[Avodah] Birds & Fish in the Mabul

[Lampel]

On 11/1/2011 8:41 PM, avodah-request at lists.aishdas.org wrote:
> RMB:
>
>
> "Mitachas hashamayim" and moreso "kol hashamayim" lack the ambiguity
> of whether eretz or adamah refers to the whole world, a piece of it,
> a clump of dirt, etc...
Besides, 40 straight days and nights (a miraculous accurance, they say) 
of  torrential rain, not to mention the waters of the "fountains of the 
great deep," would seem to have to result in somewhat more of a local 
flood, no? And the relevance of Hashem declaring that seasons would not 
cease, as they implicitly had during that entire year of the Mabul, 
would also indicate a major, more than local-flood kind of occurence. 
Finally, Chazal speak of the Mabul having been preceded by another major 
Flood in the generation of Enosh, that had flooded merely one third of 
the world. So whatever amount of land that involved, the Mabul involved 
three times as much. (I don't buy the non-historical-meaning thesis, at 
least not in this case.)