Legends of the flood

I'm going to comment on this article:

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2014/01/28/new-discovery-raises-flood-of-questions-about-noahs-ark/comment-page-19/

We have known for well over a century that there are flood stories from the ancient Near East that long predate the biblical account

Actually, Josephus and some church fathers knew about Mesopotamian flood traditions from Berossus. So this is hardly revolutionary. 

(even the most conservative biblical scholars wouldn’t date any earlier than the ninth century B.C).

i) Actually, the most conservative biblical scholars date the Genesis flood account to the time of Moses in the 2nd millennium BC. They differ on whether the early date or the late date for the Exodus is correct. But on either reckoning, that's well before the 9C BC.

ii) Baden fails to distinguish between the date for Genesis and the date of the source material which the narrator may have used.

The people who wrote down the Flood narrative, in any of its manifestations, weren’t reporting on a historical event for which they had to get their facts straight (like what shape the ark was).Everyone reshapes the Flood story, and the ark itself, according to the norms of their own time and place.Neither version is right or wrong; they are, rather, both appropriate to the culture that produced them. Neither is history; both are theology.

That's sloppy reasoning on several grounds:

i) To begin with, the fact that you may have multiple accounts of an event doesn't cast doubt on the historicity of the underlying event. Suppose a reporter collected oral histories of the Johnstown Flood (1889). Survivors would give personal accounts of the ordeal. Details would vary. But that wouldn't mean it never happened.

ii) We need to distinguish between fiction and legend. The Mesopotamian traditions are legends of the flood. But legends aren't necessarily fictitious. To the contrary, legends can have a basis in fact.

Legends can have a historical core, but be inaccurate in varying degrees if this was passed down for several generations. It's not an eyewitness account by a survivor, but a thirdhand account. By the time it's written down, inaccuracies may creep into the account. For the writer can't check his materials against the event. He wasn't on the scene when it happened. 

In addition, you sometimes have deliberate legendary embellishment. Mesopotamian accounts have a political and/or theological agenda. It may be to promote the state religion, or promote a rival religious faction.

Take the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. That's legendary rather than fictional. It's a real event, but the details are fuzzy because we don't have enough firsthand accounts to determine exactly what happened. 

In ancient Mesopotamia, a round vessel would have been perfectly reasonable – in fact, we know that this type of boat was in use, though perhaps not to such a gigantic scale, on the Mesopotamian rivers.The ancient Israelites, on the other hand, would naturally have pictured a boat like those they were familiar with: which is to say, the boats that navigated not the rivers of Mesopotamia but the Mediterranean Sea.

Since liberals typically think the Pentateuch was composed or finalized during the Babylonian Exile, the difference between the two accounts runs counter to the Babylonian provenance which liberals attribute to the Pentateuch.

What, then, of the most striking parallel between this newly discovered text and Genesis: the phrase “two by two”? Here, it would seem, we have an identical conception of the animals entering the ark. 

I don't find anything striking about that. It does't reflect literary dependence. Rather, "two by two" is a natural breeding pair. That's the bare minimum needed to repopulated the devastated area. That's realistic. Indeed, Baden even admits that lower down when he says:

If the goal of the ark is the preservation of the animals, then having a male and female of each is just common sense. And, of course, it’s a quite reasonable space-saving measure.

Moving along:

More accurately, it’s one thing that the Bible says – but a few verses later, Noah is instructed to bring not one pair of each species, but seven pairs of all the “clean” animals and the birds, and one pair of the “unclean” animals.(This is important because at the end of the story, Noah offers sacrifices – which, if he only brought one pair of each animal, would mean that, after saving them all from the Flood, he then proceeded to relegate some of those species to extinction immediately thereafter.)This isn’t news – already in the 17th century scholars recognized that there must be two versions of the Flood intertwined in the canonical Bible.

But even on his own explanation, that's not a discrepancy. There were more clean pairs than unclear pairs because clean animals were sacrificial animals (as well as edible animals for human consumption). So you needed extra clean animals to spare. 

Moreover, it's standard compositional technique for the narrator to make a general statement, then follow-up with specific details. 

One version says the Flood lasted 40 days; the other says 150.

That confuses the duration of rainfall with the duration of the flood.

One says the waters came from rain. Another says it came from the opening of primordial floodgates both above and below the Earth. 

As if the flood could only have one source of water. Keep in mind, too, that these are linked. For instance, torrential rain causes rivers to flood their banks. So that's realistic. 

One version says Noah sent out a dove, three times. The other says he sent out a raven, once.

The birds have different functions. Doves are used as homing pigeons to find your way back. Ravens are used to find new land when you travel by sea to a new destination. Once again, that's realistic.