Episode Transcript
Carey Griffel: Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot, where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel. And today, instead of the biblical flood story, we are going to turn to our global flood story series.
[00:00:25] I know it's been a little while since I've talked about our methodology and how we're going to approach it. This is a biblical theology podcast. But in the interest of the questions of the flood and how often people like to say that everyone had a flood myth, so therefore we have a global flood, I thought it would be really fun to start digging into those global flood stories. We're gonna compare them a little bit to the biblical story, and we're gonna do a lot more than that.
[00:01:00] This project is not to either prove or disprove a global flood, but we do want to think carefully about the evidence that we have, and we do want to look at the common claim of whether or not it really is true that everyone has a flood story, and that those are somehow evidence of a global flood. We want to unpack the evidence, and we're going to weigh certain things in the form of either saying it really helps our narrative here, or it's really not all that helpful.
[00:01:35] So far, we've kept to the world of the Bible, and we've talked about the biblical flood. We've talked about the Mesopotamian flood stories. And now it is time to widen our gaze and move beyond Mesopotamia into the wider context. But we're not gonna jump into something like flood stories in the Americas or something like that because we have a lot of things to do in wondering about the transmission of the story from Mesopotamia outward.
[00:02:08] And we're gonna keep to our careful method as far as weighing the evidence and trying to determine just how much we might be able to consider that the Greek flood myths, which is what we're gonna look at today, whether those are really great, strong pieces of evidence that can show that, yes, everybody really does have a flood narrative, or whether the flood narratives are maybe a little bit messier and rely a little bit more on transmission than they do on interior cultural historical tradition.
[00:02:44] I'm not discounting the idea that oral tradition can provide us some evidence and that cultures can preserve ancient memory. We've talked a bit about that before. I won't rehash all of that, but we're gonna try to not flatten all flood myths into a giant undifferentiated pile of stories. But we're also not trying to say that every similarity is either proof of direct copying or meaningless coincidence. We're trying to build a historically responsible path that is textually grounded, that is open to transmission, and curious and cautious about wild speculation of connections.
[00:03:29] And so the Greek flood myth is going to be a really good next test case for us because it lies in a zone of real contact with the Near East, but its surviving witnesses are both later and earlier, so we have a lot of kind of records and ideas to look at here. And we're gonna see a lot of local Greek flavor to these stories as well.
[00:03:52] Now, before we get into all of that, we need to clarify and bring out our methodology again. We want to avoid sloppiness. We want to avoid the idea that everything is connected just because it seems like it is to us. But we're also not gonna go to the other extreme and say that nothing is connected or that there can be no historical reality if there's a possibility of connected diffusion of stories. Neither of these extremes is careful enough.
[00:04:24] Memory can be a source of truth transmitted over time, but we do have to make room for the quirks of memory because it's not only memory that gets transmitted through time and in people groups, but cultural ideas and stories get passed along not only inside a people group, but also across borders and geography.
[00:04:50] And we know that that's the case, and so the memory that is recorded may or may not be that of the original people, but it might be stemming from somewhere else. If that's the case, then it's being transmitted for reasons other than simply recording history. If recording history and the memory of the actual people isn't being transmitted, then we need to take that into account in our assessment of the global flood narratives.
[00:05:23] Now interestingly, if we could show that the movement of the global flood stories does stem from Mesopotamia itself, then that also doesn't necessarily mean there's no global flood. It might be evidence to consider that it did all come from this biblical story that we know. But that is gonna take a lot of thinking and consideration in order to get to that if we come to that kind of evidence.
[00:05:52] But I'm gonna tell you right now, I'll just break the news to you early, the Greek flood stories, of which there are quite a few, are not necessarily going to help us out a whole lot here. They're gonna be really interesting, and we're probably going to end up coming back to some of these ideas in later episodes as well because there's so much here to talk about.
[00:06:17] Now, there are some ancient streams of thought here in the Greek myths, so that is a positive. But the way that we see it developing and the hints of transmission and effects from the ancient Near East into ancient Greece is gonna give us some ideas that maybe a lot of these similarities are due to cultural narrative influence than historical cultural memory.
[00:06:47] All of that suggests that it is the migration of a story and not the native recording of history within a certain people group. And if that's what's going on, then we cannot claim that every culture has a flood myth if those cultures have flood myths because of the migration of a story rather than an actual cultural memory that is seated within the people itself.
[00:07:17] We're not gonna get to definitive proof that is going to convince everyone here, and that's fine. I'm just trying to provide some interesting things for people who like to think about these things on a deeper level.
[00:07:32] But I do think it matters because the claim that all civilizations have a flood myth is set on a foundation where the basis of the claim is that all civilizations have preserved a historical story that goes back to flood times within their own particular people group. But if their flood myth is not that cultural memory, but rather it is motifs that they heard from others, then it really doesn't count as evidence for a global flood.
[00:08:04] Historical memory does tend to shift in some pretty regular ways , as researchers have found out. Now, we can hold some of that information loosely. It doesn't always have to shift in these regular ways, but there are patterns.
[00:08:20] And as I've said, shared motifs and stories can be transmitted that have nothing to do with the historical memory of a culture and people. But really it's speaking more of cultural influences from stronger or foreign cultures. They're using these stories to form identities and to make particular points to their current people. We can see identity crisis and political forces that drive changes like this. We have prestige borrowing from influential neighbors. We have translation effects and misunderstandings when stories get transmitted. And the diffusion of the story is going to be critical in Mesopotamia-adjacent cultures like the Bible and ancient Greece.
[00:09:11] I'm gonna give you a brief reminder of some of the criteria we're gonna consider. I'm not gonna go through each of these criteria with all of the Greek material we have, because that would be too much material, and it would get repetitive. But I do wanna give you this for your own notes and if you wanna do your own exploration.
[00:09:31] The criteria that I'm using is that we're looking at the provenance of an idea or a story. Who recorded it and why?
[00:09:39] We're looking at the transmission setting. Is it wrapped up in any kind of public ritual? Are there specialists? Is there a group of people who is going to hold to this story and perpetuate it for people?
