(Genesis 6:9 - 11:9)
This is the history of Noah's time. Noah was a just and admirable man of his era. And he had communed with Jehovah. He had fathered three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
The world was becoming degenerate and filled with violence. Jehovah witnessed how all men were becoming depraved. He told Noah "the end of mankind is imminent, for the earth has been corrupted because of them. Therefore, I will destroy them with the earth. --- Construct a boat of planked cypress wood. Make small cabins in the boat and caulk the seams within and without with pitch. You should construct it to these specifications: it should be 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high. A porthole should be made and, a foot and a half above it, a roof covering the length of the boat. A hatch should be set in the side, and the craft should consist of three decks. --- I declare that I will bring a deluge to destroy every living thing under the heavens; all life on earth will be exterminated. But with you I will make an agreement. You shall find refuge in the boat along with your sons, your wife, and your son's wives. Of every living thing take two specimens, one male and one female, and bring them into the boat and keep them alive with you. A pair of every species of creature, birds, cattle, reptiles, and so forth shall be taken into the boat with you so that they will be spared. You must acquire a store of feed and victuals and stow them in the boat as provisions for the animals and for yourself."
Noah accomplished all the tasks that Jehovah commanded of him.
Jehovah announced to Noah. "Board the boat, you and your family, for in this decadent age, I have found you worthy. Of every pure creature, take seven pairs of males and females; of those that are not pure take only two pairs, male and female. Of birds take seven pairs. Thus their progeny will repopulate the world. Seven days from now and for forty days and forty nights I will make it rain upon the land so that everything that I have created will be wiped off the face of the earth."
Noah did all that he was commanded to do by Jehovah. (Noah was 600 years old when the flood waters deluged the earth.) Because of the flood, Noah entered the boat with his wife, his sons, and his son's wives. The animals, pure and impure, birds, reptiles, and all the living creatures came to Noah in pairs, male and female, and boarded the boat, just as Jehovah had commanded. And thus it occurred that after the passage of seven days flood waters inundated the earth. In the 600th year of Noah's life, in the 17th day of the 2nd month the seas swelled and the sky poured down rain. And it rained upon the earth for forty days and forty nights.
On the same day Noah, his wife, his sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth and their wives boarded the boat and with them, in pairs, all the animals, livestock, birds, reptiles, and creatures of every sort that exist on the earth. Those that entered the boat, males and females of every species, did so as commanded by Jehovah, who, from the outside, shut them in. The deluge lasted forty days. The water level rose and lifted the boat high above the earth. The waters, in an immeasurable inundation, deluged the earth and Noah's boat was carried away by the flood currents. The water rose so high that it covered the mountains, its level being more than twenty feet above that of the highest point of land. All living things that inhabited the earth were destroyed -- the birds and livestock and animals and reptiles and men -- every thing that drew breath and existed upon the land perished. Only Noah and those in his boat survived. The flood waters remained upon the earth for 150 days.
Jehovah remembered Noah and all the living creatures and livestock that were with him in the boat. And so he stirred up a wind that blew across the earth, and the flood was abated. The springs beneath the oceans and the apertures in the sky dome were closed and the downpour of rain ceased. The flood water, rushing in every direction, spilled off the edges of the earth, and its level began to go down after 150 days. On the 27th day of the 7th month the boat of Noah ran aground on the mountains of Armenia. The water contained to drain off and its height decreased until, on the 1st day of the 10th month, the tops of the mountains appeared above the flood waters. After 40 days had passed Noah opened the porthole of his boat and out of it dispatched a raven. The raven made flights back and forth to the boat until the earth had dried up. Also, to see how much the waters had subsided, Noah sent out a pigeon. It, however, could not find a dry spot to land and returned to the boat, for the waters still covered the earth. Noah thus reached out his hand, caught the bird, and pulled it back into the boat. After 7 days he sent the pigeon back out of the boat, and when it returned in the evening, it had the twig of an olive tree, with green leaves, in its beak. Noah thus realized that that the earth was no longer covered with flood waters. He waited another 7 days and sent the pigeon out again, but it never came back to him.
