101 Myths of the Bible: how ancient scribes - Conscious Evolution TV

yth #44:
The Ark landed on the mountains of Ararat.
The Myth: And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of
the month, upon the mountains of Ararat. (Gen. 8:4)
The Reality: The mountain in the flood story originally referred to the primeval
mountain in Egypt. After the Israelites moved to Canaan, they changed the location
to the mountains of Ararat, believed to be the highest point in the world.
According to Genesis 8:4, Noah’s ark landed on top of the mountains of Ararat.
Most people who refer to this event speak of the location as Mt. Ararat, but the Bible
says only that it was one of the mountains of Ararat. It doesn’t say which one. The area
encompassed by ancient Ararat now crosses the borders of modern Turkey, Russia,
Iran, and Iraq.
Genesis 11:2, however, implies that the survivors of the flood landed at a far different
location. According to that verse, the survivors traveled from some unidentified
location east of Babylon and moved westward towards Babylon. It was in the plain of
Shinar, the territory surrounding Babylon, that those survivors incurred God’s wrath
by attempting to build the Tower of Babel.
Ararat, however, is way to the north and slightly to the west of Babylon. The survivors
would have had to travel southeast of Ararat, not west, to get to Shinar.
If you are at Ararat, you can’t get to Shinar by traveling towards the west. You have
to go southeast. That the travelers came from the east reflects the flood story’s origins
as a variation of the Hermopolitan Creation myth. In the Egyptian story, the Creator
god Re first appeared as a young child floating on a lotus. When he became an adult,
he initiated the acts of Creation. This means young Re traveled west on his lotus leaf,
growing older as the sun moved through the sky.
The mountain where the ark landed would have been the primeval mountain in
Egypt, the first land where the Egyptian Creator stood and performed his acts. When
biblical editors no longer identified the flood story with Egyptian Creation myth, they
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