Answer each question by using your favorite (or TBR) book covers, characters, and stories
Tag a friend or two
And have fun with it!
QUESTIONS
Here they come:
AUTHOR – WHO’S WRITING YOUR STORY?
Andrew Klavan. He writes older female characters pretty well, plus he totally adores women, so he will make me seem like a much better person than I actually am finally give me the credit I’m due!
On the down side, his stories tend to be rather dark and violent, so buckle up.
WORLD – WHAT LITERARY WORLD IS YOUR STORY PART OF?
It’s a paranormal portal fantasy where I go to an archaeological site to research a book, unwisely step along a ley line, and end up in Atlantis.
Mixed with a Miss Marple mystery.
ROMANCE – WHO WILL BE YOUR LOVE-INTEREST?
I’m a married woman, and besides I’m too old for romance. The romances will take place among secondary characters, the way they always do in Brother Cadfael mysteries. My grown sons will each get married in the course of the book, plus there will be at least one secondary romance in Atlantis, but it will end tragically.
APPEARANCE – WHAT WILL YOUR CHARACTER LOOK LIKE?
Myself, but about 20 years older. I’ll be a spry little old lady with wild, flyaway hair. Sort of a Good Witch look. Also, my nose will be bigger than current.
SIDEKICK – WHAT CHARACTER/CREATURE WOULD YOU HAVE BY YOUR SIDE?
My niece, a very cool person who just happened to meet up with me at Newgrange because she was on a study program in England.
I have a lot of nieces. I won’t say which one I have in mind, but she knows who she is.
GOOD, EVIL, OR GRAY – WHERE DOES YOUR CHARACTER STAND?
Twenty years from now, I will be so sanctified and refined by the sufferings of life that I am the goodest of the good, hidden underneath a thick layer of Old Lady bitterness and cynicism.
DESIGNATION – WHAT WILL YOU BE? (HUMAN, FAIRY, PIRATE, PRINCESS, ETC..)
Wait a minute … we have options other than human? Why wasn’t this mentioned earlier???
OPPOSITION – WHO WILL BE YOUR NEMESIS?
Since this is an Andrew Klavan novel, there will be two nemesises (nemesi?). In this world, it will be Klaus Schwab. In Atlantis, it will be a being of light that is going to help bring humanity to a higher plane. Later, it turns out that Schwab is working for the being of light.
THE ENDING – HOW DOES YOUR STORY END? SPOILER ALERT!
Like they all end: I die.
But not before I make it back to the 21st century in time to help expose Klaus Schwab (working together with my niece and an unlikely band of misfits that includes James Lindsey, Andrew Klavan, and my pastor. Klavan will be about 100 years old at this point, unless he has also engaged in time travel).
I posted this video a few months ago, but I can’t think of a better thing to post for Halloween, because some of the stuff Jason McLean discusses in this video is the most hair-raising stuff you can imagine.
Stay safe out there, everybody! Don’t talk to any strange aliens!
In this video, I am keeping company with Jason McLean, a Christian paranormal researcher. That moniker should tell you a lot about the nature of this video. We discuss Bigfoot, the flood, and ancient alien theory. Our interests have a lot of overlap, but I must confess that even so, I was exposed to some ideas in the course of this conversation that (even) I found startling.
We were hosted by the lovely podcaster Chris K.
If you want to forget your troubles and bury yourself in Christian paranormal weirdness, please enjoy this 2+-hour conversation.
(N.B.: At one point, Chris asks, “Have you ever heard of Michael Heiser?” and I start squealing that I am right now reading one of Heiser’s books. Then the three of us jump into a discussion of beings called the elohim, without giving any background about what these things are. What they are, is created beings who dwell in a different realm (for convenience let’s call it “the heavens”), and are called “gods” relative to human beings. They are referred to as elohim in the Old Testament, although confusingly the same word is used to refer to the Most High God. If you want to see both uses in a single verse, see Psalm 82:1, “God [Elohim] stands in the divine council; He gives judgement among the gods [elohim].” This is an Ancient Near Eastern world view that is endorsed, with some caveats, by both the Old and New Testaments. If you’re curious how this could possibly be good theology, I encourage you to read Michael Heiser’s book The Unseen Realm.)
Find out this and more in this article, which seems to indicate that the dinosaur-killing asteroid impact (or, if you prefer, the “continental sprint“ associated with the Flood) happened as the Northern Hemisphere was entering spring. There’s something poetic about that.
The “Venuses” are those little prehistoric sculptures of naked ladies found all over Europe.
