A sceptical reading of
the Bible – GENESIS – BOOKS 6 –
11
Chapter Six
Dominated by the Flood
story and Noah’s Ark, this text
lies at the heart of Creationist beliefs, and therefore requires close analysis
more than virtually any other part of the Bible.
We have already been
introduced at least by name to Noah, and his three sons, Shem, Ham &
Japeth. We are now told of their three wives. There is no mention of Noah’s
wife, though some scholars put her on the Ark crew too, so there were either 7
or 8 people due to survive the Flood –
no more.
Verse 3 - God now reduces the average age of man to 120 years. No
specific reason is given for this, and given what is about to happen, it seems
superfluous anyway. We won’t be seeing men like Methuselah living for 900 years
plus though. Except we do, as this line seems to get forgotten later for a
while anyway.
By Verse 5, God has
decided humanity is just plain evil, and chooses to wipe us out altogether. Verse 7 states that he is equally disgusted
with the other creatures he has made. “"I will blot out man whom I have
created from the face of the ground, man and beast and creeping things and
birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them."
Noah and family alone are deemed safe from the
great extinction, at least among humans. Exactly what evil everyone else
committed is never stated, nor why Noah was such a good man. And what could a
wombat do to upset a God enough to make that god want to destroy it completely?
Verse 14 – God tells Noah to build the Ark, from Gopher wood, and
divide it into rooms.It is to be built to a specific design, 300 by 50 by 30
cubits. It has three decks a roof, and a single door.
Let’s
look at what that might mean in a little detail. There is no such wood as
Gopher wood, so it may be a mistranslation. Theologians suggest it may be
timber, or reeds, or bitumen, all used in boat building in the Near East in
ancient times. Cubits are an unspecified unit of measure possibly the length of
a man’s arms (usually the carpenter’s arm). It is rather akin to the measuring
of horses in ‘hands’.
This
means that we have no real idea what wood the Ark was made of or its true
dimensions.
Noah,
his sons and their wives, are to be the only survivors of the great flood God
is due to unleash. Everyone else on Earth is doomed.
Noah has to build a
ship (his trade is not stated, nor if the other family crew help make the
vessel, or if anyone else assists. On top of that, Noah is expected to round up
two of all the animals. Verse 19
– “you shall bring two of every sort into the ark, to keep them alive with you;
they shall be male and female.”
Noah,
ship builder, sailor, family man and animal catcher, zoologist, etc. Quite a
man. He also has to bring on board enough food for everyone and all the animals
to consume over 190 days. .
Noah’s
bizarre tasks continue to be spelt out.
Verse 2 “Take with you seven pairs of all clean
animals, the male and his mate; and a pair of the animals that are not clean,
the male and his mate;”
Exactly
what is clean is unclear, though it almost certainly means edible livestock.
Trouble is, in Chapter 6, Noah was told to bring two of each animal, one male
and female. The clean beasts are presumably an extension on that. Noah also
gets additional birds to look after, - 7 of each species.
Verse 4 is my favourite line in Genesis. Verse 4 “For in seven days I will send rain
upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living thing that I have
made I will blot out from the face of the ground."
Even
if Noah has already started and almost completed building the ark with only 6
or 7 people to help him, expecting him to round up so many animals in a week is
clearly ridiculous, especially as many countries, let alone species, were
undiscovered for centuries to come. Could Noah have really found arctic polar
bears (let alone persuaded them to come to the ark), Antarctic penguins,
Australian marsupials, and Chinese Pandas to get on a wooden boat with one door
in the space of 7 days?
I
looked up these figures on line. This is the estimated number of creatures on
our planet today.
MAMMALS
15,000
FISH
20,000
INSECTS
over a million.
BIRDS
9.000 – Noah taking 7 of each on board the ark
REPTILES
6,000
Amphibians
1,000
Quite
a catch for seven naturalists to rake in within a week.
We
might expect Noah to leave the fish alone, but we’ll come back to them later.
The
World’s biggest zoos, and safari parks, staffed by hundreds, with animals kept
in carefully controlled artificial environments and temperature regulated cages
and enclosures could not cope with such a menagerie. The zoos take a staff of
hundreds, many of them specialists. Many animals have specific regulated diets.
Picture
Noah wrangling a rattlesnake, while the wife of Seth tries to persuade an
Alligator to leave the Everglades and get on a boat in Asia. Ham tries to catch
a south American Condor or seven, way before Columbus sails the Ocean Blue and
discovers the Americas where they nest. And so it goes on.
It
is possible God helped out, maybe by teleporting animals to Noah for caging up.
He may also have given Noah a book or divine knowledge of exactly how to cut
and present the right kind of Bamboo to the pandas, and Eucalyptus leaves for
the koala bears. Had Noah fed them the wrong diet they creatures would have
perished?
With
the last Jaguar on board, and just in time, Noah is ready for the worst wet
season in human history.
Of course the absence
of dinosaurs and other
prehistoric creatures in the Biblical references, and their lack of activity in
the World today leads creationists to
think they never existed. Had there been a mating pair of T-Rex’s, Noah would
have accommodated them on the Ark alongside antelope and tree frogs. Of course,
it is just a little more likely T-Rex existed but Noah’s Ark did not.
