Bruce Masse, an environmental scientist turned mythographer, has tentatively identified a candidate impact event for the historical nucleus behind the Flood of Noah, and countless imitators…
Did a Comet Cause the Great Flood? (from the November ‘Discover’ magazine)
Mabul is Real After All!! Skeptics Around the World Get frum again (Hebrew Bible literalism… defended or incomprehensible)
…Masse also dates the Flood to 2807 BC based on the reporting of a Solar Eclipse by some of the Flood tales. The concept was also splashed onto the Blogosphere via the New York Times reporting on Masse’s work in November 2006…
Ancient Crash, Epic Wave
…which was, inevitably commented upon – with varying degrees of ignorance, scepticism and slavish regurgitation – by pundits across the blogs…
May 10, 2807 BC
Ancient myth and asteroid impact
Little Asteroid Impacts and Mega-Tusamis[sic]
600′ Mega-Tsunami
Ancient Crash… etc
This one was interesting because he mentioned the Google Earth research behind the crater find… Flood Evidence Found Using Google Earth
‘Loose Wire’ wrote a similar Google Earth prefaced piece… Google Earth as Harbinger of Doom …which is doubtless a case of “great minds thinking alike” and not bloggo-cannibalism. Or so I hope…
Abnormal Interests is a blog by a biblical literature scholar of a skeptical bent:
Gigantic Tsunami 4800 Years Ago …as his comments clarify. His problem with Masse is Masse’s reliance on legend literature to infer natural events. But the blogger finds this dubious because the legends are full of ‘theological language’. Now Masse has successfully extracted real history from other tribal legends – notably in Hawaii and South America – so I dare say ‘god talk’ isn’t a big impediment to gleaning meaningful data from either “Genesis” or “Atrahasis” (Sumerian Flood Epic).
Speaking of Masse’s earlier work here’s a few annotated links to earlier news pieces…
University of Waterloo Student newsletter, Imprint … from 2006, discusses Masse’s ideas and his work with the Holocene Working Group, who are actively sifting the data to improve estimates on catastrophic impacts during the last 10,000 years. They might yet convince governments to take impact mitigation seriously.
Alan Boyle is science editor at MSNBC and always does his homework. His report, from 2000, on the Holocene Working Group is still relevant… Adding up the risks of cosmic impact …the punchline being that many lethal “impacts” don’t actually have to hit the ground and dig a crater. Some explode in the atmosphere and cause more damage via a shock-wave, while others strike the oceans and cause tsunamis.
Finally I have to say what I actually think. Personally I think there was a Noah, Ark and so forth, more or less as the Sumerians, via the Hebrews, tell us. Unlike the later Hebrew version the Sumerian accounts were quite specific – ‘noah’ was a king in Shurrupak who loaded a barge with his family and animals in accordance with words from a god. He ended up being washed into the Persian Gulf, floating around the ocean, and probably crash-landing in modern-day Bahrain. Maybe. That’s one reconstruction, borrowed slightly from Robert Best’s Noah’s Ark book. A few details would change in the new model – date slightly lower, impact wave as well as storm caused the Flood, and so on – but otherwise I think it was a real event in history.
But, as the universal nature of the legend tells us, Noah/Ziusudra/Atrahasis was not alone. People from every affected tribe and tongue had a survivor, someone who was lucky enough to either read the signs or, more mystically, listen to god. Now some of my fellow believers might take exception to the idea of there being many ‘Noahs’ around the world, but God is God for all people, not just some mythically pure bloodline through one man. Which is really what wanting ‘one Noah’ boils down to – racism.