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 the last couple of weeks we have been talking about oral tradition, and we're gonna continue that conversation today. And I'm gonna call back to the first episode I did two weeks ago about how oral tradition can function as real evidence for us on some level, because there are some reasons that we can trust it. But we can't always trust it and we shouldn't always just assume that it's completely accurate and that there aren't any guidelines that we need in order to approach this kind of thing.
[00:00:54] And last week I talked about how the Bible and the Bible's development and the Bible's writing is very much steeped in the same kind of things that oral tradition is. And so this conversation is pretty important. Now, I'm not gonna say that we need to treat Scripture in the same way that we treat oral tradition. That is not what I'm saying. But as we look at the context of Scripture, then it really is fair to ask some questions about that.
[00:01:24] But I'm gonna say that that's really not my purpose for this little mini series. I have a different purpose in mind. And that purpose is that we are going to be digging into worldwide flood stories, and we're gonna be looking at them from a critical vantage point. We're gonna compare them to the Bible. We're gonna ask, how trustworthy are these? What are the pieces that are more trustworthy than others? What are the stories that are more trustworthy than others? How do we evaluate this material?
[00:01:58] Because like I said, oral tradition can be evidence, but there are guardrails and there are questions we're going to have to ask in order to do that well. Because we want to evaluate this kind of material very wisely without sliding into cynicism or speculation or simply just accepting it because, well, it kind of sounds like the Bible and I really want it to parallel the Bible, so I'm just gonna go ahead and accept it uncritically.
[00:02:30] Well, I'm here to say that we really shouldn't do that last thing, nor should we be overly cynical and we shouldn't just jump off a cliff into speculation. I think that there are very valuable pieces that we could potentially use as evidence for historical reasons to match up to the Bible or not.
[00:02:53] But again, we just want to do this very critically to the best of our ability. The point is not to simply debunk them, but the point is also not just to accept them because, well, of course, everybody has a flood myth, and this proves that the Bible's flood is global.
[00:03:13] My point here is that there really is a body of evidence and a type of critique and evaluation that we can approach these stories with, and so that's what we're gonna talk about today. I'm still saying that oral tradition isn't automatically weak, that it can have some stability built within it. And I am saying that oral tradition is not always just a telephone game.
[00:03:39] But there are real world forces that shape it and also reshape it. And while we can't uncover all of that material by a long shot, there are some things we can look at as far as the evidence goes.
[00:03:55] So we're gonna look at some pressures and some pitfalls that reshape oral tradition. Things like retellings that adapt to new contexts. Identity and politics shaping emphasis in a text. We're gonna talk about prestige borrowing, where people will adopt motifs from influential neighbors. We'll talk about translation and transcription effects when we have that oral tradition that gets written down somewhere. We also have audience expectations and performer incentives for certain things.
[00:04:35] My main point today is that we can look at traditions and sometimes they will stay stable in their core, but they might shift in frames or details. And again, we can't always know that, but there are certain trends and there are certain things that usually happen that we can see often in history.
[00:04:58] So basically, I'm going to be giving you an evaluation toolkit, some practical criteria to weigh a tradition as evidence. That toolkit is going to include the provenance of the story, who recorded it, when was it recorded, and who was telling the story?
[00:05:19] Then we have the transmission setting. Is it in a ritual situation? Is it in a public situation? Do we have some sort of specialist custodian or storyteller or priest or some sort of leader who is supposed to be keeping the story?
[00:05:38] Then we're gonna consider genre, and remember that different cultures will define genre differently. So genre does not just go from one culture to another. You cannot just pick up one culture's genre and plop it down in another culture. But there are a few different things that we can look at that apply to different genres in different cultures. Things like charter or origin stories, folk tales and etiological legends, where we have the story of how something came to be.
[00:06:14] We're also going to look at motif versus structure. Shared motifs in stories are what I'm gonna call cheap, because many stories can have a shared motif and be completely unrelated. But I'm gonna suggest that a shared plot spine and some additional details is more costly or expensive. So this is kind of my metaphor for how we're gonna look at this today. Are the similarities in two stories on the cheap end or on the costly and expensive end. If they're on the cheap end, then we don't have a whole lot of basis to presume that they have the same origin or that they're connected at all.
[00:07:00] But if they have a little bit more of a costly integration with the motifs and the structure of the story, then there is a real potential for either a similar origin or cross contamination or some sort of direct connection.
[00:07:19] Another thing that we're gonna look at is independent attestation. This is if we have multiple stories and multiple lines that describe the same thing in a similar area or related areas. And we can tell that they're not copying each other for some reason, that we understand historically.
[00:07:41] This connects to contact and diffusion. Is there interaction between two different communities? Are they trading? Is there some sort of mission? Is there colonization going on? And these kinds of things.
[00:07:57] Then we'll also look at chronology. How early do we have the story recorded compared to the alleged event?