[00:09:55] What is the genre of the story? The genre in a culture has to be described from within that culture. How are they using that story? Are there other stories that are like it in their culture?
[00:10:10] Another piece of criteria are the motifs and the structure of the story. How does it compare with the biblical flood?
[00:10:20] A fifth aspect that we're looking at here is independent attestation. Are there multiple lines of evidence that this culture has? Those multiple lines of evidence, very importantly, do not have to be exactly the same. But if we have enough different kinds of genres or different stories or records or manuscripts that attest to what we have, especially through time, then that's going to give it a lot more heft and weight to the cultural historical memory idea.
[00:10:57] I've already mentioned contact and diffusion between cultures and whether or not that is a likely candidate for the source of the story.
[00:11:07] We're looking at the chronology of the records, if we possibly can have it. And in the Greek stories, we have a good amount of information. A lot of it is fragmentary, and a lot of it is not really as fully fledged as other pieces, but we have enough of it that we can see that ideas do travel through time here.
[00:11:29] Another important element is the level of detail in the story. Do earlier or later stories have more or less detail? This is important because transmitted memory tends to be compressed and condensed, not expanded. If we see a later story that is the expanded beautiful edition, then it's very likely that they are adding elements from outside of the cultural memory. It doesn't mean there's no cultural memory, but a lot of times when we have expanded stories that are later, they're expanding them for critical reasons at the time.
[00:12:13] Of course, we've already mentioned history and politics and their effects.
[00:12:17] We also have geography, climate, because we are talking about a flood story after all, and just cultural elements at large.
[00:12:27] So that is the body of criteria we're using. I'm not gonna go through each of these in depth because there is too much information. But we'll be doing some summaries that pull from this criteria.
[00:12:39] Not all similarities in stories carry the same evidential weight. Not all parallels and motifs are equal, and I've used the metaphor of cheap versus expensive for this.
[00:12:54] Cheap similarities are generic similarities, common clusterings, like if you have a flood, then you're gonna have a boat or some sort of container that people get through the flood with. Even divine anger can be a really common thing in religious stories. Landing on a mountain is gonna be pretty common in a flood narrative because that's the high point, and mountains do tend to have particular significance.
[00:13:25] Now, costly or expensive similarities have more specific configurations and sequences. They have unique correspondences with other stories or histories, and they might have a shared deep structure. So you might think of an unusual vessel type, specific construction details, the ordered preservation of life. We might have birds being released from the boat.
[00:13:52] If narrative diffusion is a source of the similarities, the more costly evidence is affected by the fact that diffusion is a likely candidate for explaining them rather than actual historical memory. In a way, we want to see the costly or expensive similarities in order to look at a global flood narrative. But in another way, if we have too many of them and they're too convenient sounding, then they might be the result of diffusion instead of cultural memory.
[00:14:26] Now, here is a fair question. If right out of the gate we are presuming diffusion is a better explanation than historical cultural memory, then are we really treating this in a fair way, or are we treating it in an overly skeptical, perhaps modern way? And that is a really fair question. And we will keep that in mind.
[00:14:49] But I also want you to keep in mind that this is about accumulating the evidence and weighing it. We are not saying that cheap similarities of the motifs or probability of diffusion removes all of the evidence for a global flood. And of course, I want to also remind you that we're only looking at textual evidence for a global flood. We're not doing any science.
[00:15:15] But I want to assure you that cheap or low amounts of evidence still remains evidence. In the context of studying the global flood, then after we have done enough evaluation of enough stories, we can weigh that cumulative evidence globally. So we are weighing individual locations and individual stories, but we'll also accumulate that information in a way where it seems either more or less likely that we do have a global flood that is attested in records and oral tradition and memory and things like that. Again, while I am coming at this from a skeptical standpoint, simply because that is part of critical thinking, I'm not coming at it from a skeptical standpoint to the point that we're trying to prove something from the get-go.
[00:16:13] It's really not that diffusion necessarily holds the trump card against historical cultural memory. However, if most costly similarities are explained via narrative diffusion, then that really does minimize the global evidence by quite a bit. If diffusion and cultural memory were more at play... which aligns with the diffusion of not only the story, but also people groups as they move across and migrate... then that might actually be an example of a strong case for a global flood.
[00:16:50] And let me state that again just so I get my point across hopefully clearly. If the diffusion and the sharing of a story follows the migration of people groups, then that can be evidence of shared cultural memory.
[00:17:06] But that is, of course, if we have records, then earlier records will be helpful. Unfortunately, this is where we often come up short in our evidence for global flood texts because most cultures didn't have early texts, and that is why we need to understand how to analyze oral tradition as evidence.
[00:17:28] The diffusion of a story along with migration patterns can be part of the evidence for a global flood, because if we have Noah who lands on the mountain and he has his sons and they create their people, then they spread out and they migrate. So if the story is going along migration routes, then the idea of diffusion is not problematic in that way.
[00:17:53] But if diffusion follows more along with later trade routes and later political influence, then that is far less evidence of shared cultural memory. Because stories will show up along with political or economic influence, and that is not arising from the people themselves, but coming from outside of them, and that means that it's really not a global flood.
[00:18:20] I know that's all maybe really over some people's heads here, but again, we're just trying to be really careful with the data. And these episodes are for people who like to deep dive and want the evidence and want the critical thinking along with the stories. And listen, for those of you who are into something like Bayesian logic and analysis, no, I'm not really gonna be going into all of that math, okay? I personally feel the evidence is going to build up to a point where it will skew pretty strongly in some directions.
[00:18:57] Now, if I'm wrong and the case is closer than I think, maybe somebody needs to get into the math. But I have a feeling that intuitive analysis will be sufficient for our task. And I know I'm being really detailed, and this might be a level of detail that not everyone wants to hear, but we're doing it anyway.
[00:19:19] Just a reminder, the narrative structure matters more than a loose motif list when we're thinking about diffusion and cultural memory, because cultural memory, will tend to compress ideas. And so just because we don't have as much actual connection, that might actually be a good thing for the idea of cultural memory that stems from a really long time ago.
