Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [31]
PLOT SUMMARY: THE FLOOD
People have become very wicked so God decides to clean the slate. Only Noah and his family, direct descendants of Adam, are good enough to save, so God orders Noah to build a boat, or an “ark” (from the Hebrew word for “box” or “chest”). Noah is told only to take his wife, their three sons, and their wives aboard, along with pairs of all animals and birds. This is where the ark story gets a little confused and it is clear that someone mingled the separate J and P accounts of the Flood into a single narrative that is sometimes contradictory. One account calls for pairs of every animal on the earth; the other calls for seven pairs of clean and unclean animals and seven pairs of each species of birds.
The Flood comes not just from the rains but up from below the earth in a kind of reverse Creation. Water covers the earth, killing everyone and everything, the innocent with the guilty. It rains for 40 days and 40 nights, but the account also says the water covered the earth for 150 days. When the water recedes, the ark comes to rest on “the mountains of Ararat.” Then Noah sends out a series of birds. The first, a raven, doesn’t return. The second, a dove, returns, as there is nowhere to land. The dove is released again and this time returns with an olive branch indicating that the waters have begun to recede. The dove is sent out once more and does not return. Finally, God simply tells Noah to go out of the ark and to “be fruitful and multiply on the earth.” Noah and the missus and the kids then set out to repopulate the world.
Noah takes time to make a burnt offering of the animals and birds he has just saved from destruction. Pleased by Noah’s thought, God says, “I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done.” (Gen. 8:21)
As a sign of this covenant, or promise, God sets a “bow” in the sky, presumably a folkloric explanation for rainbows after a rain. As a part of this new covenant or agreement, God blesses Noah, gives him a new set of dietary laws—meat is now in; the vegetarianism specified earlier in Genesis is out—and institutes a new sanction against murder because man has been made in God’s image.
Didn’t Noah get some blueprints for the ark?
While walking in the Alps, the famous Renaissance artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci was surprised to discover the fossilized remains of sea creatures. Curious about their existence so high above the oceans, Leonardo still failed to arrive at the explanation that modern science accepts. The Alps were once at or below sea level but were thrust higher when Africa slammed head-on into Europe in the process of catastrophic mountain building. In Leonardo’s day, however, there was a simpler explanation that seemed perfectly plausible to most folks: these remains of sea creatures high in the mountains of Italy were indisputable proof of the great Flood that the Bible said once covered the earth.
Almost every ancient culture has some sort of flood, or deluge, myth that shares much with the biblical Flood. In most of them, the gods send a catastrophic flood to destroy the world, but one good man is told of the coming disaster and his family is saved to continue human existence. For instance, one Sumerian myth told of a flood with which the gods curbed human overpopulation. Another Sumerian tale related the story of King Ziusudra, who survives a flood, offers a sacrifice to the gods, repopulates the earth, and gains immortality. The Greeks had the story of Deucalion. The son of Prometheus, Deucalion was another boat builder. When Zeus flooded the earth in one more of his fits of pique, Deucalion and his wife, Pyrrha, take refuge in an ark that lands on the top of Mount Olympus. Deucalion repopulates the earth with stones that represent the “bones” of “Mother Earth.