Thus on the 1st day of the 1st month of Noah's 601st year the waters of the flood had receded; Noah removed the roof of his boat, reconnoitered, and observed that the surface of the earth was drying. By the 27th day of the 2nd month, the land had thoroughly dried out. Jehovah then communicated with Noah and bid him to disembark from the boat with his wife, his sons, and his daughter's sons and to bring out all the living things that were with him, the animals and birds and livestock and reptiles so that they could repopulate the earth, propagate, and multiply fruitfully. Noah did so. Noah constructed an altar to worship Jehovah and upon the altar he made as a sacrifice, burned carcasses of all the livestock and birds that were deemed pure.
Smelling the savory aroma of the roasting meat, Jehovah thought to himself "I won't curse the earth again because of man, for man's thoughts and inclinations are evil even from childhood. Nor will I again destroy every living thing as I have just done. The seasons and cycles of the earth, planting and harvest time, heat and cold, summer and winter, day and night, will not be interrupted again."
Jehovah blessed Noah and his sons and bid them to propagate and be prolific.
"Let all the animals, the birds in the sky, and all that moves upon the earth have fear of you. The fish of the sea, too, I deliver into your hands. As I had already set aside vegetation as food for you, so I now allow you to regard as food any living, moving thing. The exception is that you should not eat anything that is still alive. Because man is of my image, I will punish anyone who takes a life. I demand that if any animal kills a human being that animal must be killed. And I demand that if any man kills a human being he must as well be put to death. --- Propagate and be prolific and populate the earth!"
Jehovah addressed Noah and his sons "I will established a contract with you and with your descendants, with the living creatures that are with you, and with future generations, with the fish, the livestock, the animals, all the creatures that exited the boat, with every creature on earth, I make this promise: never again will I bring a flood to wipe out mankind and destroy the earth. As a sign of this contract with you, with the living creatures of earth, with future generations in perpetuity, I will project a rainbow in the sky. When the sky is filled with clouds, it will appear and when I see it I will remember my contract with you and with all living things, that I will no more destroy the earth with a deluge. And this will be the sign of the contract that I have made with the creatures of the earth."
The sons of Noah that emerged from the boat were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. (Ham is the father of Canaan.) These are the three sons of Noah whose progeny repopulated the earth.
Noah became a farmer and planted a vineyard. He imbibed of its wine, became drunk, and lay naked in his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father naked and told his two brothers outside about it. Shem and Japheth took a cloak, put it on both of their shoulders and walked backward into the tent and covered their father's nakedness, which, with their eyes averted, they did not glimpse. Noah awoke from his drunken stupor and became aware of the offense his younger son had committed against him in seeing him naked. He pronounced "Cursed be Canaan; he will be a servant to the servants of his brothers. Blessed be Jehovah, the god of Shem. Let Canaan be a servant to Shem. Jehovah will make Japheth prosper; Japheth will dwell amid the tents of Shem, and Canaan will also be his servant."
Noah lived 350 years after the flood. He lived to be 950 years old and died.
Notes
1. Jehovah, disgusted with the behavior of the men he has created, decides to destroy mankind with the earth. Yet, when he does exterminate mankind (save for the eight souls in Noah's boat) it is with water, a flood produced by torrential rainfall and not by earthquakes or volcanoes.
2. Noah is judged a righteous man, the only man worth saving of the antediluvian race. (Apparently long life did not succeed in endowing man with wisdom or goodness.) Noah is shown to be obedient to Jehovah; he does exactly as he is told. Does this constitute righteousness in the eyes of the Biblical authors? Noah showed no concern for his fellow men who were about to be drowned and no sorrow for the destruction of the earth on which he had lived for 600 years. After the waters receded, he dutifully kills and burns a great number of the animals he saved from the flood. Later on, the old man gets drunk and carelessly allows his son to see him buck naked. After this happens, he curses his grandson, Canaan, who was blameless. A righteous man?
