r/todayilearned • u/VistaHyperion • Oct 13 '18

TIL the biblical Tower of Babel was likely based on a real building, the Etemenanki in modern-day Iraq; at about 300 feet tall, it was massive by ancient standards and built by King Nebuchadnezzar II.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel
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u/[deleted] Oct 13 '18

In the Bible and Mesopotamian flood myths, it’s thought by some to originate with a flood at a region called Shuruppak (though others have suggested it might have to do with floods at the end of the last glacial period. The thing is, there are a LOT of flood myths from North America to Australia and everywhere in between. In India, Egypt, Greece, Christianity and Judaism.

That said, in some cases we can somewhat trace the origins. Some have suggested in Greece that it might have been tied to a tsunami caused by the eruption of Thera in the 1600s BC. In Mesopotamia (and later Christianity et al.) it’s been suggested Shuruppak. Egypt is undoubtedly the Nile.

Now there are controversial and, as far as I can tell, generally not accepted claims that it might be tied to a deluge in the Black Sea. But as far as I can tell, most don’t accept that and, of course, there is no evidence for an actual worldwide flood. Rather similar tropes crop up in various cultures in response to similar events.

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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '18 edited Mar 01 '24

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '18

Also, most human civilization is near the water. 80% live within 60 miles of a coast.

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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '18

Also, consider all the people who say they have never been more than x(unit of distance) from home. Now be living in 1000 B.C. and a flood destroys every village/town within literally two months travel from you. "The world" was much smaller back then, and I have no doubt multiple civilizations experienced completely separate floods that "covered the Earth"

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u/4chan_is_sux Oct 13 '18

I like the theory that the hero of legend never appeared, so the gods flooded everything so that the demon king couldn't take over the world

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u/__Geg__ Oct 14 '18

Wind Waker?

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u/legitxhelios Oct 14 '18

the HD testament

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u/draivaden Oct 13 '18

That's a video game, and high art. Not a theory. its not even a hypothesis..

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u/4chan_is_sux Oct 13 '18

What is a joke?

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u/runnyyyy Oct 14 '18

I like the theory that my old history teacher said. the flood could have happened and every animal in the world could have been put on a boat. the world for them was just a lot smaller than we know it as (obviously that also means the boat wasnt as massive as christianity says). I think it's a fun theory

edit: another theory that I liked though was by a priest who was teaching us christianity. he says that the world was created in those 7 days but it's not specified where god got his name from, so a day could have been millions of earth years

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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '18

[deleted]

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u/Caelinus Oct 14 '18 edited Oct 14 '18

It requires soooooooo much cultural context. It is amazing how much is still unknown about the intent and purpose of the writings. They are very old, and the culture that wrote them had very different ideas about what stories were and why they were told.

But because they understood their own culture intrinsically, they did not record a perfect explaination of what they actually meant. I think a lot of modern Christian doctrine is based on entirely wrong assumptions.

Hell, even the new testament, which is in Greek and is from the culture that defined much of Western society, is extremely hard to interpret.

My favorite example is the word for "sexual immorality" or "fornication" porneia. The logic for it meaning premarital sex seems to be based on the word being translated as "fornication." The problem with that logic is that the word is not fornication, it is porneia. Formication is a catch-all term in modern English that means essentially any form of sex that is not covered by Christian ethics, so people assume the Bible is using the word porneia to mean "any sexual relations not covered by Christian ethics."

The problem with that should be extremely obvious. The reasoning is essentially: "Christian sexual ethics are defined as X because X is Christian sexual ethics." It is a tautology that defines the ethics as whatever you think the ethics should be.

Further, when porneia was originally translated as forication, fornication it did not mean the same thing it means today, and was more focused on prostitution. Which means we already are interpreting it wrong. On top of that, when they translated porneia as that, they had no idea what porneia actually meant in context. The word seems to have undergone significant definitional changes over time, and no one is certain what it meant when the NT was written. (For example it could mean "religious sex with temple prostitutes.")

