[Avodah] Birds & Fish in the Mabul

[Chana Luntz]

RZL wrote:

> 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.)

If you recall, this was an old discussion between inter alia, RMB and myself
to which RMB alluded in his email on the subject (inter alia, one of my
postings on it can be found here
http://www.aishdas.org/avodah/vol16/v16n155.shtml).

To recap, the point I was making there was that it was in many ways more
logical, to my mind, to understand "kol haaretz" as "all the known world" -
meaning known to Noach and the other members of the dor hamabul.  That is
not such a local flood, but nor is it global either, as it would seem clear
that at the time of the dor hamabul, people had not spread *that* far around
the globe, certainly never making it to islands like Great Britain etc, not
to mention further afield.  None of what you describe above causes any
problems for this approach.

Again to recap, amongst the problems that this approach solves is:

a) it focuses the moral message more closely - ie one can see Hashem judging
mida kneged mida.  People (who were corrupt and corrupted) were destroyed,
and so were those animals who were influenced by people and therefore became
corrupt.  But what did the animals who lived on islands (like Great Britain)
and who had no contact with people or with the animals that became corrupt
do to deserve this?  If we understand a global flood to deal with what was
essentially a relatively local problem (because people just had not spread
that far, relative to the size of the earth as we now know it - ie I am
using local in terms of the sheer size of the globe, as we now know it to
be), then you end up alleging a disproportionate G-d and undermining what
appears to me and the classic commentators to be the moral message of this
portion of the Torah.

b) it avoids one having to add in miracles not even whispered at in Chazal,
such as airlifting the animals to and from such islands pre and post flood
(ie first you have to get them to the ark in the first place - getting the
koalas, who only eats eucalyptus leaves and do not swim, to make their way
10,000 miles across land and sea to Noach even in 120 years requires yet
another miracle, and similarly with getting them back).

And all you need to do to avoid these problems is understand kol to be said
(as is not infrequently the case in the Torah) in the language of man, and
specifically the language of the people involved.  From Noach's point of
view, and all of the dor hamabul, it was unquestionably kol haaretz (except
maybe eretz yisrael and the other exceptions referred to in Chazal) - it is
just that today, what we know as kol haaretz is bigger than what they knew,
and includes Australia and England and indeed the moon.  That (to my mind)
doesn't make their understanding wrong, or the reference to kol haaretz
inappropriate, it just may be wrong to insist on our understanding of kol
haaretz (knowing what we now know about a much bigger area of land than the
dor hamabul was aware of) and impose it upon them and thus read it into the
Torah.  

Regards

Chana