“7: 11. the fountains of the great deep … and the apertures of the skies were opened. One must have a picture
of the structure of the universe that is described in Genesis 1 in order to
comprehend the significance of the destruction that is narrated in the flood
story. The creation account pictures a clear firmament or space holding back
the waters that are above the firmament and those that are below. Now the
narrative reports that “all the
fountains of the great deep were split open, and the apertures of the skies
were opened.” The cosmic waters are able to spill in from above and below,
filling the habitable bubble, thus: 7: 12 And there was rain on the earth,
forty days and forty nights.”(Friedman
Commentary on the Torah)
Friedman reminds us that those
who first orally broadcast the story of the flood ordeal (Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth) and the later oral testimonies of
ancient storytellers recognized the earth
as flat and dome covered; ‘a habitable bubble’.
Their world existed as far as the eye could see and ended at the
horizon. As we learn from 2 Peter “3: 6. Whereby the world that then
was, being overflowed with water, perished.”(KJV) They had
no concept of the world as we know it.
They were contained by the world “that then was’. They could not have imagined a sphere
consisting of water with an earth core. For
sure the earth as they knew it was covered with water but they were not talking
about the entire planet. This may disturb some creationists but however many
fish and mollusk fossils and humanoid
bones are uncovered in other parts of the world it is sure they were not
deposited by the flood described in Genesis.
But let us begin at the
beginning. Noah is told to build an ark because God is
determined He is going to flood the earth.
God tells him precisely the dimensions needed. The ark is to be 300 cubits in length, 50 cubits in width and 30 cubits in height (450 × 75 × 45 ft. or 137 × 22.9 × 13.7m). Clearly, this is an immense vessel but is it
large enough to provide for all the animals depicted in the many fantasy films
and pictures of the event?
The best estimates are that
there are some 6.5 million species
of animal and insects found on the earth (Give or take
1.3 million.) and 2.2 million dwelling in the ocean
depths. Undoubtedly this would be too
many land species for Noah’s ark to handle.
In the order of taxonomy, ‘species’ represents the smallest collective. The bigger the area the larger the number of
animals.
By
way of comparison consider the vessel below.
The
above is a photo of the Polaris 2 a purpose-built
livestock carrier capable of carrying 7300 cattle. At 448.5 feet long, 68 feet wide and 51 feet
high it is very close to the dimensions of Noah’s ark. For such a load it needs to carry over 1500
tonnes of animal fodder and produce up to 600 tonnes of fresh water a
day. This
will give us some idea of the problems confronting Noah as he set out on his
ordeal. Fortunately for Noah he wasn’t confronted with as many animals
as Polaris 2 can carry. Dr Marcus
Ross, the assistant professor of geology and assistant
director for the Centre for Creation Studies at Liberty University has crunched
the numbers and makes an interesting comment.
“Given that most animals were brought onto the Ark by twos, while
“clean” birds and mammals were brought by sevens, this means that Noah cared
for approximately two thousand land-dwelling vertebrate animals.”
Two points should be made
here. Clearly
Noah’s ark could easily accommodate two thousand animals. Also the designated number of representatives
(two of unclean and seven pairs of clean) from the world’s entire 6.5 million
or more different species would add up to far more than two thousand animals. Obviously
the species Noah and his family cared for were not selected from around the
world which is more evidence that the flood was local and not global. Sorry folks, kangaroos, koalas, duckbilled
platypus, giant moas and emperor penguins, among others, were not part of the
mix. The animals the Noah family cared
for were not unfamiliar to them.
Also, there are other theories
which point to the Genesis flood being local.
“As
to the extent to which the human race was spread over the earth at the time of
the Flood, two suppositions are possible. First, that of Hugh Miller (Testimony
of the Rocks) that, owing to the shortness of the antediluvian chronology, and
the violence and moral corruption of the people, the population had not spread beyond the boundary of western Asia…. Another theory, supported by much evidence,
is that, in connection with the enormous physical changes in the earth's
surface during the closing scenes of the Glacial epoch, man had perished from
off the face of the earth except in the valley of the Euphrates, and that the
Noachian Deluge is the final catastrophe in that series of destructive events.” (Various.