[00:08:07] So we are not only going to compare the stories, we're going to compare the histories of the stories, and that's really where the meat lies. If we have a lot of similarity, a lot of connection, that can either be good or it can be bad depending on what we're trying to get at in that connection.
[00:08:29] And I say that it can be good and it can be bad because if there is a lot of direct connection where we could have the story legitimately diffuse through cultural means, then that's gonna be a little bit more on the cheap end of the scale versus the expensive, costly end of the scale where we really don't understand how we got these two very similar stories, if we're mostly looking at diffusion for that connection.
[00:08:58] So basically, we're gonna be setting the rules of the road as we look at the global flood myths.
[00:09:04] Now, I'll just mention right here, there are two big things that could throw a wrench in what we're doing here. The first of them is that a lot of times, we have missionary or colonial influence with these stories. Quite often the stories are first recorded by Christian missionaries.
[00:09:26] Now that does not mean that there is anything nefarious going on. The missionaries don't have to intend to influence the people. They don't have to be doing something underhanded. Sometimes these things just happen, and we'll talk about that as we go because there's probably a few stories where it is going to be pretty evident that that's likely what has happened.
[00:09:52] The second thing we're gonna be on the lookout for is the factor of local flooding as a common hazard across human experience. So we could get parallel explanations without a common origin.
[00:10:07] Now again, we are not presuming anything about a global or local flood. But we're not gonna presume that those are the case either. We're gonna look at the evidence and we're gonna compare it to other evidences, and we're gonna see where it leads. Every tradition, every story can be independently examined with these ideas in mind. Who recorded it? What was the context? What are the similarities? What are the differences as well? And what does the contact map look like between different cultures?
[00:10:45] Now keep in mind similarity between two stories is cheap, but providence is expensive. If it looks like it has a legitimate similar origin, then that's going to give us better evidence in favor of a global flood.
[00:11:03] And so I've said that oral tradition can form some evidence, but I've also said that oral tradition can and does change through time. We see this with actual evidence, so we can't prove change, but there are likely some little telltale signs of it.
[00:11:24] So to begin with, let's define change. What does it mean for a story to change? Because sometimes you could have a little bit of adjustment and it's not really fully changing the story. Let's just talk about the types of change that we'll see. First of all, we'll see elements in the story either drop out or be added to the story.
[00:11:48] Second of all, we'll see the story compressed or sometimes expanded.
[00:11:55] Sometimes we'll see harmonization between similar stories where different versions are aligned together.
[00:12:03] Another thing that we'll notice is that there can be a type of normalization going on in a story, which makes weird things look familiar.
[00:12:14] Another important element is that we will see stories end up with more moralization. There is a shifting ethical emphasis to the story because the people are wrestling with something in a moral fashion, and so this story is helping them do that.
[00:12:33] Another really big factor we'll see is the idea of politics or legitimization of a particular line of authority. So the story is serving authority claims.
[00:12:46] Again, we will see motif borrowing. People will adopt story units from neighbors. And I know that that seems really icky to us. Like how dare they, people would not do that with a story that is rooted in history, but I'm sorry to say that they just do. We actually have evidence from scientists who study this material.
[00:13:11] Another thing that can affect change in a story is translation effects where the person who's doing the recording, they have different categories because they're not original to the context and that can unintentionally reshape the story when it is written down. Or whether it's just told in a new context with a new language, that can also happen.
[00:13:36] Okay, so now let's define core versus surface. The core of the story are things like plot line, identity markers, and causal logic, like this thing leads to this thing leads to that thing. Those are core to the story. The things that are more surface level that might change a little bit more often are things like particular phrases, minor details, kind of local color or flare, and rhetorical emphasis. When those kinds of things change, it's not really affecting the core story.
[00:14:21] Now let's define what a trope or a motif is. This is important because we really do not want to overread similarities because so many people in the world tell similar stories because we have similar experiences. So a motif is a reusable story unit that can show up in many stories, and they don't have to be related to one another.
[00:14:49] A trope is something that happens within a culture or that we just see commonly within humanity. It is a common motif. When we see a trope show up, it really has very low evidential weight by itself.
[00:15:05] Now, you could say that we're just kind of making up these categories. And I get it, to some degree that's a little bit inevitable. We could just be seeing what we wanna see sometimes. But it's also the case that throughout human history, we've had mothers, we've had kings, we've had family units, we've had worship of gods, we've had natural disasters, we've had sicknesses, we've had births, and we've had deaths, and we have all of these experiences that are very common to humanity at large.
[00:15:45] So it's not fair to say that a story that has to do with kingship has some sort of common origin, like it all stems from one single king, the first king of humanity. That just really doesn't make sense.
[00:16:01] It doesn't make sense even to say that a story about a natural disaster or a judgment has some sort of common source. We really need a whole lot of layers and a whole lot of similarities and few differences in order to say that two stories have a common origin.
[00:16:22] That is not to say that they cannot have differences. Because we've already described that stories and traditions do change over time, so we can definitely have differences in stories without ruining a common origin necessarily.