3. The size of the boat would have seemed sufficiently large to house all the animals that an ancient inhabitant of the Middle East would have been acquainted with. The story of Noah would thus would have seemed plausible to them, however ludicrous it is to us moderns. The world was then thought to be a much smaller place and its fauna far less plentiful and diverse. However, the difficulty of feeding and caring for the number of animals that could squeeze onto a three decked, 450-foot boat would have been insurmountable for just eight people -- ask a zookeeper. The authors, of course, gave no thought to the myriad animal species now on earth, but not indigenous to ancient Mesopotamia and Palestine -- elephants, tigers, hippos, bisons, kangaroos, polar bears, penguins, pandas, pythons, giraffes, grizzlies, gorillas, not to mention skunks. Nor was there consideration given to insect life. There are something like 30,000 species of beetles. Would Noah's family have welcomed them as shipmates?
4. In describing Noah's boat (usually referred to as ark, which simply means vessel and is not used today outside of Biblical references, which is the reason I have not employed it ), I have used standard nautical terminology - hatch, porthole, deck, etc. And, for clarity's sake, I have substituted feet for cubits in the measurements of the boat.
5. Jehovah first tells Noah to take two of every creature, a male and a female, and then, later on, he commands him to take seven pairs of "pure" creatures and seven pairs of birds, but only two pairs of the "impure" creatures. What a pure and an impure animal was would be established later in the laws set down by Moses. Jehovah seems a bit previous.
6. That rain, however torrential, could cause a deluge of such proportions is, of course, absurd. However, the belief that rainwater might be sufficient to raise water levels on earth to the mountain tops seems possible if you believe that the rain comes not from water on earth that has evaporated, but from an ocean in the sky above the celestial dome, which can open to release water in any quantity. There are references in the account that point clearly to rain water issuing forth from an opening in the celestial dome and bubbling up from springs or fountains beneath the sea. That such vast amounts of water could evaporate or soak into the earth in a matter of months, however, seems a stretch. However, since the ancients believed in a flat earth, they naturally assumed the flood waters would drain off the edges of the earth, as is indicated in my translation of what is usually rendered "the waters returned from off the earth coming and going" which, as it is, is not very understandable.
7. Jehovah's part in the story is interesting. He informs Noah of the flood, provides him with instructions on how to build a boat and what to put in it, he tells him when to board the boat, he personally encloses the boat, then later bids Noah when to come out of the boat. Jehovah did not furnish Noah with a boat, but commanded him build one. At the end of the flood, he makes the waters recede and remembers Noah as if it were something insignificant that he had forgotten about.
8. When Noah is on dry land and his family and the animals have all disembarked, the first thing he can think of is to thank Jehovah for sparing him. This is natural, but it seems incongruous that he would then kill, as a blood sacrifice to Jehovah, the very animals he had spent so much effort to save. While the practice of animal and even human sacrifice was a part of almost ancient and primitive religions, one wonders why the "gods" demand of humans an act that was wasteful, distasteful, and, to modern sensibilities, depraved. The probable purpose was to enforce obedience. From the gods' point of view, if you can force a man to destroy his most precious possessions at your behest, then you have him securely under your control. One wonders if Noah was really a righteous man and superior to the other inhabitants of earth, or he found favor merely because he kowtowed to Jehovah, while the rest of humanity shunned him.
9. While there is no convincing evidence of a universal flood, the Biblical flood account is not unique. Flood stories seem to be universal. Similar stories of a catastrophic flood appear in Greek mythology and there are Babylonian accounts almost identical to the one of Noah in Genesis. This strongly suggests the Flood, or at least a flood of epic proportions must have occurred in the Middle East at sometime in not-so-remote antiquity. Flooding due to the melting of glaciers and continental ice shelves during the end of the most recent Ice Age is unlikely to have given rise to Flood narratives, since that would have occurred over a period of many years. Nor can an unusual number of rainy days or really huge spring thaw account for a flood of such magnitude. Other explanations have been presented, a meteor crashing into the Persian Gulf, Mediterranean waters spilling through a formerly closed Bosphorus and creating the Black Sea, various kinds of cataclysmic earth changes, but no theory is entirely convincing. The final resting place of Noah's boat, on the mountains of Armenia (the ancient Urartu -- the mountain currently known as Mount Ararat is not specified), suggests a location for the flood. Noah's boat was unlikely to have drifted there all the way from southern Mesopotamia, the location of Eden and the ancestral home of the Hebrews. However, if Noah lived just north of eastern Anatolia, then it is plausible that currents could have caused his boat to float through the flooded valleys of that region to run aground on the mountainside. Of course, the report of the flood covering the peaks of mountains as high as 17,000 feet above sea level must be taken with a grain of salt.