International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia.)
And
again “The principal setting of the
biblical narratives is Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, the band of arable land
that extends northward from the Nile Valley along the eastern coast of the
Mediterranean, curves around the great Syrian desert, and continues southward
through Mesopotamia to the Persian Gulf.”
(The Oxford History of
the Biblical World.)
We might well ask why God should
want Noah to build such a large ark for so few animals. Voyages for livestock carriers such as
Polaris 2 last on average between 10 and 30 days at sea and such ships most
often sail with a full complement of livestock.
Noah was confined to his ark for 364 days. Given that the figure of two thousand
land-dwelling vertebrate animals is correct Noah would need far in excess of 1500
tonnes of animal fodder as well as 600 tonnes of fresh water each
day. This could account for why such a
large ark was needed for so few animals.
Some have suggested that the animals were put to sleep and didn’t need
to be fed or watered but there is no evidence for this. Such a speculative fantasy would surely have
been included in the story of the flood had the storytellers been made aware of
it. In any case, the Bible tells us: “6: 21. And you, take some of every food that will be eaten and
gather it to you, and it will be for you and for them [the animals] for food.”
(Friedman Commentary on the Torah) We must move on.
7: 11. In
the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in
the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day All the
fountains of the great deep burst apart, And the floodgates of the sky broke
open. 7:12. The rain fell on the earth
forty days and forty nights. 7:13. That same day Noah and
Noah’s sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, went into the ark, with Noah’s wife and
the three wives of his sons— (TANAKH)
The rain
was part of a devastating hurricane of epic proportions that flattened all the
trees and destroyed the shelters and homes of the population. “8: 23. All existence on earth was blotted out— man, cattle,
creeping things, and birds of the sky; they were blotted out from the earth.
Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark.” (TANAKH)
“7: 18. And the waters grew strong and multiplied
very much on the earth, and the ark went on the face of the waters. 7: 19. And the waters had grown very, very strong on the earth, so they covered
all the high mountains that are under all the skies. 7: 20.
Fifteen cubits above, the waters grew stronger, and they covered the mountains. (Friedman Commentary on
the Torah)”
Having
little knowledge of the geography of the world, ancient Old Testament Hebrew
scholars presumed that not all the mountains of the world were covered with
water. They debated among themselves,
trying to come to terms with the deluge that precipitated such a flood and how
one should understand the enigmas that were thrown up as a result of it. For example,
Ararat
at 5,137 m
is
one of the smaller mountains of the world; a mere dwarf compared to the
loftiest peaks of the Himalaya and Cordilleras. (Keil,
C. F.; Delitzsch, Franz. Commentary on the Old Testament). Yet a
number of ancient Old Testament scholars believed that Mt Olympus at 2,918 m was
taller, not understanding that Ararat is nearly twice as high as Olympus. (Nachmanides, Commentary on the Torah)
“8:
3. And the waters went back
from on the earth, going back continually, and the water receded at the end of
a hundred fifty days.8: 4. And the ark
rested in the seventh month, in the
seventeenth day of the month, on the mountains of Ararat. 8: 5. And the water went on receding until the tenth month. In the
tenth month, in the first of the month, the tops of the mountains appeared. 8:
6. And it was at the end of forty days, and Noah
opened the window of the ark that he had made. 8: 7. And he let a raven go, and it went back and forth until the
water dried up from the earth. 8: 8. And he
let a dove go from him to see whether the waters had eased from the face of the
earth. 8: 9. And the dove did not
find a resting place for its foot, and it came back to him to the ark, for waters
were on the face of the earth, and he put out his hand and took it and brought
it to him to the ark. 8: 10. And he
waited still another seven days, and he again let a dove go from the ark. 8:
11. And the dove came to him at evening
time, and here was an olive leaf torn off
in its mouth, and Noah knew that the waters had eased from the earth. (Friedman
Commentary on the Torah)”
The
Polaris 2 has a draught of 7.2 m. I
imagine Noah’s ark would be similar so
the water need not have receded from the top of Ararat for the ark to become
wedged on the mountain. The real mystery
is where the sprig from an olive tree
came from. Only a week had passed from
the dove having no place to land to finding an olive tree to alight on and
pluck a leaf from its branches. How is
it that this olive tree was not destroyed in the deluge? Everything was supposed to have been blotted
out. Surely it did not grow up in the space of a week. It was the task of ancient Hebrew scholars to
resolve such enigmas so that the truth could emerge but when you have two or
more Hebrew scholars trying to unpack a biblical issue you usually end up with
two or more contrary resolutions. The thirteen-century scholar Nachmanides (known as
Ramban) was most often the one who casts the deciding vote as to how scripture
is to be understood.
