Marty 2020 wrote:
The nahal mishmar copper was prediluvian or post?
If these artifacts were created before the flood, they would have been buried beneath hundreds of feet of silt and mud.
Moses tells us that iron-working actually predates the flood since Tubal-Cain forged bronze and iron (Genesis 4:22).
Apart from the Book of Genesis, written in the 15th century BC, Moses mentions iron in Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Numbers. Thus, combined with the Book of Job, we can see that the cultures along the King’s Highway, from the Gulf of Aqaba to Syria, would have been familiar with smelting and processing iron, however, producing copper isn't mentioned...
I have no definitive answer, but it appears they're post-diluvian, because "Items in the hoard belong to the Ghassulian culture and the Nahal Mishmar hoard is the only hoard of this culture. It is probable that the copper used for producing them was mined in Wadi Feynan."
The hoard consisted of 442 decorated objects made of copper and bronze (429 of them), ivory and stone, including 240 mace heads, about 100 scepters, 5 crowns, powder horns, tools and weapons. Archaeologist David Ussishkin has suggested the hoard was the cultic furniture of the abandoned Chalcolithic Temple of Ein Gedi, near Masada and the Qumran Caves, a Ghassulian public building dating from about 3500 BCE which was excavated from 1956 to 1964, and is partially restored.
It lies on a scarp above the oasis of Ein Gedi, on the western shore of the Dead Sea, within modern-day Israel. Archaeologist David Ussishkinhas described the site as "a monumental edifice in terms of contemporary architecture."
Due to the dry climate numerous textile and plaited remains were found at the site. Many of these copper objects were made using the lost-wax process, one of the earliest known uses of this complex technique.
Carbon-14 dating of the reed mat which was used to wrap the objects points that it was used circa 3500 B.C.E., which was 5,500 years ago During this period the use of copper became widespread throughout the Levant which also led to social changes in the region."
That time period would seem to cover the flood, but it was not mentioned as a factor, as it said the temple had been "abandoned" for unknown reasons.
I did find this story that is proof of nothing regarding the specific tools at nahal mishmar, but it is one more proof of the gigantic flood.
Ship probes land below Black Sea submerged 7,000 years ago and linked to biblical disaster
US World Environment
Tim Radford, science editor
Wed 13 Sep 2000 21.19 EDT
"Marine archaeologists have found the first evidence of a people who perished in a great flood of the Black Sea that has been linked with the story of Noah's ark.
Using robot underwater vehicles more than 300ft below the sea's surface, they have begun to map a rolling landscape, fed by meandering streams and marked with wattle and daub houses, that was flooded more than 7,000 years ago.
The Black Sea was once a freshwater lake, well below sea level. About 7,000 years ago, according to geological evidence, the rising Mediterranean sea pushed a channel through what is now the Bosphorus, and then seawater poured in at about 200 times the volume of Niagara Falls. The Black Sea would have widened at the rate of a mile a day, submerging the original shoreline under hundreds of feet of salty water.
Nearly 100,000 square miles were inundated. Sea shells on the beaches of the modern Black Sea are of marine origin, but deep below the surface there are layers of shells of freshwater molluscs, mute witnesses to the shoreline of the ancient lake.
Dr. Ballard began exploring the Black Sea in the Hull registered ship Northern Horizon, and used side-scanning sonar to look for interesting shapes on the seabed over a 200-sq-mile area, 12 miles off the Turkish coast, near Sinop.
Video cameras mounted on underwater robot submarines were put to use to find a structure characteristic of human habitation."
Above an area submerged too deeply for human divers, the sonar instruments revealed details of the landscape. On September 9 they sent robot scouts down to objects which looked like beams and branches, debris that might have been the stiffening for wattle and daub homes.
They found a rectangular area up to 12ft by 25 ft, over which an ancient mud and wooden house had collapsed, and
they found tools of highly polished stone, together with fragments of ceramics."What we are looking at is a culture that is definitely thousands of years old," said Fred Hiebert, an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who was also on the ship. "The flood is an event that is geologically known, and for us to find a structure in 150 metres (492.126) of water means that these people were definitely living there before it flooded, so it is pre-Greek.
They did not find tools of metal there, however, again, Moses first told us that it was a descendant of Cain named Tubal-Cain who instructed other craftsmen
how to forge instruments of bronze and iron before the flood.