The Pre-Biblical Origins of Noah's Flood

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Too late for breakfast unfortunately. Will save this video for later during dinner.

Dr. Irving Finkel is amazing! Not only is he a great lecturer who makes the "dry" subject of ancient languages engaging, but he also has a dry wit that makes me laugh out loud.

Please do an in-depth video adam and eve and its pre biblical origins

There was also an Ancient Greek flood story, where Zeus flooded humanity and only Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha survived by hiding in a floating chest, then repopulated the world by throwing stones over their shoulders, which turned into new people as they hit the ground.

“Can I copy your homework?” “Ok but don’t make it too obvious”

oooh, shoutout of Irving Finkel! He is excellent. British tweed man with amusing name and wizard-level head and facial hair who can read cuneiform.

It absolutely makes sense that the Mesopotamian dimensions of the boats would be 14,400. Since that number is itself 24 x 24 x 24 plus 24 x 24. Or 24³ + 24². Which would have been a very nice round number in the base 60 number system that ancient Mesopotamia used. Since 24 is two full hands of finger digit segments that the ancient Mesopotamians would have used for counting on their hands at the time. And it also makes sense why the Hebrew tradition would round that up because the Hebrew language used a quasi decimal system which would have been a strange fit for the Mesopotamian base 60. It seems that whoever wrote the original Mesopotamian flood myth really liked round numbers and consider them very important considering how much time they spent describing the dimensions of it.

I JUST saw a clip of Eoin Reardon and others making a coracle. He's a charismatic Irish traditional woodworker

Irving Finkel mention I already know this is going to be good

be prosperous and multiply, but always keep the noise level at your parties reasonable 'less you wish to drown the world

George Smith reaction to realizing what he translated when he worked on the flood tablet would have been worth a little mention. It's a classic and it's hard to fathom how revolutionary it was for the time.

Religion for brunch today!

That photo of Dr. Irving Finkel looked really cool.

also worth noting that hinduism has a story of Vishnu in his fish form Maysya, warning Manu (the first man) of a catastrophic flood and bringing him a boat

It's incredibly interesting to see how different people struggled (and still struggle tbh) with our cruel and random world. It's difficult to accept that sometimes bad things happen. You can't control it at all. No matter how righteous you are, no matter how much you give to the gods - nobody will safe you from the unpredictable flood

I always love hearing alternate flood stories. I don't really like my name, but the story it comes from has always fascinated me (although I'd rather have been named Ziusudra or Atrahasis lol)

I highly recommend everyone listen to Finkle’s presentation if you haven’t already. He’s a joy to listen to.

The cube ark wasn’t described as definitively a cube when you read out the translation though, it was the same description of a round coracle as the description in the previous story from my perspective, it says the boat should be as wide as it is long and that description is equally accurate if it is describing a circle as if it was describing a square so there’s no reason to know with certainty that it was a cube instead of a circle that the writer was envisioning when they made that description unless at that time in history they were starting to make a lot of cubic boats and the previously popular round boats were less popular than the new square ones at that time in history, from only the words as translated in this video both shapes are equally possible so we could both be correct.

Irving Finkel is brilliant his speech on the ark is one of the most entertaining I have ever listened to.