[00:19:45] The chronology, especially in these Greek texts, needs to be handled pretty carefully. The surviving Mesopotamian flood texts are clearly much older than our surviving Greek literary witnesses by many centuries. That does not automatically prove that Greece borrowed directly from a surviving Mesopotamian text or idea. But it does mean that we can't speak as though the Greek evidence were equally early.
[00:20:16] So we've got to avoid two extremes. We need to avoid treating a late witness as though it were early evidence, unless we can argue for that for some reason. But we also need to avoid treating a late witness as though it can't preserve older tradition.
[00:20:34] We're getting into the Greek stories, because geography and the contact zones matter quite a bit. And so that's why Greece is our next case after Mesopotamia and Genesis. It really does belong to an eastern Mediterranean contact zone. And it matters because trade routes, imperial structures that are shared and that migrate politically. We have scribal exchange. We have actual evidence of people from Babylon who are writing in Greek and sharing ancient Mesopotamian stories.
[00:21:13] We need to have in mind more than one explanatory model for what we see because we're not trying to presuppose what's going on here. So there are multiple types of explanations. One of them is direct literary dependence.
[00:21:31] Another one is shared traditional stock imagery. Two traditions may go back to an older common stream without one of them directly copying the other. So you can think of it as an older story that branches out into two different stories because they are in different geographical areas, but they might have a similar root. And this would be perhaps because people have a common root in people and geography.
[00:22:02] But a third explanation is a regional catastrophe memory. We have a lot of places in the world that have regional or local floods. And so our flood traditions may preserve the memory of these local events. But the benefit of going to a textual approach is that we can look at similarities and differences between stories.
[00:22:28] And a final explanation is simply independent convergence. Human communities that live near rivers and coastlines and floodplains simply just can develop catastrophe myths independently.
[00:22:44] Okay, so let's actually finally talk about the Greek flood stories. I'm using that in plural form because there is not just one. When people are thinking about everybody in the world having a flood myth, there is usually a prime Greek story that people have in mind and that is the story of Deucalion who survives the flood with his wife.
[00:23:09] But the story of Deucalion is not the only one we have. The first flood we'll talk about is centered on a figure named Ogyges. The Ogygian flood is called because it occurred in the time of Ogyges. He was a primeval king. Some records say that he was the founder and the king of Thebes. In some records, the flood in his time was said to be covering the whole world and was so devastating that this region remained without kings for quite a while after him.
[00:23:45] Now, I'm not gonna directly read any of these texts because they're pretty fragmentary, and they don't have a whole lot of detail that we can really sink our teeth into. But I'm bringing him up because he is primeval . And that really appeals to our Genesis sensibilities, right? He's not just a flood survivor, he belongs to the deep mythic antiquity of the Greek world.
[00:24:10] And so this is really a deep piece of evidence for a cultural memory that goes pretty far into the past. But interestingly, he really complicates the Greek flood myth because there is not really a clean narrative and a simple story. He is associated with a very ancient stage of Greek mythological history. So he does function as a primeval catastrophe marker, much like the Noah figure.
[00:24:42] Now, it is a less stable tradition, and we do have fragmentary evidence that contradicts itself and we're not quite sure what to do with that. It's not necessarily a bad thing when it comes to oral tradition and ancient memory though, because as I've said, ancient memory will tend to shift and change and lose clarity and detail.
[00:25:08] Okay, so then we have the story that most people are going to be familiar with, and that is the story of Deucalion. He also has a few different versions, and they aren't all the same. But there are definite similarities to the Epic of Gilgamesh and the story in Genesis. Later on in our global flood stories, we'll see there's other similarities with other cultures outside of the area as well.
[00:25:35] Let me go ahead and read the straightforward kind of simple version of this. And this is from the Theogony of the Bibliotheca. It was probably written in the first century or somewhere along those lines, so not super early, but not super late either.
[00:25:55] From the Theogony of the Bibliotheca, quote, " And Prometheus had a son, Deucalion. He reigned in the regions about Pythia, married Pyrrha, the daughter of Epimetheus and Pandora, the first woman fashioned by the gods. And when Zeus would destroy the men of the Bronze Age, Deucalion by the advice of Prometheus constructed a chest, and having stored it with provisions, he embarked in it with Pyrrha. But Zeus, by pouring heavy rain from heaven, flooded the greater part of Greece, so that all men were destroyed except a few who fled to the high mountains in the neighborhood. It was then that the mountains in Thessaly parted, and that all the world outside the isthmus and Peloponnese was overwhelmed. But Deucalion, floating in the chest over the sea for nine days and as many nights, drifted to Parnassus, and there, when the rain ceased, he landed and sacrificed to Zeus Phixius of escape. And Zeus sent Hermes to him and allowed him to choose what he would. And he chose to get men. And at the bidding of Zeus, he took up stones and threw them over his head. And the stones which Deucalion threw became men. And the stones which Pyrrha threw became women. Hence people were called metaphorically people, Laos, from Las, a stone. And Deucalion had children by Pyrrha." End quote.
[00:27:32] All right, so we see some definite similarities here. There is a couple. They are saved through the flood. And they are warned by Prometheus.
[00:27:42] But it doesn't say that they are the only survivors. So that's going to be important for other flood narratives because you're going to have other Greek flood narratives that talk about other survivors than just a single one. It's like, oh yeah, we've heard of Deucalion, but we also have this guy over here. And he survived the flood. And he is the ancestor of our people locally here.
[00:28:09] What we don't see is any animals. We do see a sacrifice after the flood.
[00:28:14] We see this really interesting story of the people coming from stones that Deucalion and Pyrrha throw. That is one of the most consistent points of the Deucalion story, actually. Sometimes that is mentioned without the mention of the flood. But a lot of times these two ideas go together. Because we see Deucalion showing up in stories through centuries, and this is a common idea, this is evidence of some form of ancient cultural memory.
