[Avodah] Local, Non-Global or Global Flood

[Micha Berger]

On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 01:02:02PM +0000, kennethgmiller at juno.com wrote:
: In both cases, the words seem very straightforward. ("Look! It says 'one
: day'!" and "Look! It says 'the whole earth'!") But it is only upon deeper
: investigation do we come to realize that we are not forced to take the
: words literally, and that it can be legitimate to take them rhetorically.

: It comes down to girsa d'yankusa...

"Yom" not meaning day has millenia of history, from well before anyone
confronted a scientific theory that said that time had a beginning, but
it was far more than 6,000 years ago. (Back in the days of the rishonim,
when they thought the earth had no beginning, no one had a motivation
to suggest that a day isn't a day.) As is an entire "this isn't literal"
approach to the pereq as a whole.

"Haaretz" in the context of the mabul not meaning the entire planet has
no such mesorah.

AND, as I wrote before, it's not just "kol haaretz". It's also leshacheis
kol basar, mitachas hashamayim, etc... There are a number of terms
of phrase that would all need to be shifted. Doesn't "lechacheis kol
basar asher yeish bo ruach chaim mitachas hasahayim" (6:17) sound like
the Author was intentionally trying to be explicit about not meaning
something regional?

But from a process and acceptability point of view, my problem is with
the creation of new peshatim where there is no TORAH reason to do so. I
find that kind of force fitting to another discipline beyond my personal
range of acceptibility. (Meaning that it doesn't even feel to me like
"a different but valid shitah".)

R' Dr Marc Shapiro, in a recent (long) Seforim Blog posting
<http://seforim.blogspot.com/2010/10/marc-b-shapiro-new-writings-from-r-kook.html>
(or (http://bit.ly/bcVtYC>) has the following quote from R' Shalom Carmy
in a footnote:

   [13] Shalom Carmy took note of R. Kook's comments and raised the
   following questions, without offering any answers:

       It seems obvious that Rabbi Kook doesn't advocate wholesale
       rejection of biblical statements. To do so would render Tanakh
       useless as a source of history. Under what circumstances would he
       countenance "deconstruction" of the text? Only where biblical texts
       contradict each other or rabbinic statements? Whenever the text
       appears to contradict well-attested Near Eastern documents? When
       the exact historicity is immaterial in the judgment of the exegete,
       to the import of the text? When the exegete detects rhetorical
       elements in the biblical text itself that point toward such
       interpretation?

   See "A Room With a View, but a Room of Our Own," in idem, ed., Modern
   Scholarship in the Study of Torah (Northvale, 1996), pp. 23-24.

My own position appears to be RSC's first hava amina "Only where biblical
texts contradict each other or rabbinic statements".

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             What we do for ourselves dies with us.
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