[Avodah] Local, Non-Global or Global Flood

[Zev Sero]

On 1/12/2010 3:34 AM, Eli Turkel wrote:
> Ramban states that the rainbow was not "invented" after the flood based on
> scientific reasoning but re-interprets the pesukim that it is a sign based on a
> pre-existing rainbow.

This is not reinterpreting the pesukim, it's just reading them closely.
It's not that we would have some difficulty with positing that Hashem
changed the nature of light and/or of water after the mabul so as to
produce rainbows; it's that there's nothing in the pesukim to justify
such a theory.  The Ramban is saying that those who claim there were no
rainbows before the mabul are reading the pesukim carelessly; it's
*they* who are reinterpreting the pesukim to say something that's just
not there.



On 1/12/2010 6:26 AM, Arie Folger wrote:
> RZL wrote:

>> I'm getting confused. You consider the posuk cited there, "Cities
>> fortified up to the heavens" as a non-extreme circumstance?
>
> Sure, Why can't they literally reach up to the heavens? Why not say
> that their walls were reaching a mile or two high

But the shamayim is higher than that.  Even taking the literal view
that shamayim is a physical object directly above a flat disc-shaped
earth, its distance is the same as the earth's diameter, which is far
more than a mile or two.  It's inconceivable that they could have
built a wall all the way up to touch the shamayim.



On 1/12/2010 10:00 AM, Arie Folger wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 3:00 PM, Zev Sero<zev at sero.name>  wrote:
>> Rashi already in
>> this pasuk accepts that shamayim and eretz were created on the first
>> day.  What he rejects is that they were created first.  Mayim had to
>> be created before eretz, and both esh and mayim had to be created
>> before shamayim.

> We obviously disagree as to how to read a text. Some of what you write
> evokes in me the question regarding what the meaning of is is. Rashi
> is quite explicit, but doesn't spell everything out., because some of
> the blanks I filled in are simply obvious, for anyone who has read
> three pessukim in a row. Once Rashi spelled out that it is incongruent
> to claim that heavens were created bereishit, all the rest follows"

How does it follow?  You want to say that his problem with saying that
shamayim were created in the beginning is that we are still running with
the hava amina that they were created on the second day, and only in
chapter 2 will we discover that it wasn't so.  But how could we form
that hava amina in the first place, when the very first time the chumash
tells us they were created on the second day Rashi hastens to inform us
that they weren't?   *Where* are you getting this whole concept from?

-- 
Zev Sero
zev at sero.name