You might not want to readthis article, as it features both the phrases “obesity” and “climate change.” But long story short, it seems that the closer the Venuses were to the glaciers, the fatter they were. The assumption is that, the harder food was to come by, the fatter the ideal mama became.
I swear, I just lucked into this. It’s serendipity.
Note the pterodactyl is now a terradacdyl. And the mammoth is a mamouth. That’s O.K., its was prehistory; the spellings had not stabilized yet. Nor had the earth’s crust …
As I heard a podcaster say, “The plural of anecdote is data.”
Wait. Are We Even Sure It Was Worldwide?
You can make a case that the account in Genesis 7 – 8 is not necessarily describing a global flood. This is because the same Hebrew word can be translated “world,” “earth,” or “land.” How we interpret it depends upon context. There is a case to be made, for example, that the whole book of Revelation is describing the devastation of the land of Israel during the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. (hence the frequent warnings that it is going to happen “soon”), and that lines like “one third of the people on the earth died” are better translated as “one third of the people in the land died.”
I have even seen people try to interpret the poetic descriptions of creation in Genesis 1 and 2 as happening from the perspective of a person standing on the surface of the earth, in the land of Israel.
However, getting back to the flood narrative, there are good reasons to think that the text is in fact describing a global flood. This passage is set in very ancient times, before the nation of Israel existed. It’s before Abram was called by God out of Ur. Before Abram was even born. Before the Table of Nations (Genesis 10). So, not only was there no nation of Israel at the time of flood narrative, but we can’t even be sure there was a land of Israel, given the dramatic damage that the flood did to the earth’s geography. (And by the way, yes, I have just revealed that I think the flood narrative was not composed by Moses — even under the inspiration of God — but was passed down to Moses from a much older source.)
Finally, it’s hard to imagine how a local flood could “cover the mountains to a depth of more than fifteen cubits” (Genesis 7:20) … especially for enough of a length of time for Noah and his sons to take soundings so as to estimate this depth.
So, given all this, I don’t think it’s straining the text to say that the flood account in Genesis is meant to be describing a global event.
Like so many sensational things in the Bible, the flood account sounds hard to believe, but the longer we look at it, the better it matches with the world we live in. Here are some features of the world we live, which are features we would expect if the dark millennia of our past concealed a worldwide flood.
Oral Flood Histories from Around the World
I have written before about Graham Hancock. I really enjoyed his book Fingerprints of the Gods, which posits an ancient period of cataclysms that included “earth crust slippage,” a geological upheaval so dramatic that it would have caused catastrophic floods among many other disasters. Hancock keeps changing his theories, and he has his own reasons for collecting the historical data that he does. However, here is some of the data that he conveniently collected about flood legends worldwide:
More than 500 deluge legends are known around the world and, in a survey of 86 of these (50 Asiatic, 3 European, 7 African, 46 American and 10 from Australia and the Pacific), the specialist researcher Dr. Richard Andree concluded that 62 were entirely independent of the Mesopotamian and Hebrew accounts.
Hancock, Fingerprints, p. 193
People Group
page in Fingerprints
summary
Aztec
98
“First Sun, Matlactli Atl: duration 4008 years. In this age lived the giants … The First Sun was destroyed by water in the sign Matlactli Atl (Ten Water). It was called Apachiohualiztli (flood, deluge), the art of sorcery of the permanent rain. Men were turned into fish. Some say that only one couple escaped, protected by an old tree living near the water. Others say there were seven couples who hid in a cave until the flood was over and the waters had gone down. They repopulated the earth and were worshipped as gods in their nations …”
Sumerian
188 – 189
The Noah figure is called Utnapishtim. He later tells his story to Gilgamesh. It almost exactly parallels the Genesis 7 account.
South American tribes
191 – 192
Hancock mentions flood accounts coming from the following tribes: Chibcas (Colombia); Canarians (Ecuador); Tupinamba (Brazil); Araucnaian (Chile); Yamana (Tierra del Fuego); Pehuenche (Tierra del Fuego); and numerous groups in Peru.
Inuit
192 – 193
“a terrible flood, accompanied by an earthquake, which swept so rapidly over the face of the earth that only a few people managed to escape in their canoes or take refuge on the tops of the highest mountains.”
“The planets altered their courses. The sky sank lower towards the north. The sun, moon, and stars changed their motions. The earth fell to pieces and the waters in its bosom rushed upwards with violence and overflowed the earth.”
Southeast Asia
194
Flood accounts in: Chewong (Malaysia); Laos and northern Thailand; Karen (Burma); Vietnam; tribes along the northern coast of Australia
Hawai’i
194
“The world was destroyed by a flood and later recreated by a god named Tangaloa.”
