Why do many cultures have Noah's Ark- type stories?

Answer 1

A:The story of Noah's Ark is a creation story, and almst all cultures have creation stories. As far distant in time and space as possible from Israel would be the Australian dreamtime, in which creation stories tell of how the rainbow came to be - just as Genesis 9:13 tells how the rainbow came to be, in the Hebrew culture. Other stories, particularly in animistic religions tell why other different parts of the environment are just the way they are.

Floods raise powerful emotions and memories of catostrophic floods are undoubtedly exaggerated with the telling. Ian Wilson (Before the Flood) says that on every continent there are peoples who have preserved world flood myths of some description in their folklore.

The Eskimos of Alaska's Norton Sound inlet, close to the Bering Strait, recall a flood legend that in ancient times water rose up from the ocean, rather than coming down from the sky - a clear reference to the end of the mini Ice Age, when the Bering Strait was opened:

" ... the earth was flooded, all but a very high mountain in the middle. The water came up from the sea and covered the whole land except the top of this mountain. Only a few animals escaped to the mountain and were saved; and a few people made a shift to survive by floating about in a boat and subsisting on the fish they caught till the water subsided."

Wilson believes that the flood myths prevalent around the ancient Near East were folk memories of the breaching of the Dardanelles, also at the end of the Younger Dryas, which flooded the rich low-lying land under what is now the Black Sea. Archaeological surveys have begun, with promising results.