10. Jehovah decides not to destroy the earth again, having resigned himself to the deficiencies and evil tendencies of human nature. But what brings him to this decision is not any regret for the loss of life, but rather his food preferences. Apparently a chap who likes a well-done steak, Jehovah is moved to this momentous determination by the delectable aroma of roasted carcasses. This is, at best, appallingly ungodlike!
11. After the flood, Jehovah, who formerly enforced a vegetarian diet, now allows man to eat anything, any kind of creature, even any kind of pig, provided it is not still alive. There is no mention yet of the dietary restrictions that would be so meticulously itemized in Leviticus. Also, Jehovah inaugurates the death penalty for murder, which he did not enforce in the earlier case of Cain.
12. For the second time, the first being in the shame that Adam and Eve feel in their nakedness, we are reminded of the prohibition against nudity. Exposure was considered a serious offense not only by the Hebrew, but the Babylonians as well. The moral outrage it here engenders seems extreme: not only revealing one's self unclothed, but having the indiscretion or misfortune to see another unclothed seems almost tantamount to murder and sufficient to doom one's self and one's progeny forever. The premise, apparently held by the Hebrews, that humans naturally feel shame in nudity is, however, demonstrably untrue, for such shame must be taught. While medieval and modern Judeo-Christian culture perpetuated the belief that nudity is concomitant with dissolution and conducive to moral depravity and decadence, (as well as being sensibly undesirable from an aesthetic and hygienic point of view) other ancient peoples evinced no such neurotic revulsion to nakedness. The Egyptians wore transparent clothes. The Greeks regularly paraded about nude without much embarrassment.
13. The incident of Ham and the naked Noah has been interpreted by some to be symbolic or allegorical. This is highly unlikely. The story is presented in a straight-forward manner and should be accepted at face value. And the contention of some that Ham had improper relations with his drunken father is in no way supported by the text and seems simply a latter-day fabrication to excuse Jehovah's severe treatment Canaan. (This isn't the first or last time that Jehovah brings down punishment upon the guiltless.) The incident, though, does seem a convenient invention to justify the curse. The Israelites would invade the country of the Canaanites and make war against them. If Canaan had been cursed by God, this would give the Israelites the moral high ground in their conflicts with them, as well as divine sanction for their expulsion from Palestine. Nationalistic propaganda already is seeping into the chronicle!
14. Methuselah, Noah's grandfather, was the only antediluvian man whom we are told of that alive at the time of the Flood, excepting, of course, Noah and his sons. Did he die before the Flood or did the Flood cut short his life (at 969 years?) Did Jehovah deem him insufficiently righteous to merit saving, did he know he was going to die before the flood came, or did he simply think that Methuselah was too old to bother with?
15. All estimations based on Genesis date the Flood to 2500-2300 B.C. (Sumerian and Egyptian civilization was well underway at this time.) Archbishop James Ussher, a profound Biblical scholar and the Primate of the Church of Ireland in the 17th Century, calculated that the Flood occurred in 2350 B.C. Using the historical sources available to him at the time, in addition to the Bible, he was able to place the date of Creation at 4004 B.C., four thousand round years before the birth of Jesus. It should be mentioned that the originator of the Anno Domino system was a 6th Century Scythian monk named Dionysius Exiguuus, or Dennis the Short. He pegged Jesus's birth as occurring exactly two thousand years before the end of astrological Age of Pisces, in what would be 2000 AD., the time at which he believed the world would end. He was wrong about the end of the world. And he botched figuring the date of Jesus's birth, since Herod the Great, the King of Judea, was still alive at the time of the Nativity and is known to have died in what would be 4 B.C. Ussher and nearly all those who came after decided that 4 B.C. was the probable date of the Christ's birth. Thus the 4004 B.C. in Ussher's calculations, which, despite the impressive scholarship that went into them, seem a bit too pat. Ussher's calculations, however, do not differ by more than a few years from those of others, including Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton, both scientists, but religious men with keen interest in the Bible.
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