[00:16:39] But again, these are just the pieces we're gonna look at for our evidence and for our study as we look at these stories. We're not trying to intentionally debunk, we're just trying to be wise and to weigh the evidence. We're going to weigh all of the evidence we possibly can because it's really not true that we just can't know anything because we do have a set of knowledge and pieces that we can look at as evidence.
[00:17:08] I mean, not everyone looks at the same things as being as likely as other things. We all weigh evidence differently according to what we trust, which probably has something to do with how we were raised and how we think and all of these things. But it's simply true that we have a lot of material and we should use all of the material we have at our disposal.
[00:17:34] Okay, so I want to show a little bit of how things really do change, and we can know that they do. There's what we might call three independent lanes of evidence here. First of all, we have psychology and by psychology, I mean actual working with people and having experiments. Not like creepy experiments, but social experiments and investigation into how people tell stories and judging their storytelling with the accuracy of a situation. Change can be demonstrated under controlled pressures.
[00:18:14] We've already talked quite a bit about the ethnography angle here, or the oral history. Change will show patterns in real communities.
[00:18:24] And then finally, we can look at the actual textual witnesses, especially those of the ancient Near East, because that is the context of the Hebrew Bible.
[00:18:36] So we don't need to assume that things change. We can directly observe it at least sometimes.
[00:18:43] Let's dig into the different pressures that will reshape a tradition. I've already mentioned some of these in previous episodes and already today, but let's dig a little bit into this. First of all, when you have a story that is being told orally and it becomes an oral tradition. Well inherent to that, because these stories are communal, but they are told by individuals. So there is an internal pressure from your memory and how it can actually work. So even without any outside contact, this will change your story and it will shape your story.
[00:19:25] By necessity, we have to have some form of compression. We cannot tell all of the events. And all of the events in an oral history do not become an oral tradition. Remember, we've talked about the difference between oral history, which is what somebody is telling you about their experience and what they remember, and oral tradition, which is those stories which get passed through generations. So oral tradition is something that lasts through a culture and over generations through time and oral history is only going to last a lifetime or a generation.
[00:20:05] So when you are recalling something to tell it, you cannot tell all of the details. You cannot tell everything that you experienced. You necessarily have to compress the story and shorten it to what's tellable.
[00:20:20] And in that process, we have a smoothing out of the story and there is often a normalization where odd details will get really kind of domesticated. If something sticks out really oddly in a story, it's there for a narrative purpose or you're trying to wrestle with that point at least. And sometimes you will add things to your story to describe why that thing is maybe not really as weird and odd as you might initially think.
[00:20:53] And the purpose of telling a story is quite often something to do with morals or it has something to do with the constraints of the culture. The lesson of the story will get sharpened through different tellings.
[00:21:08] Again, if this is an oral tradition, then it is being passed around by different people and eventually that story will become harmonized. So perhaps every telling of the story does not have every detail, but over time, differences will kind of get weeded out. And this is shaped by the community and sometimes shaped by a direct audience because a performer will learn what lands with their audience and what doesn't, and they'll repeat the things that work and they'll leave out the things that don't.
[00:21:46] Okay, so then we have social pressures within the community itself which is going to shape the story. We have some sort of authority or legitimization of the structure and the organization of the society. So stories quite often will justify leaders, land claims, and boundaries.
[00:22:08] Again, we've talked quite a bit about the maintenance or the creation of an identity. Stories are used to tell us who we are. Stories often relate to ritual behavior, and these fixed context can stabilize and select what survives. over time we will also have gaps in the generations, especially where the story gets continued through time. That is just a necessary part of what happens. And what is emphasized will shift as the community needs will also shift.
[00:22:44] So we have the pressures from an individual and the way that memory works. We have pressures within social community. But then we have external pressures. We have pressures from contact with other people. This can happen through trade, through intermarriage, through migration, or through conquest. And this is where we could get the idea of prestige borrowing, where we adopt motifs from powerful neighbors or powerful visitors.
[00:23:17] When we have contact with other people, we will also have translation and recording effects. And all of these things will be very strong when we have missionary or colonial influence. Sometimes we have direct implantation of the story where the missionary will teach something from the Bible and it will be implanted in the people's memories themselves. Again, this does not have to be nefarious, it doesn't have to be intentional. It's just kind of what happens.
[00:23:50] We can also have prompting of stories where we have two different cultures meet and one group is telling their stories and another group is telling stories and there could be leading questions that kind of shape the way the story is being told. And additional explanations that would not be native to the story originally. Then we have the potential of retrofitting where locals will retell their story with new frames once contact with somebody else happens.
[00:24:24] Okay, so let's look at some of the actual evidence we have. Let's look at the psychology angle first. So here we're gonna look at memory. Memory is natively reconstructive and it is shaped by social forces. That doesn't make memory worthless, but it does mean that even an eyewitness account should be treated as not exactly perfect. When we do something like remember, what we're doing is reconstructing the past.