“Rabbi Birei said: The gates of the Garden of
Eden were opened up for it, and it brought [the leaf] from there.” “Rabbi Levi said: It brought it from the Mount of Olives, for the
Land of Israel was not inundated with the waters of the Flood.” (Nachmanides,
Commentary on the Torah) Rabbi
Birei indulges in a bit of conjecture in his attempt to answer the question
posed by the Sages in Bereishis Rabbah (ancient
rabbinical interpretations of Genesis). Ramban sides with Rabbi Levi for he has
supported his argument with a quote from Ezekiel. God is venting his wrath on Israel for their
abominations and reminds them how in the past they were spared the deluge that
floated Noah’s ark. “22: 24
Mortal, say to it: You are a land that is not cleansed, not rained upon in the day of indignation.” (Ezekiel 22: 24. NRSV, The New
Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha). Ramban concludes: “Their statement that “The Land of Israel was
not inundated with the waters of the Flood” means that the rain of the Flood
did not fall on [The Land of Israel] – as it says in the verse cited there as
proof, it was not rained upon and the fountains of the great deep were not
opened up in the [Land of Israel].” (Nachmanides,
Commentary on the Torah) So was the land of Israel left high and
dry? It seems not. Water is presumed to have spilled over from
the floodplains of Mesopotamia that
spared the trees but killed the locals and their animals. Though some may have tried to escape by
climbing the trees it is safe to suggest they could not have held out for 364
days. Where it was that Noah built his
ark we are not told but we realize it was nowhere near the Land of Israel. The best guess is that it was somewhere near
the land called Eden. The apple doesn’t
fall far from the tree.
We may well wonder that, if it
is true that Genesis was written by scribes inspired by God’s spirit so that
the result was God’s word, why was it so difficult to understand? Why could not later Hebrew scholars grasp the
written word immediately? We are told
that early Hebrew script derived from the Phoenician
script and did not emerge as a distinct cultural artifact until the ninth century B.C.E. Unlike mathematical equations language is
inherently ambiguous requiring the meaning of a statement to be determined as
much by the context as by the syntax and punctuation. Hebrew is written without punctuation or
vowels. Consequently,
words in Hebrew have far more nuances attached to them than words in English. Imagine what it would be like if we had to
decipher a word such as ‘br’. Is it ‘bar,
bare, bore, bier, bure, bur, etc.? Word
choice, how a word is positioned in a statement and its history of use along
with its context are some of the concerns Hebrew scholars use to determine the
meaning of a phrase. Of, course, this
forced the reader to read aloud or in a low voice in order to grasp if they had
made a mistake by choosing the wrong word.
How one scribe chooses to express an idea may well be significantly
different for how another scribe chooses to express the same idea. But the distinction between the works of the
two scribes may only involve a seemingly minor alteration. Ancient Hebrew scholars often passionately
scrutinize and debate the use of a word that English speakers may well ignore
as irrelevant to the meaning of a phrase.
