RE: The story of Noah' s Ark - or - God is dumber than you.
September 22, 2021 at 10:55 am
(This post was last modified: September 22, 2021 at 11:01 am by The Grand Nudger.)
Which, ofc, doesn't detract from whatever a person might take from the story today. We're endlessly creative not just in coming up with stories but in understanding them and fitting them to our own needs. That's how it ended up in magic book, too. The notable revision there was that people weren't slaughtered by the flood on the whims of a capricius god - but by a fair god for their own evils.
It contextualizes suffering as deserved - and post exile communities culturally descended from the last holdouts of judah had every reason to make this revision. The version they took it from had the gods killing people for being too loud down here on earth. Not so in magic book. Deliverance from evil and suffering, as Neo put it. Their own, the evil of other cultures, other gods. Their revisions weren't meant to turn the tale to allegory, it was a claim that the other guys had gotten the cause of that very real flood very wrong....even more importantly, those people, themselves, were very wrong. Their gods were weak poopsauce, their cultures were condemnable, judahs god was the one that dun really didit, the culture of the returning exiles..ascendant.
None of that was true either, hilariously. Old magic book is very much a version of history based on how then contemporary people wished it had gone down. A list of items useful to them in the immediate sense as they attempted to reassert control over a region that had never been depopulated.
"Hi, we're the rightful rulers of this land!"
Natives. - who the fuck are you?
"Sit down, I'll tell ya"
It contextualizes suffering as deserved - and post exile communities culturally descended from the last holdouts of judah had every reason to make this revision. The version they took it from had the gods killing people for being too loud down here on earth. Not so in magic book. Deliverance from evil and suffering, as Neo put it. Their own, the evil of other cultures, other gods. Their revisions weren't meant to turn the tale to allegory, it was a claim that the other guys had gotten the cause of that very real flood very wrong....even more importantly, those people, themselves, were very wrong. Their gods were weak poopsauce, their cultures were condemnable, judahs god was the one that dun really didit, the culture of the returning exiles..ascendant.
None of that was true either, hilariously. Old magic book is very much a version of history based on how then contemporary people wished it had gone down. A list of items useful to them in the immediate sense as they attempted to reassert control over a region that had never been depopulated.
"Hi, we're the rightful rulers of this land!"
Natives. - who the fuck are you?
"Sit down, I'll tell ya"
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