[00:25:00] We're gonna look at the work of a scientist named Frederick Bartlett. Bartlett studied what happens when people retell an unfamiliar story over time and across people. The retellings don't stay verbatim. They get reconstructed and changed according to the new person's description and how they are parsing and understanding the story.
[00:25:24] Now, granted, these are unfamiliar stories and an unfamiliar story will tend to get changed more because people are trying to make sense of it and they're trying to fit it into their own experience. So unfamiliar and odd details will be dropped, simplified, or reshaped into something that fits the expectations. This is what we would call normalization. The gist or the plot of the story can stay the same, but a lot of details will drift.
[00:25:57] Now, even though this is about unfamiliar stories and within an oral tradition, that might not be what's happening, but when that story is being told to somebody who is not already familiar with it, these kinds of artifacts and changes will creep in. So really, we tend to shift details toward our cultural expectations and what makes sense to us.
[00:26:21] This is where we get that telephone game idea, and it does happen. We turn strange ideas into familiar ones. We end up with things that were originally ambiguous to us, but now they make a whole lot of sense when we tell the story. Anything that is confusing gets simplified and integrated into the whole. So this is one kind of change we should expect from weird into familiar.
[00:26:52] This is important when people who tell the story and the people who record the story are in different contexts, and when that happens, something called a misinformation effect can happen.
[00:27:05] I'm going to bring up Elizabeth Loftus here. Loftus showed that post-event information, especially how questions are phrased, can change what people later report and believe that they remember. So like something like a car crash. If we change one word in the question when somebody is being asked about it, that can actually shift what people think happened and how severe it was.
[00:27:32] If somebody is leading the questioning and they use a word like smashed that is more vivid and more violent, that can actually affect what somebody is describing in the event as opposed to if they used kind of a more normal word like hit.
[00:27:51] So this is a really strong reason to care about how a tradition was collected because leading questions and supplied vocabulary and comparison will prompt the reshaping of the version that we end up with.
[00:28:08] Now let's talk about social contagion and collaborative remembering. I'm going to bring up Henry Roediger. Roediger and his colleagues created a paradigm where a person will recall scenes alongside a partner who sometimes mentions incorrect items, and then later on, participants will repeat those suggested items as if they were truly the originally, even though they weren't.
[00:28:37] This demonstrates a real phenomenon that memory can be socially shaped. So somebody brings up a detail and that detail wasn't in an original telling, but additional people telling the story will use that detail. And so the detail will spread through the group like a contagion. And this is unintentional. Nobody means to do that, but it does happen. And when the false detail really fits the scene, it just ends up there natively.
[00:29:10] Okay, so that is some of the psychology. And I know I could get a little bit deeper into all of that, but that's not really my point. I bring up those names so that you can go do that if you want. But I'm just pointing out that we have people who actually study this material. We have people who investigate eyewitness accounts. We have investigation into how memory works and social contagion of ideas. And again, this is not nefarious. This is just what humans natively do.
[00:29:44] Think about the development of superhero stories, for instance. Now today, we just think of that as a particular genre. And while, you know, some of the people who are really interested in superhero stories will talk about the different influences that are between different writers and different types of worlds written by different people and created by different people. You can really dig into some of that cross-contamination and pollination and all of this stuff.
[00:30:15] But what's really clear is that it doesn't really have to be that somebody is borrowing from the idea at this point. The whole concept of the superhero is so deeply embedded into our culture today that you can't really even get away from it. It is not just for people who read comic books. It is something that we natively understand.
[00:30:38] It is something that everybody knows about on some level because it's so deep in our consciousness today because it's just a social contagion. And it's not like anybody has to be plagiarizing anybody else, but ideas develop through time and they're impacted by other things.
[00:30:57] And as I said, we have genres here that are very deeply embedded into a culture, but it's not fair to just pick up a superhero story and then go plop it down into ancient Greece and say that those stories are exactly the same, even though there could be a whole lot of parallels. And why are there parallels? Well, because we are also affected by those stories.
[00:31:21] But it's not like it has to be that way either because there are motifs. You look at different cultures in the world and they will have hero myths. Does that mean that they all stem from some original hero, or is it a common hope and a common idea that people just have?
[00:31:39] So again, to determine whether or not cultures influence other cultures or whether they just stem from an original source, there are things you have to look at, including the contact map of the people. And this is where our textual witnesses come in from the ancient Near East. We see flood stories. There are several different flood stories and different flood traditions in the ancient Near East. They're very similar, but they're also very different.
[00:32:11] So the ancient Near East, because it is the closest material to the Bible, is the thing, of course, we'll look at first. But I've kind of cheated because we've already looked at a lot of the similarities. I have episodes about Atrahasis, we've talked about Enuma Elish, we've talked about Gilgamesh. Probably haven't talked quite enough about the Sumerian King lists and things like that.
