[RE: The Epic of Gilgamesh is quite considerably older than the Bible. Just thought I'd point that one out]
This is true as far as a written account goes, and written holy scripture didn't come about until Moses.
But from Adam to Moses, biblical accounts were oral tradition.
The biblical account of a global flood and the Epic of Gilgamesh come from the same source...the early descendants of Noah.
The difference is: One gives full credit to God and the other does not.
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The problem is that Sumerian society was already settled by the time of the Great Flood and they have no mention of it. Also the Epic of Gilgamesh was also orally passed down and then it was only written later during the Akkadian Dynasty. Sorry but history shows that the Bible descended from Gilgamesh, not the other way around.
"The difference is: One gives full credit to God and the other does not."
So what? Your fairy tale attributes the flood to your God, the Gilgamesh fairy tale does not. That says nothing about the truth of the biblical flood story.
Moses didn't write anything at all. It's true that the oral tradition of the Bible dates back to the Bronze Age but Gilgamesh and its oral tradition is considerably older, bearing in mind too that archaeology situates the earliest stable settlements of Caananites, that is, the ancestors to the Jews on 2000 BC and that the first Biblical account of the Bible dates from 500 BC after the exile of Babylon. So, who copied whom?
In fact, in Gilgamesh epic there is a mention of a flood, and in many other earlier Sumerian texts. However, they just speak about a great flood, not that mumbo jumbo of Noah or God's punishment.
Of course, it never came to your mind that both Sumerians and Jews shared the same geographical area and that the Akkadian, those who recorded some Sumerian myths, were linguistically and probably culturally linked to the Jews. And that they never mention Noah and other Biblical accounts, just a big flood.
"But from Adam to Moses, biblical accounts were oral tradition"
"Hey Eve! Did I ever tell you about the time you got us kicked out of the Garden and the male gender spent thousands of years keeping you down just because of some retarded Bible story?"
"What? kicked out of the Garden? Adam, what are you talking about?"
"NOTHING! Here, want an apple??"
I guess you meant that it was passed down... gradually... Thus introducing lots of human error...
I'm sure someone has pointed this out, but if Gilgamesh predates Moses, there is no way it could be the story of Noah. Time is not a moebius loop, unlike your thought processes.
Has your head imploded yet?
written holy scripture didn't come about until Moses.
If you believe Moses really was the author of the books attributed to him then you have to explain how he wrote an account of his own death and funeral in Deuteronomy.
I'm waiting...
Oh, and Old Viking wins the internets.
I would just like to touch on a philosophical issue: These people takes words too serious. They believe that words actually are truth instead of the truth itself. Words are just placeholders to describe objects, situations, ideas, feelings, but they are not the thing, per se.
Religious people believe that a collection of words and ideas actually ARE the truth, but we all know it can only be at best a good guess, because language is oh so often inefficient in describing certain things.
It basically boils down to rhetoric, because if people are actually offended, controlled and manipulated because they think words actually represent the describing object or idea, they're letting themselves be controlled, offended and manipulated by airwaves that we all basically belch out every so often.
My point being words can be changed and with it ideas and can change, but reality is fairly consistent.
Essentially : sticks and stones will break bones, but words will never make me believe in what I can experience.
What, you mean the devil didn't write it earlier just to fool us?
You guy's really need to get together to get your stories straight.
Truthuser:
This is a characteristic of fundies. They seem unable to understand reality as something that exists apart from their own personal selves. Words are like voodoo dolls, if you twist the words into a new shape you've changed reality. Reality is defined by the words used to talk about it. His emotional reaction to something is not just his emotional reaction, but a property of the thing istelf.
"For yea, The Father hath copyright trademark, both international and domestic, on the use of thy holy flood."
Obviously the Epic of Gilgamesh is like a bootleg DVD.
There is one thing I'd like to see taught in school about christianity, It's History. The stories it's pulled from (sumerian, babalonian and egyptian etc) what it's actually done through history and it's agenda today.
So, you're basically saying God gave the Sumerians the ability to write, 2500 years before he gave this ability to his own people? Why not just give this ability to Adam and Eve, and let them keep written records from the beginning, instead of making people pass it down through word of mouth for millennia and risk getting it terribly wrong?
"biblical accounts were oral tradition."
Which explains why, even when they were put to scrolls there were contradictions between them that exist in all Bibles since.
When they compiled the Bible they left much out that existed alongside, the Dead Sea Scrolls aren't even entirely represented and the ones that compare differ from the Bibles first version on up.
The Bibles exactly like the Grimms Brothers collection of European folk tales in it's formation.
Different people wrote about "the flood" ...different floods. Almost every place has had bad floods at some time. It's like your grandfather's "The year when the snowplow got stuck in the drift and nobody could get out for three days." Some years are notable for major events. Only an idiot would assume that "I'm flooded, so the whole world is flooded".
"Rapture ready"? I rest my case.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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