[00:28:47] It's interesting that the story with Deucalion, and he's creating men after the flood. He is the son of Prometheus, and Prometheus, of course, molded men out of water and earth and gave them fire, which Zeus didn't know about, and so there was consequence there. So just interesting that we have the connection of creation of people by Prometheus and creation of people by his son in a different way.
[00:29:15] Okay, so what I read to you did come kind of late, right? It's not a super early source, but it is our earliest version of the story that has all of these details. Also interesting that it references the Bronze Age.
[00:29:32] So this is really quite interesting as far as asking ourselves whether this is an ancient cultural historical memory for the people. And we have to say that to some degree because we have the Deucalion story with the stones attested in earlier times than this as well.
[00:29:51] Probably the earliest one that we have is in a text called The Catalog of Women. This is attributed to Hesiod, but it probably wasn't actually written by him, and the women in the title are heroines, many of whom lay with gods and bear heroes of Greek mythology. And it's not really a narrative, it's more structured around a system of genealogies. Although they do have some story formats in it. This is not surprising because we know that ancient genealogies tend to be very tied to narrative stories
[00:30:29] But at any rate, it's a really important ancient witness. It doesn't give us a fully polished Deucalion flood narrative, but he is an important ancestral figure, and Deucalion is tied to post-catastrophe continuity and Greek identity, so it's crucial witness here. And if we have this witness that's pretty early. I wanna say it's 7th century BC, and that lasts up until the 1st century and beyond, then this is really important for what we're seeing here.
[00:31:06] Probably the multitude of records and evidence that we have that mentions Deucalion in this way is why he is the prime example of the Greek flood narrative, even though there are several more. We also have the Odes of Pindar, or the Olympian Odes. This is also fairly early. And it talks about a flood, and it also relates it to the Bronze Age. I won't get into a whole lot of detail right there.
[00:31:37] The next really interesting thing we want to look at is Plato's Timaeus, and this is super interesting for our conversation. So this was written about three sixty BC or something along those lines. And Plato gives us some suggestion of the deluge or the flood, but there's a really interesting spin to this, which is going to be fascinating for our conversation. Let me just go ahead and read this section here. It is a little bit long, but I think it's really important.
[00:32:15] So Timaeus is, of course, a dialogue. And so they're talking about somebody else named Solon. It says, quote, " Tell us from the beginning," said Amyander, what Solon related and how, and who were the informants who vouched for its truth? In the delta of Egypt," said Critias, "where at its head the stream of the Nile parts in two, there is a certain district called the Saitic. The chief city in this district is Sais, the home of King Amasis, the founder of which they say is a goddess whose Egyptian name is Neith, and in Greek, as they assert, Athena.
[00:33:01] " These people profess to be great lovers of Athens and in a measure akin to our people here. And Solon said that when he traveled there, he was held in great esteem amongst them." Moreover, when he was questioning such of their priests as were most versed in ancient lore about their early history, he discovered that neither he himself nor any other Greek knew anything at all, one might say, about such matters." End quote.
[00:33:32] I just wanna pause here for just a second. So Critias is telling a story about Solon, who was really highly regarded, and he's talking to these Egyptians. And even though these are Greeks, and they have a high sense of themselves, in the course of talking to the Egyptians about ancient history, he realizes that the Greeks really don't know as much as they think they do.
[00:33:57] Continuing on, it says, quote, " And on one occasion, when he wished to draw them on to discourse on ancient history, he attempted to tell them the most ancient of our traditions concerning Phoroneus, who was said to be the first man, and Niobe. And he went on to tell the legend about Deucalion and Pyrrha after the flood, and how they survived it, and to give the genealogy of their descendants.
[00:34:24] " And by recounting the number of years occupied by the events mentioned, he tried to calculate the periods of time. Whereupon one of the priests, a prodigiously old man, said, " O Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always children. There is not such a thing as an old Greek." And on hearing this, he asked, " What mean you by this saying?"
[00:34:49] " And the priest replied, " You are young in soul, every one of you, for therein you possess not a single belief that is ancient and derived from old tradition, nor yet one science that is hoary with age. And this is the cause thereof. There have been, and there will be, many and diverse destructions of mankind, of which the greatest are by fire and water, and lesser ones by countless other means.
[00:35:17] " For in truth, the history that is told in your country, as well as ours, how once upon a time, Phaethon, son of Helios, yoked his father's chariot, and because he was unable to drive it along the course taken by his father, burnt up all that was upon the earth and himself perished by a thunderbolt. That story, as it is told, has the fashion of a legend, but the truth of it lies in the occurrence of a shifting of the bodies in the heavens which move around the earth, and a destruction of the things on the earth by fierce fire, which recurs at long intervals.
[00:35:54] " At such times, all they that dwell on the mountains and in high and dry places suffer destruction more than those who dwell near to rivers or the sea. And in our case, the Nile, our savior in other ways, saves us also at such times from this calamity by rising high. And when, on the other hand, the gods purge the earth with a flood of waters, all the herdsmen and shepherds that are in the mountains are saved, but those in the cities of your land are swept into the sea by the streams.
[00:36:27] " Whereas in our country, neither then nor at any other time does the water pour down over our fields from above. On the contrary, it all tends naturally to well up from below. Hence it is, for these reasons, that what is here preserved is reckoned to be most ancient. The truth being that in every place where there is no excessive heat or cold to prevent it, there always exists some human stock, now more, now less in number.
[00:36:57] " And if any event has occurred that is noble or great or in any way conspicuous, whether it be in your country or in ours or in some other place of which we know by report, all such events are recorded from of old and preserved here in our temples. Whereas your people and the others are but newly equipped every time with letters and all such arts as civilized states require.
[00:37:24] " And when after the usual interval of years, like a plague, the flood from heaven comes sweeping down afresh upon your people, it leaves none of you but the unlettered and uncultured, so that you become young as ever, with no knowledge of all that happened in old times in this land or in your own.