[00:32:37] But nonetheless, we're all familiar here with the fact that ancient Near Eastern stories of the flood are similar, but also different. So they clearly share core material. The question is how and why. There is real variation in these stories as well. Sometimes the variation is fairly small. Sometimes it's pretty profound.
[00:33:02] Scribes and students learning and memorizing for repetition, but also for new creation. Connections between orality and intertextuality because we don't always have a text, but we can have people learning and memorizing and preserving. But we must presume that will also result in creation along similar lines using similar motifs.
[00:33:27] I won't get too deep into these because again, we've already talked about them, but the Epic of Gilgamesh draws upon what we might call the Mesopotamian flood tradition, and most scholars treat Atrahasis as a major earlier stream behind it.
[00:33:43] When you compare the flood material across both of the witnesses, and of course we have multiple versions of them, but you can see compression, you can see expansion, you can see an shift in emphasis, and there is some pretty clear editorial shaping and harmonization. We have versions that are shorter and tighter. We have versions that preserve more text and detail. And while the same core material is there, the emphasis shifts and the telling leans harder into certain features like divine reactions, the scope of the story, the aftermath of it, and so on.
[00:34:25] And sometimes what we will see is that the flood story will become part of a larger composition with its own themes. So that can be part of the harmonization of stories or the smoothing together of a tradition.
[00:34:40] Now here is the point. We can compare flood tradition across witnesses and watch it get shaped. Which is not being invented from nothing, but it's being edited, streamlined, and re aimed for a new context. Now that variation doesn't mean it's fake, doesn't mean it's made up, but it does mean it's transmitted.
[00:35:04] Now let's talk a little bit about the scribal copying and variation, the actual reality of the manuscript culture here. In these ancient cuneiform cultures that are shaped by Mesopotamia and by Sumeria before that, we have literary texts that often survive in multiple copies, and there is variance there. Some of the variants are seemingly accidental. Some of them are deliberate. Some of them are pretty clearly creative and innovative.
[00:35:36] Again, we get things like omission addition, normalization, harmonization, and memory copying effects where it looks like a trained scribe is copying from memory instead of another text.
[00:35:52] So again, as we described last week, the written transmission of a text is not a sterilized lab process. It is a living scribal ecosystem. So it makes sense that we get versions over time, especially in a really long lived text, like the Epic of Gilgamesh, for example.
[00:36:12] Again, this does not prove that something is not historical or that there isn't an intent to preserve what the story is. What we can see here is that something being written down doesn't magically freeze the tradition in place.
[00:36:29] We will be talking more about ancient near Eastern literature and things like that, but let's talk about reasons that stories will look alike in different cultures no matter what. There are quite a few reasons for that kind of similarity. A lot of times, stories will serve a similar purpose in a culture.
[00:36:50] Whether it is about identity, whether it is about authority, whether it is about family, whether it's about religion. You'll have similar things crop up. So again, before we treat similarity as shared memory, we have to ask, could it be explained by something else first? And what is the more likely reason?
[00:37:14] Let's go through some of this. First of all, convergent invention. Different societies will independently generate similar stories because certain experiences are simply common to humanity. So in the case of the flood, well, we do know that disasters happen everywhere and survival and rebuilding are a universal human experience. So wiping out a culture, having a remnant preserved and having a new start is a pretty natural narrative arc.
[00:37:49] Then you move over to the shared ecology that people can have. Similar environments will produce similar dangers, and those produce similar stories. So if people are trying to survive and they're trying to do things like agriculture, then they need water sources, right? And those water sources are often unpredictable.
[00:38:13] So river floodplains, monsoons, coastal storm surges, tsunamis, glacial melting events, all of those are ecological drivers of natural disaster stories. So if people live on a floodplain, they don't need a global flood to explain why they have a flood story. Now that doesn't rule it out okay? But these are things we have to keep in mind.
[00:38:44] Then there are cognitive attractors. This is something that we have to think about in regards to the simplicity of the story, the agency of the story, and the causality of the story and the morality about it. Because human memory and storytelling tend to drift toward certain sticky forms.
[00:39:08] So simplicity, there's fewer moving parts. There's a cleaner cause and effect there. And so there's a reason that compressed stories will often look alike because we compress them in similar ways.
[00:39:23] Now what about agency? Disasters will become somebody's action because humans like stories that are caused by people or conscious beings of some sort, gods and spirits and humans. We prefer things to be described in ways that are assigned to an actual agent.
[00:39:45] And another common attractor for different types of stories is the idea of moral causality. We did something wrong, and so this disaster happened. So even without contact, even without a common origin. We can have stories in different cultures that drift toward what's memorable and meaningful to the human experience.
[00:40:10] Now, we've talked about genre conventions before, but let's hit on this one just a little bit again. We have etiology, or stories that describe the beginning of something. We have charter or origin stories, and we have warning tales. So a similarity might arise because two stories are doing the same social job. They're explaining why something exists. They're justifying the people, the land, the leadership, the ritual, or they might be warning something because they are enforcing a particular norm. Don't do this or else you'll be in this disaster.
