Talk:Noah

JewishEncyclopedia.com
1906 copy and doesnt appear jewish. Author was Australian folklorist. 2600:1700:2D50:2D40:A13B:EB66:EF12:F90A (talk) 21:35, 12 December 2021 (UTC)


 * So? Who cares? Non-Jews are allowed to study the Hebrew Bible. tgeorgescu (talk) 04:09, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

Lead too detailed?
Both the opening section and the article's subsequent structure address the multi-faith aspects of Noah. This is fine.

But, as a result, the lead now seems too detailed. And it includes at least one statement which could be read in a misleading way, namely, "Noah is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible in the First Book of Chronicles, and the books of Tobit, Wisdom, Sirach, Isaiah, Ezekiel, 2 Esdras, 4 Maccabees". That can easily be read as "...in the Hebrew Bible in ". This reading would be wrong as the HB only contains a few, not all, of those books.

I propose simplifying the lead. It would maintain the multi-faith aspects, but devolve the details to the relevant sections later in the article. Does that sound OK?

Feline Hymnic (talk) 12:25, 31 January 2022 (UTC)


 * Done on 5 Feb. Feline Hymnic (talk) 12:06, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Hebrew mythology is not history.
When a reader goes to learn about the Labors of Hercules, the first thing he is greeted with is this statement: "This article is about the Greek myth."

I notice that because of the religious background of many (most) editors that Hebrew Mythology (which, yes, has been incorporated by other religions) is treated as, if not quite fact, something more "true" than myth. Something in between.

Of course, that is false. It violates the NPV policy of Wikipedia and should be fixed.

The problems with leaving it indeterminate are legion. People will cite this article as proof of all sorts of things. According to fundamentalist Christians that year of the flood was 2438 BCE, calculated by adding up the ages of the characters as given in the first five books. Failure to tell the truth about people's religious mythology leads to all sorts of idiocy: people saying the Pyramids must have been built much later because they don't show flood damage, people claiming dinosaurs were wiped out in the flood, and all sorts of absurd pseudo-archeology.

There will alway be people who believe in mythology, but accepting those beliefs as "kinda-sorta" true is never OK for an encyclopedia (unless it's a religious encyclopedia).

So, I strongly favor adding the phrase "In Hebrew mythology" with the proper caveats about other religions that accept parts of Hebrew mythology.

ZeroXero (talk) 22:55, 24 November 2022 (UTC)
 * "So, I strongly favor adding the phrase "In Hebrew mythology" " Hebrew mythology is currently a disambiguation page, leading either to Canaanite religion or to Jewish mythology. As for nonsense concerning the Genesis flood narrative, we already have an article on the absurd "flood geology". Dimadick (talk) 06:05, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
 * That's a bit of an odd disambiguation, given that Hebrew mythology is a distinctly more specific subject than Canaanite religion in general. It (along with the subject here) is clearly more closely aligned in meaning to the latter, the page for which comprises the gamut of stories born out of the Hebrew scripture that form the basis of the development of Judaism. Iskandar323 (talk) 12:19, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Agreed on all fronts. This is not a religious encyclopedia; all "in-universe" myth and other nonsense ought to be clearly labeled as such for the benefit of naive, credulous readers. 162.196.254.96 (talk) 04:45, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

Religion is not reality
A lot of this article is written in a style that conflates historical reality with religious myth.

As a arbitrary example, the statement "Noah, as the last of the extremely long-lived Antediluvian patriarchs, died 350 years after the flood, at the age of 950, when Terah was 128" is absurd in an encyclopedia, especially one that follows objective scientific irreligious principles; none of what's stated is true.

This needs to be rewritten from the evidence-based perspective of a historical scholar, not a cleric. 162.196.254.96 (talk) 04:39, 24 May 2023 (UTC)


 * I think if it is viewed by evidence it will be a short article: It is a fable with no possibility of it being remotely true... 24.79.242.46 (talk) 14:46, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

Birth and death years should be removed
As others have mentioned, there is no evidence that Noah's existence is anything more than religious tradition. To assign him arbitrary birth/death years based off when certain religious groups think a great flood happened is irresponsible encyclopedic practice. 107.0.218.50 (talk) 18:18, 11 July 2024 (UTC)