Quote Originally Posted by Brenus View Post
"clear reason brenus avoids my other link on this very topic, it refutes his claims that isreal copied from any other local belief.” I don’t avoid other link, you just expose why I don’t take them seriously. You are telling that you refute bla bla bla. So you refute that the Bible copied from the Sumerian Legends, so you avoid reality/facts in order to keep your faith. You just confirm what I said from the start. See, even I was able to make a prediction: “he (as he will probably do) dodges the question.”

“The bottom line is this - the fact that the Biblical account of the flood is preceded by a Sumerian one does not definitively prove that the Biblical account was not inspired by God.” Yes it does. As the description in the Sumerians Myths preceding the Bible accounts provides different names to the Deities and humans involved in the story. If others spoke of it before, God can’t inspire the wording of a known story.

This of course without the knowledge of what HoreTore just highlight: The Deluge (global one) never happened. I was generous in conceding a local reality enlarged to a Mythic History (as we don’t know if the Sumerian did believe in it or if it was just a story for the long winter nights without TV, local version of Scary Movies).
According to the Biblical narrative Noah and his family were the only ones who survived the flood. Over time Noah's descendants broke away from Jehovah worship (yes I know Jehovah is not the correct form) and founded their own religions and nations. So as Rhyfelwyr says it makes perfect sense that the Sumerians would have their own flood account alongside the Jewish one.

Also according to the Bible the Israelite religion was codified by Moses during the Exodus, but the Hebrews had already been worshiping Jehovah as Jehovah was the God of Abraham and Jacob, the founders of the Israelite nation. The book of Genesis, which contains the flood account, was purportedly written by Moses. When Moses was writing the flood account he would have been writing a story that had been passed down for generations. The flood story was not revealed by God the moment it was written down, it already existed.

In short, the fact that there is a Sumerian flood story does not falsify the belief that the Bible is an inspired text.

Quote Originally Posted by Rhyfelwyr View Post
Yeah I know I looked into that, and knew that would be brought up. The thing is we are talking about completely disconnected peoples growing all sorts of different crops in completely different climates - much of the world was suitable for some sort of agriculture even during the last glacial period. Please explain why we record agriculture as beginning at around 7,000 BC in Papua New Guinea, 10,000 BC in Mexico, 5-8,000 BC in South America, when these areas were all still temperate or tropical even during the maximum extent of the ice sheet during the last glacial period (a full 22,000 years ago, supposedly).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:La...tation_map.png
Agriculture began in the Americas much later than it did in Eurasia. Plant cultivation was only invented in 7 different places, if I remember right, and then it slowly spread to the rest of the world. Even today there are societies which do not practice agriculture and subsist on hunting and gathering.

Farming was actually a pretty miserable lifestyle compared to gathering. Farmers had to work longer and harder to obtain food and because they relied on only a few food sources they had worse nutrition and health than gatherers (I'm willing to bet that modern gatherers have better nutrition than Americans do). I believe the current hypothesis is that at first crop cultivation was only practiced on a small scale to supplement gathering. As time went on the population grew and people began to rely on farming more and more until hunting and gathering was no longer enough to sustain the population.

Agriculture did not lead to civilization overnight either. The first farmers lived in small communities that show no sign of divisions in wealth or status. Over time (hundreds or thousands of years) societies became more and more complex until they were what we would call "Civilization".