[00:37:44] " Certainly, the genealogies which you related just now, Solon, concerning the people of your country, are little better than children's tales. For in the first place, you remember but one deluge, though many had occurred previously. And next, you are ignorant of the fact that the noblest and most perfect race amongst men were born in the land where you now dwell. And from them both you yourself are sprung and the whole of your existing city, out of some little seed that chanced to be left over.
[00:38:17] " But this has escaped your notice because for many generations the survivors died with no power to express themselves in writing. For verily at one time, Solon, before the greatest destruction by water, what is now the Athenian state was the bravest in war and supremely well organized also in all other respects. It is said that it possessed the most splendid works of art and the noblest polity of any nation under heaven of which we heard tell.
[00:38:47] " Upon hearing this, Solon said that he marveled And with the utmost eagerness requested the priest to recount for him in order and exactly all the facts about those citizens of old. The priest then said, I begrudge you not the story, Solon. Nay, I will tell it, both for your own sake and that of your city. And most of all, for the sake of the goddess who has adopted for her own both your land and this of ours, and has nurtured and trained them.
[00:39:17] " Yours first by the space of a thousand years, when she had received the seed of you from Ge and Hephaestus, and after that ours. And the duration of our civilization as set down in our sacred writings is eight thousand years. Of the citizens then who lived nine thousand years ago, I will declare to you briefly certain of their laws and the noblest of the deeds they performed." End quote.
[00:39:44] Okay, so sorry that was a bit long, but you can see how interesting this is in regards to the conversation of global flood stories. While this does mention the Greek flood story, and so it seems like it's a really seated piece of ancient Greek history as much as we can know, there's also an awareness that there are other stories and other ideas out there from other cultures.
[00:40:13] And this is explained by multiple different catastrophes. And not just one, but they happen in cycles or patterns, and some are larger than others. There is the underlying idea that the Egyptians are so amazing because they have in their temples so many records. And when the Greeks and others are destroyed, they kind of have to start over, and they don't have writing, and so they don't have civilization right?
[00:40:41] Absolutely fascinating part of what we're talking about with flood narratives because if we want to say that everybody has a flood narrative and they all come from the same kind of idea, and we want to use the Greek flood myth, well, one of the earlier attestations of that Greek flood myth actually says, "You know what? It's not really a global flood. There's not only one," and so on and so forth. So absolutely fascinating part of our evidence here.
[00:41:16] All right. So, so far what we've talked about is that Deucalion is not the only Greek flood myth. We have earlier primeval stories, but there is this core part of the story with Deucalion and the flood and the stones that survives through time. We have the story here that I just read with Plato and the Timaeus. We have the theogony of the Bibliotheca, which is late but has some firm details here.
[00:41:46] But I think none of that... Well, maybe Plato a little bit, but none of that quite seats the Deucalion flood myth in a way that really describes the lasting impact of the Greek flood myth. And I'm going to suggest that it is Ovid who we should really credit for this lasting narrative.
[00:42:07] The reason I say that is because the story as Ovid wrote it, who was not Greek by the way, he was Latin, late first century BC, early first century AD. He wrote a beautiful poem that has the story of Deucalion. And it is when somebody packages the story in a really beautiful way that really impacts a culture and can last and can make all of the particular details last through time.
[00:42:38] Now, a couple of points I am gonna have to point out here. When we're talking about anything that might sound like the borrowing of a story, well, you have that going on in spades between the Greeks and the Romans, right? I mean, you just do. And so this story by Ovid is not a really great example to draw upon for an ancient Greek myth. That doesn't mean it's not there and it's not an ancient Greek myth, but the way that Ovid tells it is not that ancient Greek myth. It's just not.
[00:43:17] And I would parallel this in the same way that we have the story of Satan and the fall of the angels before creation, which is not in the Bible, but is in Milton's Paradise Lost. And the reason we have the perpetuation of the story of Satan and his fallen angels that we do in our culture is because of Milton's beautiful story in Paradise Lost.
[00:43:48] When you have a beautiful story and it captures people's imaginations, then that will be carried along as the story. So the prime example of the story of Deucalion and the flood is not Greek at all. It is Roman. Again, that doesn't mean there is not that ancient Greek core, but all of the details that we kind of presume are there in the Deucalion story are really in Ovid's story, not the Greek story.
[00:44:22] And that matters because Ovid's telling of the Great Flood matches the Bible story really well, and that is gonna make us wonder. Because while we do have some kind of matches early on with the Deucalion flood story and the Bible, there are some parallels there. There's not enough detail to really say there's a whole lot of actually embedded similarities, right? But you do get that with the story as Ovid recites it.
[00:44:55] Okay. I read Timaeus, so I might as well read Ovid as well. So I will read part of Metamorphosis. You should all go find a copy of this. You can find it online. Maybe I'll link it in the show notes because it's beautiful, and you ought to be familiar with it because there are some reasons why it's very popular, and some of these ideas are presumed to be in multiple cultures when probably they're doing a lot of narrative diffusion. I don't really like to use the word borrowing, but that might be what we have going on here.
[00:45:34] I'm going to read this section about the great deluge. This is Ovid's Metamorphosis. And he says, quote, " Thus fell one house, but not one house alone deserved to perish. Over all the earth, ferocious deeds prevail. All men conspire in evil. Let them therefore feel the weight of dreadful penalties so justly earned, for such hath my unchanging will ordained." End quote.
[00:46:05] Okay, I'm gonna stop here for a second because I'm gonna remind you that the biblical flood story does not specifically say that God was wrathful. But we do have these ideas that everybody is evil and wicked, right? And so the story here in Ovid is already paralleling the biblical story, but instead of God being sorry, God is going to be angry because people are evil. I just want to point that out here.
[00:46:35] Okay, I'm gonna continue reading here now. Quote, " With exclamations, some approved the words of Jove and added fuel to his wrath, while others gave assent. But all deplored and questioned the estate of earth deprived of mortals. Who could offer frankincense upon the altars? Would he suffer earth to be despoiled by hungry beasts of prey? Such idle questions of the state of man, the king of gods forbade, but granted soon to people earth with race miraculous, unlike the first.
