Noah – antediluvian nonsense, now in 3D

The human specie uniquely, amongst all animals, is able to transmit ideas, knowledge and imagination via stories. Hardly homo sapiens, the wise man, as we hubristically awarded ourselves as the epithet of our specie, we would probably be much more well served to be known as the pan narrans, or story-telling apes. Stories, like genes, have the ability to be bequeathed or transmitted through generations. And like genes, sometimes undergo mutations. However, the essence of a good story, the moral underlay, the grain of truth, usually remains intact. This is why Aesop’s fables, some 2,500 years after they were writ, remain in the inventory of great literary treasures due to its merits. Some stories, however, remain with us not due to inherent goodness or truth, but because they are deemed holy and immutable. Noah’s damp tale, soon to be released as a major Hollywood picture, is one such example.

A quick recap of the familiar tale, ignoring some internal discrepancies – in chapters 6-9 of Genesis, God, seeing the pure wickedness of the crown of his own creation, humans, decided to wipe the slate clean and start again, returning the earth to a tabula rasa and repopulating it with the only apparently righteous man Noah and his immediate family, in an incestuous arrangement. In doing so, God chose to use an apocalyptic flood; a rather blunt instrument that one has to say is rather heartless to the innocent animals that would be collateral damage. He tells Noah, who was at the time over 500 years old (having fathered children around half a millennia after his own birth), to construct an Ark that can fit his family, two (or sometimes seven pairs, depending on kosher laws) of every species of creatures and provisions that will last the 40 day flood and subsequent re-population of the world. The flood kills everyone except the inhabitants of the Ark.

Aside from the fact that this story bears uncanny similarities with antecedent flood-myths, the most obvious being the Epics of Gilgamesh, a Mesopotamian legend around 4,500 years old, as well as the story of Deucalion, son of Prometheus, what can we salvage from this tale? The goodness and competence of God is clearly under question – creating us sick and commanding us to be well; only to kill off all men, women and children callously and in the painful and lingeringly cruel fashion of drowning for what was his mistake in the first place in creating humans with flaws. And this is not to mention the annihilation of all other non-aquatic animals for no apparent reason other than not having any tools in his arsenal more precise than a mass flood. Could it be an over the top warning for us not to be bad? That goodness, like Noah’s apparent model behaviour, will be rewarded? Noah’s ethics may be summed up by the following:

After the flood subsides, Noah became a husbandman who planted vineyards. Famously, in Genesis 9, he got drunk, stripped naked and dropped down in a stupor in his tent to sleep it off. Pretty normal and respectable behaviour so far. His son Ham then happen to walk by and saw his father, naked and couchant and Ham told his brothers Shem and Japheth about this, possibly cracking a joke at the old man’s expense. Shem and Japheth, out of respect for the plastered Noah, covered him with garments whilst not looking at the old man’s nakedness out of filial respect. When Noah awoke, he realised Ham’s ‘transgression’. He was furious and his retribution was curiously to curse Canaan, Ham’s son and his grandson, not Ham, that all his offspring shall be slaves. After the exodus, the Israelis did indeed wipe out and enslaved the Canaanites; one famous battle being Joshua using trumpets to bring down the city walls of Jericho. If such is the example of the only worthy man in the eye of God, then the standard must have been very low at the time.

Unable to find any iota of worthy substance out of the sordid story, I wonder why it’s taught to children and now made into a multi-million dollar Hollywood blockbuster. No doubt the CGI would be amazing and Russell Crowe would bring his deep, husky voice and stoic, meaningful stares into the middle distance to Oscar-realm effects, buttressed by other A-list stars. It would be very interesting to see how Darren Aronofsky, the director of the praiseworthy Black Swan, a movie delving into the depth of some dark and dank emotions and motivations of the soul, would salvage some catharsis from the story of the Ark.

I find it amazing that there are people actually looking for the Ark, holding it as a literal rather than metaphorical tale, as recently as 2007. One expedition was ironically led by astronaut and one of a handful of men to ever have walked on the moon, James Irwin in the 1980’s. The irony might be lost on the Christian who, privileged to have been a passenger in a space-ark that have taken him to another heavenly body, would spend years looking for a mythical ark in Mt Ararat in Turkey. Give me Aesop’s the Fox and the Raven any day.