Noah’s Ark — was the flood 40 days or 150 days?

[Multicolored Lemur]

Bible Gateway passage: Genesis 7 - King James Version

And the LORD said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation. Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female. Of fowls also of...

www.biblegateway.com

Genesis, chapter 7:

verse 4: For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.

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.

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verse 24: And the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days.


— King James Version

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And no, I don’t think we can say that it rained for this long and then it took this other amount of time for the waters to recede, because the very next chapter says how long it took the waters to recede.

 

[Multicolored Lemur]

And I’d say most people of average religious impulse don’t literally believe in Noah’s Ark. I mean, all those animals, and all that food! It’s more of an . . .

Allegory — expression of truths with symbolic fiction

And same with Jonah being swallowed by the whale [or large fish]

 

[AgnosticBoy]

Bible Gateway passage: Genesis 7 - King James Version

And the LORD said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation. Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female. Of fowls also of...

www.biblegateway.com

Genesis, chapter 7:

verse 4: For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.

.

.

.

verse 24: And the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days.


— King James Version

===============

And no, I don’t think we can say that it rained for this long and then it took this other amount of time for the waters to recede, because the very next chapter says how long it took the waters to recede.

Initially, I wanted to say that the waters began to recede right at or after the 150 days, but I wonder why wouldn't the water start receding as soon as the rain stopped, which was at the 40th day. Then again, I wonder if the "fountains of the deep" that Genesis 8:2 (also in Genesis 6:11) talks about is referring to some underground water source that was releasing water. Perhaps this water source continued to release water even after the rain stopped. Noah's flood is an interesting story, especially the parts preceding it, like about the "nephilim".

 

[AgnosticBoy]

And I’d say most people of average religious impulse don’t literally believe in Noah’s Ark. I mean, all those animals, and all that food! It’s more of an . . .

Allegory — expression of truths with symbolic fiction

And same with Jonah being swallowed by the whale [or large fish]

I agree with you for the most part. The only slight difference is that i think it is myth that is built on an actual event. These ancient writers might have mythologize the event to either explain it (which is possible that they might have believed it literally) or to use it tell a story. Perhaps a global flood didn't occur, nor was there any god involved, but there was a major flood in some major area. But it's also interesting that a lot of ancient civilizations around the world have a flood myth.

Especially common in world mythologies are stories about world-ending floods and the chosen individuals that managed to survive them, like the biblical Noah and Utnapishtim, the ark builder in the Epic of Gilgamesh, a text thought to be even older than the Abrahamic religions. In Aztec mythology, a man named Tata and his wife Nena carve out a cypress tree after being warned of a coming deluge by the god Tezcatlipoca, while Manu, the first man in Hindu folklore, was visited by a fish that guided his boat to the peak of a mountain. The list goes on.

This all begs the question: Why is there such astounding similarity between the oral traditions of geographically separated peoples? Anthropologists, psychologists, and archaeologists have spent years looking for an answer. To this day, however, there still isn’t a theory that everyone agrees with.

Some argue that these similarities are evidence of cultural transmission in the distant past before human migration really got underway. Others maintain that they developed independently as the result of comparable experiences. Others still believe that it has something to do with the way our brains work. Which of these, if any, is correct?

Source: Big Think

 

[Multicolored Lemur]

but there was a major flood in some major area

A famous one is the volcano and resulting tsunami which hit the Minoan civilization of Crete about 1600 BC.

This is a boring explanation for the legend of Atlantis, but maybe the most likely.