[00:47:11] " And now his thunderous bolts would Jove wide scatter, but he feared the flames unnumbered. Sacred ether might ignite and burn the axle of the universe. And he remembered in the scroll of fate, there is a time appointed when the sea and earth and heavens shall melt, and fire destroy the universe of mighty labor wrought. Such weapons by the skill of Cyclops forged. For different punishment, he laid aside. For straight away, he preferred to overwhelm the mortal race beneath deep waves and storms from every raining sky.
[00:47:51] " And instantly, he shut the north wind in Aeolian caves, and every other wind that might dispel the gathering clouds. He bade the south wind blow. The south flies abroad, with dripping wings, concealing in the gloom his awful face. The drenching rain descends from his wet beard and hoary locks. Dark clouds are on his brows, and from his wings and garments drip the dews. His great hands press the overhanging clouds. Loudly the thunders roll. The torrents pour. Iris, the messenger of Juno, clad in many colored raiment, upward draws the streaming moisture to renew the clouds. The standing grain is beaten to the ground. The rustic's crops are scattered in the mire, and he bewails the long year's fruitless toil.
[00:48:45] " The wrath of Jove was not content with powers that emanate from heaven. He brought to aid his azure brother, lord of flowing waves, who called upon the rivers and the streams. And when they endured his imperial abode, Neptune, their ancient ruler, thus began, " A long appeal is needless. Pour ye forth in rage of power. Open your fountains. Rush over obstacles. Let every stream pour forth in boundless floods."
[00:49:17] " Thus he commands; and none dissenting all the river gods return, and opening up their fountains roll tumultuous to the deep unfruitful sea. And Neptune with his trident smote the earth, with trembling with unwonted throes heaved up the sources of her waters bare; and through her open plains the rapid rivers rushed resistless onward bearing the waving grain, the budding groves, the houses, sheep, and men, and holy temples and their sacred urns.
[00:49:51] " The mansions that remained, resisting vast and total ruin, deepening waves concealed and whelmed their tottering turrets in the flood and whirling gulf. And now one vast expanse the land and sea were mingled in the waste of endless waves, a sea without a shore. One desperate man seized on the nearest hill; another sitting in his curved boat plied the long oar where he was wont to plow; another sailed above his grain, above his hidden dwelling; and another hooked a fish that sported in a leafy elm.
[00:50:27] " Perchance an anchor dropped in verdant fields, or curving keels were pushed through the tingled vines; and where the gracile goat enjoyed the green, unsightly seals reposed. Beneath the waves were wondering nereids, viewing cities, groves, and houses. Dolphins darting 'mid the trees, meshed in the twisted branches, beat against the shaken oak trees.
[00:50:52] " There the sheep afraid swim with the frightened wolf. The surging waves float tigers and lions. Availeth not his lightning shock the wild boar, nor avails the stag's fleet-footed speed. The wandering bird, seeking umbrageous groves and hidden vales, with wearied pinion droops into the sea. The waves increasing surge above the hills, and rising waters dash on mountain tops.
[00:51:20] " Myriads by the waves are swept away, and those the waters spare for lack of food, starvation slowly overcomes at last. A fruitful land and fair, but now submerged beneath a wilderness of rising waves. ' Twixt Oeta and Enonia, Phocis lies, where through the clouds Parnassus' summits twain point upward to the stars, unmeasured height, save when the rolling billows covered all.
[00:51:48] " There in a small and fragile boat arrived Deucalion and the consort of his couch prepared to worship the Corsian nymphs, the mountain deities, and Themis kind, who in that age reveled in oracles the voice of fate, as he no other lived so good and just, as she no other feared the gods.
[00:52:11] " When Jupiter beheld the globe in ruin covered, swept with wasting waves, and when he saw one man of myriads left, one helpless woman left on myriads lone, both innocent and worshiping the gods, he scattered all the clouds. He blew away the great storms by the cold north wind. Once more, the earth appeared to heaven, and the skies appeared to earth. The fury of the main abated, for the ocean ruler laid his trident down and pacified the waves and called on azure Triton. Triton arose above the waving seas, his shoulders mailed in purple shells.
[00:52:50] " He bade the Triton blow, blow in his sounding shell the wandering streams and rivers to recall with signal known, a hollow wreathed trumpet, tapering wide and slender stemmed. The Triton took a main and wound the pearly shell at midmost sea. Betwixt the rising and the setting suns, the wildered notes resounded shore to shore. And as it touched his lips, wet with the brine beneath his dripping beard, sounded retreat. And all the waters of the land and sea obeyed. Their fountains heard and ceased to flow.
[00:53:25] " Their waves subsided. Hidden hills uprose, emerged the shores of ocean. Channels filled with flowing streams. The soil appeared. The land increased its surface as the waters decreased. And after length of days, the trees put forth with ooze on bending boughs their naked tops. And all the wasted globe was now restored.
[00:53:48] " But as he viewed the vast and silent world, Deucalion wept and thus to Pyrrha spoke, " Oh, sister, wife, alone of women left, my kindred in descent and origin, dearest companion of my marriage bed, doubly endeared by deepening dangers borne. Of all the dawn and eve behold of earth, but you and I are left, for the deep sea has kept the rest.
[00:54:15] " And what prevents the tide from overwhelming us? Remaining clouds affright us. How could you endure your fears if you alone were rescued by this fate? And who would then console your bitter grief? Oh, be assured, if you were buried in the waves, that I would follow you and be with you. Oh, would that by my father's art I might restore the people and inspire this clay to take the form of man.
[00:54:42] " Alas, the gods decreed, and only we are living. Thus Deucalion's plaint to Pyrrha, and they wept. And after he had spoken, they resolved to ask the aid of sacred oracles. And so they hastened to Cephissian waves, which rolled a turbid flood in channels known. Thence when their robes and brows were sprinkled well, they turned their footsteps to the goddess's fane.
