Friday Bonus Intro to the flood

This week we will be reading about Noach and the flood. When reading the text, pay attention to the confusion in the story. When did Noach start building the ark? When did he enter the ark? Where did the waters come from? When did the rain start? When did it finish? The text itself seems like an amalgamation of various versions of the story. Some commentators, like Rashi, try to synthesize the mixed up versions of the story into one timeline. We can also look at the story in a "form follows content" analysis. The story of the flood is meant to be chaotic and haphazard. The purpose is for the reader to feel like they are drowning in the waves of pesukim swirling around them. For further reading, below is a link to the flood story from the Epic of Gilgamesh, a poem from ancient Mesopotamia. There are many overlapping facts with the story in the Torah. Some scholars try to focus this as an attack on the authorship of the Torah, but careful Torah readers know better. As noted above, the flood story in Genesis itself seems like a few versions of the story mixed together. The fact that a similar story exists in ancient cuneiform from around the same time more likely shows that a flood like event actually happened. More on the flood story tomorrow…https://www.historywiz.com/primarysources/sumerianflood.html