Posted: Nov 23, 2011 12:19 pm
Something to remember about the flood story is that the people who wrote it, imagined that they were an isolated incident on a little piece of land floating under the sky. They met other people as their "world" grew bigger, but at the start, when they began to record their stories, it was as small to them as our town is to the woman who used to clean my house. When we went overseas, and I showed her a map of where we were going and that we'd be sleeping overnight on the plane, her reaction was "you lie!" She was concerned that I would disappear into the sky when I flew 600 miles away to visit my kids, she simply couldn't conceive of a place far enough for a plane to fly for that length of time.
I suppose a little like the first explorers going into the Atlantic felt when they tried to find the "east" or when we first sent people into space. So a torrential downpour that lasted a month and flooded their tiny little patch of the desert, it must've felt like the world was drowned!
That is of course if they ever experienced an actual month-long flood. The story could have come from someone who'd experienced a monsoon telling them about it and the audience then playing "broken telephone" embellishing the story.
I suppose a little like the first explorers going into the Atlantic felt when they tried to find the "east" or when we first sent people into space. So a torrential downpour that lasted a month and flooded their tiny little patch of the desert, it must've felt like the world was drowned!
That is of course if they ever experienced an actual month-long flood. The story could have come from someone who'd experienced a monsoon telling them about it and the audience then playing "broken telephone" embellishing the story.