For example, Nachmanides felt the need to resolve a debate among scholars as to the sex of the dove that
Noah freed to determine if the water had receded. It seems that masculine and feminine endings
had been confused. There is a hint of
competition between those ancient scholars who comment on the Torah.
Also, the
scribes who wrote down the bible stories were not merely taking down
dictation. They also had heard the Bible
stories from their youth retold to them by the elders of their tribe. What they wrote was influenced by those
passages in the story that most captured their youthful imagination; that left
an indelible impression on their innocent memory. What is truly amazing is how unerring the
ancestral line from Adam through Seth, Noah, Abraham, Moses and the
House of David to Jesus is maintained. Today
individuals may seek out and record their ancestry but the Jews orally recorded
the ancestry of a nation of people from the beginning of prehistory; almost as
it happened.
Noah, his family, and the animals are called out of the ark. Noah makes an altar and offers a sacrifice
to God. God, in turn, makes a covenant
with Noah and family and with the animals.
8: 9. “I now establish My
covenant with you and your offspring to come, 8: 10. and with every living thing that is with you— birds,
cattle, and every wild beast as well— all that have come out of the ark, every
living thing on earth. 8: 11. I will maintain My covenant with you: never again shall all
flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a
flood to destroy the earth.”(The
Torah)
Obviously, the
sons of Noah did not disperse right away.
They camped nearby with their wives and children. Noah must have taken a considerable number of
saplings or seeds with him for he soon planted a vineyard. It takes at least three years for a sapling
to grow strong enough to produce grapes and it takes 600 to 800 grapes to make
a litre of wine. It would take between five days and two weeks
for the wine to ferment which was Noah’s undoing.
“9:
21. And he drank from the wine and was
drunk. And he was exposed inside his tent. 9: 22. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father’s nakedness
and told his two brothers outside. 9: 23. And Shem and Yaphet took a garment and put it on both their
shoulders and went backwards and covered
their father’s nakedness. And they faced backwards
and did not see their father’s nakedness. 9: 24. And Noah woke up from his wine, and he knew what his
youngest son had done to him. 9:
25. And he said, “Canaan is cursed. He’ll be
a servant of servants to his brothers.” (Friedman,
Commentary on the Torah)
A strange turn of events. Ham is at fault for he has embarrassed his
father publicly (he told his two brothers outside). His behaviour
was verging on ridicule. He should have
covered his father and kept the whole episode to himself. “There was no negative judgment attached to
getting drunk.” (The New
Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha) It was
Noah’s nakedness that Ham broadcast to his brothers in front of others. We may well ask why Noah chose to curse
Canaan rather than Ham?
“9: 25 he said, “Cursed be Canaan; The lowest of slaves Shall he be to his brothers.” 9:26. And he
said, “Blessed be the LORD, The God of Shem; Let Canaan be a slave to them. 9:
27. May God enlarge Japheth, And let him dwell in the tents of Shem; And let
Canaan be a slave to them.” (The Torah)
This may
well be a bit of contrivance by the authors of this story. Ham may feel some angst knowing that his son
has been cursed but it is Canaan who suffers for
the deed of his father. “Thus, he made
Canaan a slave to Shem twice thereby intimating that [Shem] would inherit
[Canaan’s] land and all his possessions for whatever a slave acquires
automatically belongs to his master.
This section was written to inform us that it was as a result of [Ham’s]
sin that Canaan became an eternal slave and Abraham acquired the rights to his
land.” (Nachmanides, Commentary on the Torah)
The
Torah seems to be writing itself laying out a convenient justification for
Abraham long before he arrives on the scene. God, of course, knows the world’s
history. Did He privately confide in
Noah telling him that Abraham, his distant relative, would eventually be
residing in a land to which Canaan shares his name? Hebrew scribes have a reputation for playing
with words and knew that Canaan was eventually to be the home of Abraham. Scribes tend to allow themselves to
anticipate upcoming events in their writing. I think we have to remember that the scribes
recording the events of the Bible were not automatic writing or copying
machines. The writing of language is one
of the most creative acts a human being can undertake; it is part of the intellectual
perception with which God has endowed us and results unequivocally from
inspiration. We have no choice but to
describe scripture as inspired by God. But however inspired these scribes may have
been, they had personalities, thoughts, and
ideas, biases and quirks that infected the language they used. Though they were diligent in their tasks they
were nevertheless subject to human fickleness.
