It would take 100 pages to respond to your statements on Creation and Flood. Happy to that too, but maybe later. I respond to Gilgamesh here.
Gilgamesh traveled from Sumer to Dilmun on the sea. Dilmun is identified as Indus Valley (~Samuel Noah Kramer). Here he met Utnapishtim who told him about the Flood. I am attaching my post on Gilgamesh for the details please.
I appreciate this conversation. Thanks.
None of this makes any sense. Gilamesh is from a completely different theological system and is a character from a myth.
Moses is not a real person. There are many lines of evidence Genesis was written by several authors in 5/6 BC. They go over the different authors here:
Moses life is a collection of Egyptian myths including a deity giving laws on stone tablets. Characters who lived far before the stories were written (and the Israelites were a people) are fiction? There wasn't one Israelite running around centuries before there were Jewish people? They would have been an Egyptain or Mesopotamian and worshipped those fake Gods?
Yahweh is a deity who is spoken about in every way exactly like all deities since Sumer.
Again, a large part of this early conversation with Hebrew Bible professor F. Stavrakopoulou is that her research into older Gods has shown this to be true
Francesca Stavrakopoulou Discusses Her Latest Book,
3:15 Yahweh is the same as older Greek gods. Anthropormorphic, dynamic, colorful, emotional, vivid, changeable, masculine, real body parts. In "God: An Anatomy"
Gilamesh isn't a "prophet". That is a fictional concept. First there needs to be good evidence that a theistic deity exists and actually talks to people. That has not been done. Why it would care about mundane things, have human emotions, require blood sacrifice (just like all the other Gods), and then when Greek Hellenism made Gods more cosmic and took souls to heaven then suddenly this God also does that?
There isn't evidence for anything except stories created by people.
Genesis was written and they needed some older characters to be the "flood guy" and someone to kick things off (Abraham). That doesn't mean it's real? There was not one man living with the Canaanites getting secret messages from the "real God" while everyone there worshipped EL and Ashera?
Ashera was actually the consort of Yahweh in early Israel up until the 6th century. Gods of reality would not pick out one tribe?
The 2 religions have some common ground because for one storytellers travel, because all religious myths have commonalities and these spread around and because people write similar metaphorical legends. Joseph Campbell has several books comparing all the worlds religions into similar themes that all humans deal with. But he knows none of the stories are literal and there are no theistic deities giving people messages. If so, the messages from Yahweh are remarkable similar to all religions before it and the NT is all Greek/Persian theology. This quest is no different than trying to find if Hercules and Thor maybe had adventures together.
There is no Garden of Eden? Humans existed for 200,000 years and evolved from hominids over millions of years. There was no first man. The final transition from Homo Heidelburgensis to H Sapien was over millenia.
"Most historians view the
patriarchal age, along with
the Exodus and the period of the
biblical judges, as a late literary construct that does not relate to any particular historical era;
[8] and after a century of exhaustive archaeological investigation, no evidence has been found for a historical Abraham.
[9] It is largely concluded that the
Torah was composed during the
early Persian period (late-6th century BCE) as a result of tensions between Jewish landowners who had stayed in
Judah during the
Babylonian captivity and traced their right to the land through their "father Abraham", and the returning exiles who based their counterclaim on
Moses and the Exodus tradition of the
Israelites.
[10]
Historicity
Abraham's well at
Beersheba, Israel
In the early and middle 20th century, leading archaeologists such as
William F. Albright and
G. Ernest Wright and biblical scholars such as
Albrecht Alt and
John Bright believed that the patriarchs and matriarchs were either real individuals or believable composites of people who lived in the "
patriarchal age", the 2nd millennium BCE.
[57] But, in the 1970s, new arguments concerning Israel's past and the biblical texts challenged these views; these arguments can be found in
Thomas L. Thompson's
The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives (1974),
[58] and
John Van Seters'
Abraham in History and Tradition (1975).
[59] Thompson, a literary scholar, based his argument on archaeology and ancient texts. His thesis centered on the lack of compelling evidence that the patriarchs lived in the 2nd millennium BCE, and noted how certain biblical texts reflected first millennium conditions and concerns. Van Seters examined the patriarchal stories and argued that their names, social milieu, and messages strongly suggested that they were
Iron Age creations.
[60] Van Seter and Thompson's works were a
paradigm shift in biblical scholarship and archaeology, which gradually led scholars to no longer consider the patriarchal narratives as historical.
[61] Some conservative scholars attempted to defend the Patriarchal narratives in the following years, but this has not found acceptance among scholars.
[62][63] By the beginning of the 21st century, archaeologists had given up hope of recovering any context that would make Abraham, Isaac or Jacob credible historical figures.
[64]"
This makes sense and is backed by the vast majority of scholarship. The far more likely answer is every culture comes up with a bunch of stories, they are fiction.