[00:55:08] " Its gables were befouled with reeking moss, and on its altars every fire was cold. But when the twain had reached the temple steps, they fell upon the earth, inspired with awe, and kissed the cold stone with their trembling lips, and said, ' If righteous prayers appease the gods, and if the wrath of high celestial powers may thus be turned, declare, O Themis, whence and what the art may raise humanity. O gentle goddess, help the dying world.'
[00:55:40] " Moved by their supplications, she replied, ' Depart from me and veil your brows, ungird your robes, and cast behind you as you go the bones of your great mother.'
[00:55:52] " Long they stood in dumb amazement. Pyrrha, first of voice, refused the mandate, and with trembling lips implored the goddess to forgive. She feared to violate her mother's bones and vex her sacred spirit. Often pondered they the words involved in such obscurity, repeating oft.
[00:56:12] " And thus Deucalion to Epimetheus's daughter uttered speech of soothing import. Oracles are just and urge not evil deeds, or naught avails the skill of thought. " Our mother is the Earth, and I may judge the stones of the Earth are bones that we should cast behind us as we go.'
[00:56:33] " And although Pyrrha by his words was moved, she hesitated to comply, and both amazed doubted the purpose of the oracle, but deemed no harm to come of trial. They, descending from the temple, veiled their heads and loosed their robes and threw some stones behind them. It is much beyond belief, were not receding ages witness, hard and rigid stones assumed a softer form, enlarging as their brittle nature changed to milder substance, till the shape of man appeared imperfect, faintly outlined first as marble statue chiseled in the rough.
[00:57:11] " The soft, moist parts were changed to softer flesh, the hard and brittle substance into bones. The veins retained their ancient name. And now the gods supreme ordained that every stone Deucalion threw should take the form of man, and those by Pyrrha cast should woman's form assume. So are we hardy to endure and prove by toil and deeds from what we sprung." End quote.
[00:57:40] Okay. That was a long part to read, I know, but isn't it beautiful? It's really beautiful. You guys should go read it, especially because right after that is an interesting part where the Earth produces the animals spontaneously, and there is an enormous snake. Just go read it. Who doesn't wanna read about a giant snake that gets slain. But anyway, that's beyond our story here.
[00:58:04] But you can see how Ovid in this story, you'll see it at the beginning of it as well, the creation account. It parallels stories from the ancient Near East. It parallels the biblical story. It brings in the Greek story, and it puts them together in this really beautiful rendition.
[00:58:24] And I am saying that it's putting them together deliberately because before this, there's only hints that seem like the Deucalion story matches the biblical story and the ancient Near Eastern story. But here it is really woven together in this narrative. Like I said, I think that is why this story has endured and lasts in cultural memory. Again, similar to how Milton's Paradise Lost has given us this memory of Satan and a story that seems really biblical, but actually is not.
[00:59:01] This is probably unquestionably the fullest surviving literary retelling of the Greek flood story. It's very detailed and it brings together a lot of different things. Ovid is a Roman poet. And Romans were particularly good at things like this.
[00:59:22] There are other stories we could talk about, especially the ones that talk about local flood heroes that are survivors in addition to Deucalion. But let's return to our methodological points.
[00:59:36] One of the most important chronological facts in our discussion today is that the Greek flood tradition is older than some of our more detailed surviving Greek witnesses. But it is still younger, in attested form at least, than the major Near Eastern flood texts. In other words, the Deucalion tradition probably has some earlier oral roots, especially since the core of it remains with Deucalion and Pyrrha and the stones.
[01:00:10] But the coherent, detailed narrative that really matches the Mesopotamian account is only securely visible to us in surviving Greek and Latin authors from the first millennium BC and really the turn of the millennium. Especially that with all of the detail.
[01:00:31] And this is especially fascinating because the other quote-unquote Greek myth I will talk about is the one from Berosus. Now, I have mentioned Berosus before. He's actually not Greek. He's from Mesopotamia. He is a priest, but he writes the Mesopotamian stories in Greece for a Greek audience. And this was probably in the 3rd century BC, so slightly after Plato.
[01:01:03] Unfortunately, we don't actually have a surviving original account, but he is mentioned and quoted in several places, which means that he is a really wide-ranging source. Quite likely, this means that we have a lot of evidence to say that the Mesopotamian stories got disseminated throughout Greece in a way that was very impactful. Really strong evidence for narrative diffusion.
[01:01:34] Like I said, we have multiple witnesses, multiple quotations, including with Josephus, who talks about how he is from Mesopotamia, but also connects the Mesopotamian flood accounts with the Genesis flood account. as well. These are very dominant sources in Christian culture and Jewish culture and from Greece into the Roman Empire. So there's a reason why we would have a really strong diffusion of these stories in a cultural way instead of just saying, well, every culture has their unique internal flood account.
[01:02:14] And so what all of that means from a historical perspective is that even though we might have some core Greek things that go back pretty far, it's hard to say that they go back farther than the Mesopotamian flood stories. In the earliest versions that we have, they're so low on detail that we can't really presume that they are from a similar original source.
[01:02:42] Because the later stories that we have that are more detailed, those are the places where we might say they might have similar common roots, but it's better explained by transfer of stories and diffusion of ideas.
[01:02:59] It seems pretty clear that at least some of the Greek stories, definitely the Roman version, is a literary consolidation of different stories. So they do preserve earlier traditional content, but that content is definitely shaped by Greek religious imagination, by the local geography, by genealogical interests, by symbolic repopulation themes and identities, definitely a lot of literary polish, and there tends to be a little bit of standardization as you go. So it's not that we don't have any preservation of early core memories, but we have clear development and pretty clear influence.
[01:03:49] And so this is why the chronology of these records should make us really cautious in a couple of different ways. First of all, clearly the Deucalion tradition is not just late. It is as early as we can possibly really say in the Greek tradition. But how much actual full historical weight can we place on it? It's a little bit more up in the air.
[01:04:16] A practical implication for comparative work that we're doing is that the Greek tradition of the flood shouldn't be treated as a direct duplicate of Mesopotamian material, 'cause it's not that, but it's pretty clearly influenced by that. At least I would weight it very heavily in that way.