Some will insist that it was Moses who wrote the first five books of the
Bible but while Moses may have redacted these books, choosing which part of
which oral story was used, it would be unusual for him not to also employ
scribes even when the word was directly from God.
For all
the inadequacies of the scribes who sealed God’s word by imprinting it on
papyrus scrolls, we have to admire the
craft entailed by the book of Genesis. The
attendant genealogies of Noah, Japheth, Ham, and
Shem may for some be trying and superfluous but they make a very necessary
contribution to the narrative God provides us.
For ancient Hebrew scholars, these
genealogies serve to reinforce the truth of “…the Torah’s account of the
Creation of the world. For our father
Abraham “commanded his sons and household after him,” and he bore witness to
them regarding the existence of Noah and his sons, who saw the Flood with their
own eyes and who were in the Ark. Abraham
was born during Noah’s lifetime (Noah died in the year 2006 After Creation, and
Abraham was born in 1948) so that
although he did not witness the Flood himself, he did hear of it directly from
the one who experienced it. Noah was 595
years old at the time of Lamech’s death [his father] in the year 1651 After
Creation. Lamech was 56 years old at the
time of Adam’s
death in 930. Isaac was 110 and Jacob
was 50 years old at the time of Shem’s death, in 2158.” (Bereishis/Genesis, The ArtScroll Series,
20100) The implication here is
that Lamech saw and may well have spoken with Adam, the first man. If it is true that Hebrew did not emerge as a
written language until about 900 BCE the oral history of the peoples called
Israel was maintained for a little over 3000 years. As incredible as it sounds the chronological history
of Israel’s blessed patriarchs passed from mouth
to mouth, throughout the many tribes, seemingly without distortion or revision. Some of these stories may have been captured
in what is called Old Hebrew, a script closely related to Phoenician
script, as early as the 10th century BCE but if they existed they
are now lost. There is evidence of a
Canaanite alphabet as far back a 1600 BCE which ancient Hebrew scribes may have
been familiar with but it cannot be demonstrated. Nevertheless, we can’t help but admire the
determined discipline of the Israel peoples to orally preserve their history
and God’s covenant with them.
Archaeologists
and Palaeontologists have had a difficult time confirming the dates of Genesis. For Israel peoples and many Christians measuring
the age of the earth began on the sixth day of creation when Adam was made. Each side considers the other as making a
fundamental mistake. I have argued in
the first paper of this sequence how, as God is outside of time, the age of the
universe and our earth is necessarily relative.
What He created in less than the blink of an eye Palaeontologists
describe as millions of years. Most thoughtful people will accept that our
all-powerful God did not labour millions
of years to create the universe and our earth.
Nor did he create an old earth to confound our scientists. The fault is
not in our stars but in our egos by which we seek to maintain ourselves as the
final word on God’s creation. The Bible
is not a sociological treatise. It is
God’s way of showing us Himself; God’s word is about God and not the age of the
earth and its many Palaeolithic artifacts.
What better way to show us who He is than to tie himself to one group of
peoples who will dutifully record His existence while recording their own
history and their covenant with Him. In
this way He avoids showing Himself to be a whimsical God, sometimes reliable
and sometimes not, undermining the very thing He is trying to achieve;
recognition and worship as the One True God; a God who loves and cares for
people. He gave us an intellectual
perception and He relies on our ability to reason. Jews are the chosen people but they are
chosen for the sake of humanity. Let us
continue.