[00:40:53] And so these are not really even in the category of genre exactly, because genre exists on the culture level. But these are kind of meta genres we might say. And so the similarity in two different stories could just be the meta genre. This is just how that kind of a story works.
[00:41:13] And of course, I've talked again about diffusion through contact. Motifs and ideas simply spread through human networks naturally. I won't spend a whole lot of time here on this point, but sometimes the best explanation for similarity is simply that people meet other people.
[00:41:34] And along with that, we have the idea that I've mentioned before about prestige borrowing. This is the influence of the empire or the influence of the mystical stranger that comes and visits. And either everybody is really awestruck by that person or somebody within the culture will see an opportunity and they will seize that opportunity to gain social status for themselves by connecting themselves to the stranger.
[00:42:04] So communities and individuals will adopt motifs from high status cultures or people. Again, imperial centers, dominant religions, elite scribal traditions, or simply mysterious strangers that are really good to attach yourself to. And it's pretty obvious why this happens because people will get status, they'll get legitimacy, they'll get some sort of social capital.
[00:42:35] And then of course we have recorder effects that have to do with the translation or the framing of the story by the person who's recording it. I think I've talked quite a bit about this so that you probably understand it. But again, translation choices, summarizing and paraphrasing, and fitting it into the categories that the person has.
[00:42:59] All right, so I said I'm going to build you a toolkit. That's what I've been doing in this episode, and you can jot down these notes, or I will probably have some to share at some point in time in the future, and we will be using all of this material as we go through the global flood stories in the future.
[00:43:17] Again, not all similarities are created equal. Some similarities are really cheap. They're almost inevitable, but others are expensive. And so they do demand some sort of explanation for them, either a shared origin or a shared contact map.
[00:43:37] When we have cheap similarities, they aren't gonna provide a whole lot of evidence for us. But if we have expensive similarities, those are really what we want to look for. Those are going to be valuable to us.
[00:43:53] So let's go through some levels here. The first level I will call the generic motif. This is very cheap. It's not gonna get us a whole lot of evidence. If it is a single broad motif that appears basically everywhere. And you're gonna have similar things along with it, then it really isn't going to give us a whole lot of data to work with. Like if there's a flood and there's a boat and people survived and they had to create a new world after that, well all of those ideas just kinda go together.
[00:44:29] It doesn't mean that they all come from the same global flood, especially when we have floods that happen locally all the time, and that disaster- survival- renewal arc is quite universal to human experience. So the generic motif can help us, but it's not gonna get us very far.
[00:44:50] Our level two is still cheap, but it's kinda getting us up there. We have motif clusters. If we have several common motifs that come together, then that gets a little bit better, but we need something more than flood plus boat plus family, because those things are already just naturally going to come together.
[00:45:14] If we have flood, plus boat, plus animals, plus mountain, yeah, we're still fairly cheap in these motifs, but what if we add in a bird messenger? That could still be something that is fairly common because a bird is going to symbolize something that is going to be transmitted over long distances easily.
[00:45:37] So again, not a definitive thing, but a little bit better than just the flood and the boat and the family, right? But again, motif clusters still can arise through convergence with humans and just general ecology, and genre expectations. Quite often we have diffusion and contact of some sort and so on. So this is interesting, but we still need a little bit of work before it counts as strong evidence.
[00:46:10] Okay, so level three, we have a specific configuration to the story and a sequence. Now we're getting a little bit more expensive. Similar elements arranged in a similar order with similar causal links, especially when they don't just naturally arise out of a flood story.
[00:46:30] Like any flood story is going to have the flood, the boat, the people saved and so on. But if we have some details that we have a shared order to that are a little bit unpredictable, that is much harder to get by accident than simply by shared motifs and common experience. So this is not just that they have the same motifs, but they lead the same way and they're connected in a comparable chain of logic. This is where we have something that is worth testing and looking at closely.
[00:47:06] Level four, this is where we start really getting expensive, where we have multiple unique correspondences and unusual details that match across tradition, details that not everyone would naturally invent, particularly if they're a little bit odd. Sometimes, if they're culturally specific, and especially if they're counterintuitive. The more odd details you have, the harder it is to explain by coincidence or shared motif. But this can still be produced by diffusion and implantation and so on.
[00:47:44] But now we are really highly interested in the story and the providence of the story becomes absolutely decisive to how we're going to view it. Sometimes we don't have a whole lot of material as to how we got the story, and that is simply the unfortunate reality of our study here. But we will do everything in our power in every one of these stories to try and find out where it came from, who recorded it, and all of the contact map and all of these things.
[00:48:16] Now we come to level five. This is the most expensive. It has deep structure and early independent attestation. So there's a strong structural similarity plus early sources, plus credible independence where there is no clear borrowing pathway. There's key ingredients here. We want to see a deep plot structure, not just motifs, stable core features across the early multiple witnesses.
