You say "the legends didn't really happen", Eliza.

No, they didn't happen exactly as they are told. But something happened. The legend arises out of something that happened, and the legend is a signpost that points toward what happened.

For instance, the legend of a Great Flood is not limited to Judeo-Christian holy books. Similar legends appear in cultures all over the world, and they are tales of a worldwide inundation that affected vast areas, not just a local flood of some sort.

Something definitely happened. It happened in a very remote time. And it is remembered in literally hundreds of legends from separate cultures all over the world. This is something we might do well to look further into, and indeed there are some books that do look further into it, books written not by religious people but by science-minded investigators, and they propose very interesting theories about what may have happened...on a planetary scale.

Needless to say, it wasn't one family and one "Ark" that rode it out. There would have been many survivors in many scattered locations. But each local tribe or culture made up their own legend about it, and they made it a simple and symbolic story that could be passed on through oral tradition...which generally outlasts written records (unless they're carved in stone). Even if they are carved in stone, the alphabet or hieroglyphs they were carved in are often completely forgotten as cultures rise and fall. Oral tales are not forgotten, they are passed on with each succeeding generation. And that's mainly where legends have come from, oral tradition.

The Bible incorporated many of the old legends from a much earlier time period...legends which had been passed on for thousands of years through oral tradition, and they predate both Christianity and Judaism, in my opinion. They probably even predate the Egyptian civilization.