Samoa
194
The flood is survived by “two human beings who put to sea in a boat which eventually came to rest in the Samoan archipelago.”
Japan
194
The Pacific islands were formed after the deluge receded.
Greek (Hesiod)
195 – 196
After a series of races of gold and silver, there is a “bronze race” who “have the strength of giants, and mighty hands on their mighty limbs.” After Prometheus gets them into trouble, Zeus wipes out the bronze race with a flood. Deucalion and Pyrrha float over the sea in a box for nine days and finally land on Mt. Parnassus.
“Vedic India”
196 – 197
The Noah figure is named Manu. He rescues a fish, which in return warns him of a coming flood. Manu loads a ship with two of every living species and seeds of every plant. The fish turns out to be Vishnu, who pulls Manu’s ship through the flood.
Egypt (Book of the Dead)
197
Thoth says, “They have fought fights, they have upheld strifes, they have done evil, they have created hostilities, they have made slaughter, they have caused trouble and oppression … I am going to blot out everything which I have made. This earth shall enter into the watery abyss by means of a raging flood, and will become even as it was in primeval time.”
Mayan (Popol Vuh)
203
“It was cloudy and twilight all over the world … the faces of the sun and moon were covered … Sunlight did not return till the twenty-sixth year after the flood.”
Norse
204 – 205
An awful lot happens in this apocalyptic tale. First a “hideous winter,” then worldwide war, then Yggdrasil (the earth tree) is shaken, causing the earth to literally fall apart. Then, worldwide fire. And finally, a flood. “The earth sank beneath the sea … Yet not all men perished in the great catastrophe. Enclosed in the wood itself of the ash tree Yggdrasil — which the devouring flames of the universal conflagration had been unable to consume — the ancestors of the future race of men had escaped death. In this asylum they had found that their only nourishment had been the morning dew. Slowly the earth emerged from the waves. Mountains rose again …”
The charming thing about these origin tales is that couple who survive the flood usually end up landing on the local mountain, founding the nation that is currently telling the story, and not moving from that spot ever since. This is similar to how nearly every people group has a local landmark (usually a mountain, terrain permitting) that is believed to be the home of the gods or “the center of the world.”
This is what origin stories are supposed to do. They ground the local community in the great ancient story of the world, and they also give the ancient stories credibility by grounding them in local features “still seen to this day.” This is not to say, however, that origin stories are simply made up out of whole cloth. They are handed down the generations, and though they might get tailored to make human beings look better, and have bits of other interesting stories added to them, they ultimately have some kind of origin in actual events. (Especially since they often come with genealogies that are also handed down.) I can’t imagine the coincidence that would be required for hundreds of peoples all around the world to make up a traditional flood story.
Yes, But It Could Still Have Been Local, If …
… if all of these widely scattered people groups were descended from a small number of couples who were once all in one place and who experienced a catastrophic local flood together.
That is true. Could still be true. And, in fact, even if the entire world were experiencing earthquakes, uplifts and sinkings, tsunamis, etc., all at once, there wouldn’t necessarily have been a moment when water was covering all the land on earth all at the same time. On the other hand, there wouldn’t have to be, for events to satisfy the description given in these flood accounts, including the Genesis one. After all, the perspective from which these stories are told, is that of human beings experiencing the flood and associated disasters, not the perspective of an observer looking at the globe from outer space. The mental picture of the whole world sitting under a flat layer of water, while not impossible, is more of a Sunday School stylization of the account, than the actual claim being made.
Buried Beneath a Wave of Mud
In all of these accounts, the flood is sudden, dramatic, and overwhelming, whether or not it is accompanied by other disasters such as earthquake or fire. Even the Genesis account (often simplified to sound like just rain) says “on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened” (Genesis 7:11, NIV).
In a world in which this had happened, we should expect to find the remains of plants and animals that had been instantly buried under huge waves of mud and essentially frozen in time. And that is exactly what we do find. Here is the latest example, which was called to my attention by Google within the last month:
This poor dino mom, if she had been given any warning that she was about to be buried in an oxygen-free environment that would later prove convenient to future paleontologists, would probably have fled or tried to move her eggs to safety. OK, maybe she would have stayed to protect them. But we also find fossil dinos caught in the act of, say, eating prey. We find mammoths apparently flash-frozen with summer plants still in their mouths and/or stomachs. I can’t imagine how that could have come about, but it can’t have been gradual. (Although here are some fish who appear to be frozen in a wave, but the process was a quite different.)
Out of Babel 