[00:48:48] Early recording that is closer to pre-contact, pre evangelism, pre-modern retellings and so on, and independence. If we have multiple lines that don't seem to be copying each other. This is where the shared origin becomes a real hypothesis that we can genuinely dig into.
[00:49:10] Now I'm not saying that we can't have that in the earlier levels as well. But the higher we go up in this, the more certain we can be and the more firm we can use this as evidence. These levels don't prove anything by themselves, but the actual details are what we're gonna be interested in. But we cannot forget that differences matter too. And sometimes they're more helpful than the similarities.
[00:49:40] Okay, so let's go over our evaluation toolkit real quickly. This is what we're gonna actually use to compare stories. And I do have some other ideas to add to this later, but this is where we're gonna start.
[00:49:53] First of all, what is the earliest record we have? The earliest mention, the earliest full narrative, and it matters whether that earliest record is a primary one or a later retelling or a summary or a recording by somebody outside the culture and the longer the gap between the event and this first recording that we have, the more room we have for reshaping the story.
[00:50:21] It is quite possible that the whole idea of everyone having a flood myth depends on late attestations. And if that's the case, then it is less reliable as evidence. Again, doesn't mean it can't be evidence, but we have to weigh these things. There's gonna be some red flags. If it's claimed to be ancient, we don't have to believe them. I don't know if you know this or not, but just because someone says that a story is old doesn't make that story old. So if the first documentation is in the 1800s, we've got some potential things to consider there, right?
[00:51:04] Another red flag could be vague dating with no real traceable record. Another important point is going to be who recorded it in what language and what was their goal? Were they an insider? Were they an outsider? Were they fluent in the original language? Was it recorded in an original language? Is it a paraphrase? Is it a transcription? Did they ask questions or did they just listen to somebody telling the story?
[00:51:35] Some of the goals or the incentives that we could have are evangelism, and again, this doesn't have to be nefarious, but an evangelist is going to be seeking proofs and parallels. That's just natural. We could have the goal of romantic nationalism People are going to want to claim pure ancient wisdom.
[00:51:58] The goal might simply be to record the people's history, and sometimes when you're doing that, you're going to simplify or generalize a story. Another goal could be polemics, either anti-Christian or pro Christian agendas. And again, this doesn't have to even be on a conscious level. If we're doing prestige borrowing, we're likely not doing that intentionally.
[00:52:25] Sometimes the goal might be simply for entertainment or to publish something. Again, I don't know if you know this, but sensational parallels will sell. So again, there's going to be red flags that we're gonna look at here. Is there an explicit goal of proving Bible parallels? Is there a biblical vocabulary in the recorder's framing? Is it unclear whether the wording is the tradition or the recorder's summary of the tradition?
[00:52:58] Along with this, we need to ask how close the recorder is to the tradition bearers. Did they get it firsthand? Is it secondhand? Was it recorded in the community? Was it filtered through an interpreter? Was the person who is telling the story really even good at telling the story? Do we even have the story as recognized as a community tradition versus just some elder telling an ancient story?
[00:53:26] We need to look for any evidence of prompting or interpretive translation. This might be really hard because we probably don't have enough records a lot of times to get here, but something to keep in mind, does it seem like the person who's recording the story is asking them about biblical stories, or did they first tell the people about the biblical story?
[00:53:51] Do we have interpretive translation markers where we have particular Christianese, for instance, or we have something that looks an awful lot like an explanation rather than part of the story itself and the story's actual content.
[00:54:09] Do we have actual field notes? Do we have any information from the investigator? Do we have multiple people telling the story? So those are some of the things we will be looking at. We're not just gonna be looking at the story, we're looking at the transmission and history environment.
[00:54:29] So we'll be looking at the people who recorded it. We'll be looking at the people who told the story. We'll be looking at the genres and the meta genres. We'll be looking for any of those stability mechanisms that I've talked about a couple of episodes ago. Mechanisms that increase stability are things like frequent retelling or recitation, like there is some sort of ritual that the people would do to keep this in mind in a stable form through generations.
[00:55:00] Do they have this as part of their calendar rhythm, as part of their festivals? Within the story itself, do we have cueing and some sort of structure or scaffolding, and that is going to help to keep the story stable through time? Do we have mnemonic design with parallelism, repetition, et cetera?
[00:55:21] And do we have some sort of public accountability and a shared audience and an authority that is going to be stable itself through time? Because if the authority shifts around a lot, then what we have as an ancient story may just be some sort of legitimization of the current regime. Do we have trained roles with responsibilities? And what are the authorized settings and how stable are those?
[00:55:51] The evidence is going to be much weaker if there's no fixed setting, if there are no custodians or specialists of the story, if there's no shared correct version that we're hearing from different people. If the tradition is appearing only in isolated interviews and not in a community practice, then that's something we should start looking at. That is less strong evidence.
