and being dependent upon these other Mesopotamian flood stories. Those of us, then, who affirm the the historicity of the Torah (and that on very good grounds, mind you) have every reason to believe that those pagan narratives comes from the OT tradition, not vice-versa.

Whether one believes Moses wrote in the 15th Century BC or 13th Century BC, he did not witness any of the events of the Book of Genesis. So Genesis is not, in that sense, an eyewitness account. So either Moses had access to and transcribed accurate accounts or God directly revealed to Moses what happened, or God guided Moses by "correcting" the accounts to which Moses did have access. I know, on good days I have a firm grasp on the obvious.

That the person writing of this "discovery" doesn't at all believe there was anything like a real Noah, Ark and flood implies that he would not care much about what the correct story was (for him, his assumption is, "E. None of the above"). It's all a bunch of jumbled metaphor and myth to him. So description dissimilarities between a round coracle and the Biblical Ark having length and width - i.e. rectangular, elliptical or somewhere in between - would not bother him. Nor would the extreme difficulty of a constructing a ginormous round coracle out of wood (seriously, why expend so much effort when a more or less rectangular box would be far simpler?!).

[bippy123]

I happen to have The Epic of Gilgamesh in book form in my home...but it is in French. The flood story is in chapter 11 (or tablet 11) and the story is very different from the Flood in Genesis. Here is my translation of a few verses (word-for-word) from the French:

Man of Sourippak*, son of Oubara-Toutou,
Destroy your house, build a vessel,
Abandon your riches, look for life,
Hate your riches and preserve your life,
Call the seed of all life into the vessel!

Measure carefully the vessel's dimensions!
The vessel that you will build!
The width and the length must correspond!
On the ocean, put it!
Me, I understood and said to Ea my Master:
Lord, what you have said,
I will accomplish and will be proof of my dedication,
But what will I say to the villagers,
To the ancients, when they ask?

(...) The god Ea answers that he will not stay any longer with the inhabitants of the village but will sail with 'the man of Sourripak.' The vessel was completed by sundown that day and 'the man of Sourripak' filled it with all that was his: money, possessions and his family.

I haven't read anything in the rest of the chapter similar to the biblical narrative. There are vague similarities, vague because we are talking about a sea voyage and the techniques used then were probably common to all seafarers (such as letting a bird out to see if it would come back). Gilgamesh's trip lasted 7 days and he let out 3 different birds: a dove, a swallow and a raven. The raven never came back. Gilgamesh landed on Mount Nisir, and set up 14 ritual goblets filled with some sort of potion ''which the gods gathered round like flies''.

At the end of this adventure, Gilgamesh (the man of Sourripak) and his wife are transformed into gods and Gilgamesh is given a new name: Outa-napistim.

FL

*I have left all proper names in the French spelling.

It sounds to me like Irving Finkel is giving us the same Psudo/skeptic Garbage as the people behind Zeitgeist were trying to fool people with a few years back.
All it is is sensationalist pseudo-history that is easily debunked by people that have studied their new testament and old testament history.

This crowd was in vogue in the late 19th century but started to die down after that when great archeological finds confirmed what the bible said on these matters.
Every few years another one of these lunatic fringe archeologists pops up and tries to gain attention again by trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the genral public.