Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Lack of evidence for a regional Mabul?
It has been argued in anti/Xtian Creationist websites and lists that there isn't enough evidence for a regional Mabul. Of course, virtually none of them work on a regional "Meteor" mechanism (which I assumed for my offered regional event), only a conventional, rising-sea-level sort of Mabul. If the Mabul happened in a conventional period of flooding (all the more so a period of intense flooding or weather upheaval related to rapid coastal flooding), the sudden impact of a meteor at the southern shores of modern Iraq would have made resulting tsunamis all the more devastating because they would have the swelling river waters as a 'lubricant' in their travel up the basin. The fact that the marine waters would have been surging up into an already flooded basin could explain why their are sporadic marine sediment deposits scattered through the area within that era; as the tsunami waters receded (a process perhaps prolonged to Biblical lengths due to the saturated nature of the soil), much marine material may have otherwise been swept from much of the plains. I know too little about such mixed marine/coastal floods to say how plausible this is, but the idea would make sense of terms like "mayim" in the narrative, where multiple water sources are discussed (note also the Torah Temimah on the term Metzulah, "The Deep", considered a geological location noted here; perhaps then waters from "The Deep" were waters in that location). Where the narrative mentions a specific 'water source' - that source is what is being considered. Meteor impacts are known to cause earthquakes (which could have affected some of the lay of the land in the basin), as well as meteorological upheaval (huge electrical storms of long duration, etc; resulting differences of temperature of mixing bodies of water and soils also contribute to unusual, though empirical, phenomena). A meteor (or meteors, or local experience in a general period of fallout), seems a reasonable way to explain much of the phenomena displayed in the narrative as well as the phenomena 'in/on the ground', and could be one of the puzzle pieces which are not displayed in the narrative, but pieces that did happen.

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