[00:56:17] So again, weak evidence doesn't disprove anything, but it's not really gonna do a whole lot to prove something.
[00:56:25] And again, are similarities better explained by diffusion than common origin? If we can demonstrate a plausible diffusion pathway, we really don't need a shared primeval origin to explain the similarity. So if there's clear contact between people, language crossover, and so on, then that's just going to mean that somebody came up with a story in the past. And do we have evidence that that is based on some sort of actual event in history and original source?
[00:56:59] And again, the differences are gonna matter. So if we have things like the Gilgamesh, epic and so on, and those get passed through time, and we have the biblical story, well, there's one that is earlier than the other, and we know this because of chronology, because of language, because of cultural influence and so on.
[00:57:23] Now, again, that does not mean there's no original idea here, but you know, you consider the fertile crescent a and people trying to tame the waters. And you have stories about the gods and the waters and how they're so very similar and interconnected. It's almost like they are personalizing the actual events and the things that they are dealing with and taming. Again, I'm not trying to cast doubt on these stories in the ancient world. I'm just saying this is the reality and the bits of evidence we have to deal with.
[00:58:01] How much confidence do we have in our evidence in all of these items? Again, low confidence doesn't mean that there aren't things that we can't use here, but we're just gonna be honest about the material and the evidence we have. That's all I can promise. I'm gonna be looking at it as honestly as I possibly can, not to disprove anything.
[00:58:26] Not because I'm trying to prove evolution here, you guys okay? That is.... I know somebody's gonna bring that up. I know somebody's gonna think about that, and that is just patently ridiculous to me, but people are gonna go there anyway. I'm not trying to undercut anything here. I'm not trying to undermine the authority of Scripture or the global flood.
[00:58:50] I don't wanna come at this with a preconceived notion either way, because I do think there are different interpretive options that take Scripture seriously. So we're just gonna look at the evidence. That's all we're gonna do, and we're gonna do it as honestly as we can.
[00:59:07] Again, the purpose of this is to be faithful in our reading and to be good thinkers. Our goal here is discernment with humility. Okay? We don't have to be gullible, but we don't have to be overly cautious either. Our faith should not be threatened by our careful methods, and being discerning isn't just hostility.
[00:59:33] We want to have a good relationship with the truth, right? So we're not afraid to use the information we have in science, in psychology, in anthropology, in history. All truth is God's truth and all of it can stand up to careful examination. We don't want to rush to conclusions.
[00:59:55] And there's this modern idea that just rewards certainty, immediate certainty, without any actual information. But wisdom is going to reward our patience to actually investigate. And sometimes the most faithful and best answer we can give is that we don't know, and that's an okay position to end on as well. Uncertainty isn't unbelief, it's just being intellectually honest and humble.
[01:00:24] And maybe in the end our answer is that there is a stable core to these stories, but there's real change at the edges and at the surface and on these different levels. I don't know. All I'm asking is that we ask better questions before we accept big claims. I'm asking us to weigh the evidence and there is a good bit of it.
[01:00:49] All right, so I'm not gonna get into any details of what we'll be getting into exactly in this flood series, and I'm not gonna go through it just from here on out. I'm going to be sprinkling a lot of other things into this investigation. We're gonna be looking into the biblical flood story still, we're still seated very deeply within that flood story in just talking about Genesis in general.
[01:01:15] So I'll still be getting into a lot of biblical material, still be doing a lot of biblical themes and tracings and things like that, but I will occasionally be bringing up these flood parallels. So that we can compare them to the Bible and we can just investigate them on their own terms and hopefully through that process we can become better discerners, better readers of Scripture and just clear thinkers.
[01:01:42] And I think all of that is part of our faith process. Now, that is not to say that our faith is or should be entirely intellectual. This is only a piece of what we should be doing as disciples of Christ.
[01:01:56] But I do think it's going to be interesting. I think most people are a little bit interested in these ancient stories and that we'd like to know a little bit more about them, right? I think that's going to be a lot of fun.
[01:02:09] So at any rate, I will wrap up the episode for this week. This will be a really good one for some notes and things, but no worries if you don't take those notes as we go through things. I will be bringing up a lot of this material again, refreshing our minds about it, and we'll try and investigate these to the best of our ability with all of the information we have that is accessible, at least to me.
[01:02:35] But at any rate, that is it for this week. And as always, I thank you guys for listening to the episodes. Thank you guys for sharing them, And by the way, if anybody has a good flood story that you would like me to include in this investigation, please let me know what that is. You can contact me through my website at genesis marks the spot.com, or you can find me on Facebook, or you can come and join me at On This Rock, a biblical theology community. Thank you guys for supporting and a big shout out to all of you who support me financially through Patreon, through PayPal, or through my biblical theology community. I really appreciate you guys. Seriously. You guys are awesome and I love you all, and I wish you all a blessed week and we will see you later.