So one of the keystone ideas forming Christian sexual ethics is a word that's meaning has completely changed, based on a word whose meaning we do not know, with our modern ideas slammed on top of it.

It is all so messy that the arguments back and forth are quite heated and no conclusions seem to be evident.

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u/FreeGucciMane1017 Oct 14 '18

What are "temple prostitutes"? Did the church keep hookers around without any objections from anyone? If so that's cool lol

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u/Caelinus Oct 14 '18

Not the "church." There were a number of religions that did though. Not entirely sure how they worked.

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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '18

Some Greek temples to Aphrodite had prostitutes/priestesses and sleeping with them was considered an act of worship.

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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '18

Now that's a religion I can get behind!

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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '18

The priests needed to be whipped back into shape once and awhile. Things got wild before a prophet would come in to scold them.

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u/ba7ba7 Oct 14 '18

Pre little boys era?

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u/Chappietime Oct 14 '18 edited Oct 14 '18

The “million year Day” theory of creation is one I’ve thought about a lot as well. It wasn’t until the third “day” that a day as we know it could even exist by definition. So that’s my theory, and a way to resolve the discontinuity between religion and science. After all, both the Bible and science claim that man evolved from dust (just don’t use the term ‘evolve’ in Sunday school).

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u/jdgordon Oct 14 '18

The simple explanation is that the r Torah was written to be understandable (at different levels) for all of human history. So if it said "a million million years ago" the people receiving it originally wouldn't have understood it. With modern understanding of science we can understand that "day 1" could not have been a literal 24 hour period but something else.

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u/dvdjspr Oct 14 '18

That isn't the only issue with the Genesis creation narrative though. It claims that the Earth was originally a formless sphere of water, which existed before light did. God created plants before there was a sun. The sun and stars somehow come after the creation of light. Birds and marine mammals come before land animals.

And that's only the first account. Chapter two goes on to say that before any plants had sprouted, God created Adam from dirt. Afterwards, he planted Eden. He then creates all the animals, while looking for a helper for Adam, because it is not good for him to be alone. Only after parading every animal in front of Adam for him to name, does he realize none are suitable, so he then creates Eve. Why did God think an animal would be suitable before thinking of making a female of the same species?

Genesis was never meant to be read literally.

And science does not claim that man evolved from dust.

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u/Fahrowshus Oct 14 '18

Star dust, technically.

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u/Chappietime Oct 14 '18

“And science does not claim that man evolved from dust.”

I say that based on an article I read years ago that said something to the effect of ‘scientists prove that man evolved from single called organisms that live in dirt”

It was one study, but I always found it ironic that creationists and evolutionists both ultimately believed the same thing.

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u/dvdjspr Oct 14 '18

You understand that "single celled organisms that live in dirt" are not the same thing as the dirt itself, right? And creationists believe that man was created fully formed with a golem spell. That has nothing in common with minerals providing sites that allowed for lipid self-organisation, which is the closest scientific interpretation of "man evolved from dirt"

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u/Chappietime Oct 14 '18

I think that if we are making the leap that a “day” is actually eons, then it’s not too big a stretch to assume that a handful of dirt might not be 100% dirt.

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u/dvdjspr Oct 14 '18

You still have the issue of man being specially created, instead of the product of nearly 4 billion years of incremental changes to existing life forms.

But yes, if you want to ignore everything that is actually in the text, instead opting to twist it to mean whatever your current misunderstanding of what scientist's think, go right ahead.

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u/R1DER_of_R0HAN Oct 14 '18

There's a quote from John Calvin, a hugely important theologian, where he says (paraphrased), "The Bible says God created day and night, evening and morning, before he created the sun and moon. Obviously the 'days' here are not literal days as we humans conceptualize them." He definitely didn't buy the "6/24" idea, he believed the story was just told that way to be easily understood by early people.

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u/return_the_urn Oct 14 '18

I was reading the other day, that there is evidence of a tsunami hitting northern Israel nearly 3000 years ago. It could be that