“Now,
when Noah descended from the mountain after the flood, he
settled
in those lands adjacent to Ararat along with his descendants.” (Bereishis/Genesis,). The sons of Noah prospered and
their seed spawned many tribes. “And when they became numerous they migrated
from there to this valley of Shinar.” (Bereishis/Genesis,) We know that Ham begat Canaan and one of
Canaan’s offspring was Cush who begat Nimrod, who had a reputation as a mighty
hunter. Nimrod became a very powerful
ruler and rose to become the first king of
these new peoples. “10:10. And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel,
and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar.” (KJV)
11: 1. Everyone
on earth had the same language and the same words. 11:
2. And as they migrated from the east, they
came upon a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there. 11:3. They said to one
another, “Come, let us make bricks and burn them hard.”— Brick served them as
stone, and bitumen served them as mortar. —11: 4. And they said, “Come, let us build us a city, and a tower
with its top in the sky, to make a name for ourselves; else we shall be
scattered all over the world.” 11: 5. The LORD
came down to look at the city and tower that man had built, 11:
6. and the
LORD said, “If, as one people with one language for all, this is how they have
begun to act, then nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their
reach. 11: 7. Let us,
then, go down and confound their speech there, so that they shall not
understand one another’s speech.” 11: 8. Thus the LORD scattered them from there over the face of
the whole earth; and they stopped
building the city. 11: 9. That is
why it was called Babel, because there
the LORD confounded the speech of the whole earth; and from there the LORD
scattered them over the face of the whole earth. (The Torah)
Although
several artists has attempted to depict the tower of Babel they suffer from a lack
of historical knowledge. The tower was
built to tempt God to come down and live among them. A temple was to be at the top of the tower in
which God was expected to reside.
Remnants
of such towers known as Ziggurats have been uncovered by Archaeologists. The Torah tells us “the LORD confounded the
speech of the whole earth” and “scattered them over the
face of the whole earth” but what is being described are those tribes living
under the influence of the ruler of Babel (Babylon). The speech of the ‘whole earth’ was the
speech of those peoples living in and around the valley of Shinar before they
were dispersed farther afield. More
evidence that when the Torah speaks of the ‘whole earth’ it is not speaking of
the ‘whole world’. Japheth’s descendants
found a new home in what is now Turkey and the islands of the
Mediterranean. Ham’s descendants spread
into Egypt and Africa and the tribes descended from Shem spread from the Zagros
Mountains in the east to the Persian Gulf, and on the west by the northern
expanses of the Arabian Desert.
References
Friedman, Richard Elliott. Commentary on
the Torah, HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Keil, C. F.;
Delitzsch, Franz. Commentary on the Old Testament, Kindle Edition.
Dr Marcus Ross, Center for
Creation Studies at Liberty University, Lynchburg, Va.
Various. International Standard Bible
Encyclopaedia. E4 Group. Kindle Edition.
Inc., Jewish
Publication Society. JPS TANAKH: The Holy Scriptures (blue): The New JPS
Translation according to the Traditional Hebrew Text. The Jewish Publication
Society. Kindle Edition.
The Oxford History of the Biblical World. Oxford University
Press. Kindle Edition.
Nachmanides, Commentary on the Torah,
Bereishis/Genesis, The ArtScroll Series, 2010, Mesorah Publications Ltd.
Brooklyn, NY
Coogan, Michael D.; Brettler, Marc Z.;
Perkins, Pheme; Newsom, Carol A. The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha:
New Revised Standard Version. Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
Inc.
Jewish Publication Society. THE TORAH: The Five Books of Moses, the New
Translation of the Holy Scriptures According to the Traditional Hebrew Text . The Jewish Publication Society. Kindle
Edition.
Coogan,
Michael D.; Brettler, Marc Z.; Perkins, Pheme; Newsom, Carol A..: The New
Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha New Revised Standard Version. Oxford
University Press. Kindle Edition.
The Authorized King James Version of the
Holy Bible (Old and New Testament) Fair Price Classics. Kindle Edition.
