How Colleges Create Creationists

[vonbach]

One pastor I've met online has literally translated the entire Bible word for word to check the meanings of words.
Also bear in mind that block Hebrew is not Hebrew. Real Hebrew is a truly ancient language that looks like
hieroglyphics or runes almost.

[Elok]

I'm basically agnostic on Noah, but have a hard time believing that the story happened anything like actually described; it requires me to insert divine intervention for essentially no reason at every turn.  Given the oft-noted ubiquity of ancient flood narratives, it likely has some basis in fact, but that's all we can say.

Just for your information on the flood nowhere in the Bible does is say the Flood was global.
The Flood was local (the word used is land or area as I recall) the deluge was global.

I take this to mean that it rained everywhere, but only truly flooded in one area?  Sadly, that's just the tip of the iceberg.  I cover a lot of the other problems in my blog post, but leave out a few.  They can be broadly divided into boatbuilding and maintenance issues and animal husbandry issues, with some overlap such as ventilation and sanitation concerns.  At a minimum, the bottom level of the ark would be a toxic deathtrap.  The second wouldn't be very healthy either.  I don't know what happens when people and animals have to breathe extremely high concentrations of ammonia for forty days, but I bet it isn't good, and that's not even mentioning the poop.

EDIT: Really, the more I think about it, the more horrifying complications appear.  Water: how are eight people getting a reliable supply of water to all those animals?  There's going to be plenty in the air, thanks to the rain, which will probably cause a great deal of their fodder to spoil.  But no way to get a reliable supply safely to all the passengers.  All that moisture probably ups the odds of pneumonia considerably, especially given the highly unsanitary environment.  The sheer amount of urine added to the condensation, with no means of cleaning it, would likely rot the timbers, assuming more than a tiny fraction of the animals survived the first week.  They couldn't keep any safe fodder for carnivorous animals at all, sans refrigeration.  Getting the animals onto the boat would be problematic; the common hole-in-the-side depiction would be impossible to seal against storm conditions.  You'd have to sneak them in through some sort of door in the roof with an overhang; good luck with the elephants.  If (when) an animal died, it could go undiscovered for a long time, and removing its carcass would be a logistical nightmare with such a small crew and no heavy equipment.  And then you've got necrotic products mixing in the air, and the slick of body fluids coating the floor.

[Rusty Edge]

Well, I suppose there could be salted/smoked/dried mutton or goat jerky of some sort as a predator food supply.

But as you say, pneumonia city, with even the fresh air saturated with moisture.

[vonbach]

It wasn't all the animals. It was all animals in the region. So were not talking anywhere near as many as you seem to think.

[Elok]

Irrelevant.  Unless southeastern Turkey had basically no large fauna whatever (camels, horses, sheep, goats, cattle, bears, large cats, dogs, wolves, deer, etc. all seem possible), waste products would still build up at an intolerable rate in a sealed vessel with a closed roof over it--CO2 if nothing else.  The animals would sicken and die rapidly with no fresh food, no exercise, little light, no opportunity to change their bedding properly, and breathing damp, stale air.

[Buster's Uncle]

Having been in a horse stable or two on a hot, still, summer day, I have to have Elok's back, here.  It can go WAY beyond difficult-to-bear stench when large animals are too long in an insufficiently-ventilated space, and get actually toxic.  Poop and pee in sufficient quantities give off some seriously nasty gasses -methane and I don't know what-all- and it actually can get hard to breathe.  Obviously, those were poorly-made, poorly-cleaned stables to get that hard to stay conscious in, but how much worse would the hold of a ship be?

[Elok]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mammals_of_Turkey

Lists about twenty-five species of largish mammal, including bears, equids, hyenas, a wide variety of large cats, a rather sizable species of seal, canids, and multiple ungulates including moose, bison, and wild boars.  Many are now extinct, but would have been quite prolific in Noah's day.  That's fifty large animals, plus a number of bats, rodents, rabbits, weasels, and sundry small vermin, before one considers birds and reptiles.  We'll assume he ignored the 19K invertebrate species, amphibians (the spawn would survive) and of course all fish and cetaceans.  The reptiles list mercifully doesn't seem to include gators or crocs, but there is a hulking monitor lizard and a profusion of smaller lizards plus turtles and several snakes, some poisonous.  A fair sampling of large birds, some carnivorous.  We're talking about storing the contents of a very large zoo in a boat the size of a football field (possibly up to twice that length, depending how generously one interprets "cubit").

That is a very large amount of poop and pee for eight people to deal with.

[Yitzi]

One pastor I've met online has literally translated the entire Bible word for word to check the meanings of words.

Word-for-word translations often miss expressions and the like, though.

Also bear in mind that block Hebrew is not Hebrew. Real Hebrew is a truly ancient language that looks like
hieroglyphics or runes almost.

You are probably thinking of the original Hebrew script, as opposed to block Hebrew which is derived from the Mesopotamian script (though they're all related, as they are to Greek-derived scripts such as the one I'm typing in now).  The language is still the same, it's just the script that's different.