[01:04:37] So again, back to our core methodology and weighing the evidence. Some sources are stronger for narrative reconstruction, others are stronger for their depth of tradition, and their being very embedded in the locale and in perhaps cultural memory. Although, of course, we know that people do like to take outside stories and apply them to themselves.
[01:05:05] Clearly we have catastrophe memory here. Remember in the story with Plato.
[01:05:10] We do have a lot of different explanations for the transmission and the history, right? So what we could say, pretty strongly, is that there is a pretty deep and ancient Greek flood narrative. It's not as ancient as we have in Mesopotamia, at least in documented form, but that is kind of to be expected because of the Greek culture.
[01:05:36] We have a few little details that remain oddly stable through the Greek corpus. So that is pretty indicative of either an ancient memory or something that is exceptionally bound with the identity of the people at least.
[01:05:55] Deucalion is functioning as a known ancestral figure. We have dramatic judgment. We have catastrophe. We don't always have Deucalion warned, but sometimes we do. He is associated with the creation of people, and those people are not birthed in the same way that we have with the Noah story. It is more miraculous, more supernatural. And it's almost like what we have with the Deucalion flood story and the stones and people, it makes me wonder how much that might parallel the ancient Mesopotamian stories of people being created by dirt and blood and things like that.
[01:06:38] We just don't get a whole lot of narrative detail until late, though. And there is just so much evidence for direct transmission from ancient Mesopotamia into the Greek stories, at least as far as the really highly detailed aspects.
[01:06:55] I think I'll probably wrap it up here. But I'll leave you with a few questions that you can explore yourself. And what I would suggest, although, of course, you can do whatever you want with this, but if you're kind of following along with what I'm trying to do, then the idea is to look at each individual flood myth and individual flood witness, each individual story, and ask similar questions.
[01:07:21] After you do that with each one, you pull them together and see what the stream of tradition is. See how they fit together. What is the evidence telling us?
[01:07:32] Go back to our criteria. Who is recording the story? Why are they recording it? What is the transmission setting? What is the genre? Because a genre has a purpose as well. What are the shared motifs and the structure of the story? Where do we have multiple examples of the story from different authors and different times?
[01:07:55] Where do we expect contact and diffusion, and why might we expect that in certain historical places? What is the chronology of all of these pieces together? What is the level of detail we have? What is the associated history and politics of the story and the region and the geography and the climate?
[01:08:17] I hope you see that when we boil down the entire Greek tradition into one single flood story, it is far too simplistic. We cannot just say that they had this flood narrative that Ovid wrote because that is not the evidence that we have. There is too much suggestion that there is a coming together of different traditions in a story like that.
[01:08:44] So a fun thing to do is to take each of these stories and compare them. What is the main Greek flood story? Where does it show up in history? How early is it? How does it connect to earlier stories? How does it connect to later stories? How could flood traditions survive unevenly or in fragmented form?
[01:09:07] Is that helpful to our question about the global flood and the relation of these global flood stories to trying to determine whether or not we had a global flood. Where does the Mesopotamian flood tradition enter Greek literary culture directly, and where do we have evidence of it? How do we understand the story? Is it only in these written forms or does it seem to be an underlying aspect of the culture, kind of something that everyone would know whether or not they had heard a particular version or not?
[01:09:42] All right. So again, in the broader question of global flood memory, not every flood myth is gonna carry the same evidential weight. If a tradition seems to be independently preserved within a cultural's own historical stream, then that does count more strongly as a separate witness, and we do have some of that in the Greek accounts.
[01:10:05] That is fair, but it's not as strong as we want to say because, the high parallels come late, and they come in Roman form. So if a lot of the parallels and similarities that we're gonna see is likely the result of later transmission from a different tradition, then it can still be historically important, but it does less to support the idea of multiple independent cultural memories around the globe of one single primordial flood.
[01:10:40] And Plato really doesn't help us there does he? Which that's fascinating to me. We have real Greek evidence here, but it's uneven, and it's not as certain as we would like it to be. Deucalion is a meaningful comparison, and it has connections, but it's not that tight of a match to the Noah and Utnapishtim accounts.
[01:11:06] So really what we see in the Greek flood tradition is strong evidence to suggest that we have preservation of, some sort of internal memory, but also a lot of literary shaping later.
[01:11:20] And Berossus is a fascinating aspect to this as well because until fairly recently, the fragmented evidence from Berossus is what we had of the Mesopotamian flood accounts. Now we have entire stories from Mesopotamia itself, from those cuneiform texts, and they confirm what Berossus says about those ancient texts .
[01:11:45] Absolutely fascinating witness as far as ancient Mesopotamia goes. Pretty strongly hints at affecting the Greek flood accounts, though. And Plato supports a model of damaged memory and people trying to make sense of the fact that we have different stories that don't really make a whole lot of sense from different people.
[01:12:07] We are too early in our global flood question to make a whole lot of determinations. But there are some interesting trajectories. The bottom line is the Greek evidence doesn't function as a really clean, independent witness of equal weight, certainly not to really match up super well to the biblical account in a way that we kind of think that it does, and Ovid makes us think that it does.
[01:12:35] All right, I'm gonna go ahead and end here. Lots of interesting stuff to think about here. We will be widening our perspective later on with the global flood stories and again, doing lots more comparison, lots more interesting analysis. I hope you enjoyed hearing some of the Greek flood accounts because they're very interesting, and some of them are just beautiful.
[01:13:00] But I will leave all of that for you and appreciate everybody listening, appreciate everybody sharing the episodes. And I want to say again, if you have a particular flood account in mind that you know about that you would like to hear me talk about, I would love to hear about that. We will be sprinkling more of those as we get back into the flood account and other topical studies.
[01:13:24] But thanks for listening, and a special shout-out to my Patreon and PayPal and biblical theology community supporters because you guys are so awesome, especially right now for me. I really want to thank you guys for supporting me. Deeply appreciate all of you. But at any rate, I wish you all a blessed week, and we will see you later.
