Noah

“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 10^th 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.