[Avodah] Birds & Fish in the Mabul

[Lisa Liel]

On 11/2/2011 5:40 PM, Chana Luntz wrote:
> RMB writes:
>
>    
>> But I think you're arguing in the wrong direction to make your own
>> point.
>>
>> Noach was told that everything under shamayim would be destroyed. That
>> includes all of earth no matter which homonym is intended by "shamayim"
>> here. Your ability to raise problems is tangential, unless you can
>> prove
>> that "shamayim" has yet another meaning that is yet smaller.
>>      
> The position I have been consistently arguing is that kol haaretz and kol
> hashamayim are terms that are most logically to be understood in the way
> that Noach and the other members of the dor hamabul would have understood
> them (and did understand them, or refused to believe them).  That excludes
> anything completely out of their ken, like planets and galaxies from either
> definition, but also Australia and England and other places that to them did
> not exist. If you asked the dor hamabul for a definition of kol haaretz, you
> would not get any references to Australia.

But again, it's the narrative that says the whole world is going to be 
flooded.  If you take that to mean "the whole world that we knew about 
at the time", you might as well do the same thing with Genesis 1:1 and 
say Hashem only created the Middle East.  It stands to reason that the 
word is used the same way in both places.

Lisa