[Avodah] Birds & Fish in the Mabul

[Micha Berger]

On Wed, Nov 02, 2011 at 11:34:31AM -0400, Lampel wrote:
>            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.  

Unless they ceased only in the relevant area, which HQBH promised
never to do again.

Just as 40 days of local rain would cover one locale no less than
40 days of global rain would cover the globe.

> 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.)

You can't mix and match, though. If you are insisting that chazal
were speaking historically, then we have their variety of opinions --
the whole globe vs. everything but EY. And then the whole question of
understanding the flood as referring only to some subset of the Middle
East doesn't even get started.

>                      (I don't buy the non-historical-meaning thesis, at  
> least not in this case.)

That's different than believing in a local flood, which is the topic
being argued here. More specifically, is it even possible to fit the
idea into the words of the pasuq. Never mind what such an interpretaion
would mean in terms of our relationship to chazal's aggaditos and
parshanut.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             It's never too late
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