Such
floodwater might be assumed to serve no real inconvenience to the fish at
least, but actually, yes it would. The mix of salt and fresh water would wipe
out most river creatures. Also, deep-sea water creatures would find the rising
water would increase the pressure over them, and many would be crushed to death
by their intensifying atmosphere. Currents would shift; warm waters turn cold,
etc. Air breathing marine mammals like Whales and Dolphins would suffer worst
of all, as in diving deep for fish, or plankton, that the rising water would be
much deeper as they ascended than they thought it was in submerging themselves.
They would probably drown.
It
seems that the Ark would therefore also require an aquarium, and Noah may well
have invented scuba gear way before Jacques Cousteau did it.
The
flood would also threaten much fauna. You may have over-watered your window box
plants once in a while, so imagine roses and daffodils coping with waters
rising over 700 feet a day. Noah would have had to take a botanical garden or
thousands of types of seeds on his strange voyage too.
Verse 10. It rains. It starts
on February 17th. It last 40 days & Nights. Noah is 600 years
old. He was presumably aged before God set the time scale on human life to a maximum
of 120 or we have another minor contradiction. (See above). Not only does it
rain, but the waters rise up from within the Earth too, suggesting not only the
water table, but some colossal underground reservoirs being unleashed too.
Verse 19 tells us the highest mountains were covered
entirely by the water. That would have to include Mount Everest. We now have a
scale for the deluge and a means to measure the rate of water rising.
Everest
is 29,035 feet above sea level, give or take 100 foot of snow on top. For water
to rise from our current sea level to the tip of the summit of Everest in 40
days, the water would rise at the rate of 725.875 feet each day. That is
clearly overkill on God’s part. A flood with water rising thirty feet high can
destroy a city.
A
flood on that scale and speed is truly unprecedented in human records. Most
people would be wiped out in the first few hours of the first day, let alone
over 40 days. The rivers would rise sharply so anyone on low ground would be
engulfed very quickly. Those taking to the hills would find new rivers forming
as the water swept down hill, and there would be giant mudslides everywhere.
Few could hope to find shelter for even a short time.
The
only true hope of survival would be to take to boats as Noah did, and it is not
unreasonable to expect others would try, especially from coastal towns.
Fishermen might already have been sailing when the rains started. There is no
mention of God, or Noah, taking action in regard to other boats. Many would
undoubtedly not survive the epic scale oceanic storms and waves created by such
colossal storms.
Noah
however, sailed out the tempest and looked after a giant floating zoo at the
same time, if we take the story literally.
Many
Creationists are quick to talk of how many cultures describe epic floods in
their histories. It is not surprising given humans had to live in proximity to
drinking water, and that many of the early civilizations lived by the great
rivers, The Nile, Euphrates, Ganges, Jordan, etc. These rivers would flow and
spate a great deal. Many people would have known floods that were worse than
average, possibly killing many of their relatives. No flood like that seen by
Noah could have taken place though.
Once
Everest was under water the floods stopped rising but stayed on the Earth for
150 days, during which Noah, sons and daughters-in-law fed, mucked out, and
tended to the zoo.
CHAPTER 8
God finally lets the
waters go down. Earth population is now 7 people, plus the beasts they looked
after. On the 17th of
July that year, the Ark came to rest on the top of Mount Ararat in Turkey. Many
people go there to this day searching for the remains of the Ark. A few claim
to have found it, convincing even fewer.
Given that Noah
doesn’t see dry land in the form of mountain peaks until the 10thmonth,
the Ark appears to be merely grounded, and have its keel on the mountaintop,
but a dry feet landing was still impossible.
40
days after the spotting of a mountain peak, Noah put the birds to good use,
sending them out to fly, until after three attempts, 7 days apart, a Dove fails
to return, telling Noah that it has found somewhere to nest and roost. An
earlier recon mission had seen the clever dove return with an Olive Leaf. A
year after setting sail, on The 1st February, God finally tells Noah that he
can disembark from the Ark.
Noah
lets all the animals go free, leaving polar bears to presumably swim back home
to the Arctic, and Kangaroos to hop all the way back to Australia. He does
however keep back many of the birds to burn them in a sacrifice as thanks to
God for saving him and his family from the fate shared by the rest of humanity.
Verse 6 A few rules are imposed on Noah and co though. They are
forbidden to eat flesh that still bleeds. (That rare steak you had the other
day might land you in Hell). More importantly, any man committing murder will
be subjected to death – the earliest provision of Capital punishment was now in
force.
In Verse 11, God vows to
never kill the other animals on the planet again (he says nothing about letting
humans avoid mass extinction). “Neither will I ever again destroy every living
creature as I have done.” This will be contradicted at the other end of the
Bible in Revelations, which seems to prophesy the end of the World. It’s
unlikely the animals could survive that any more than people could.
Verse 13. The Rainbow was now
created before Noah, as proof that the rain is just ordinary rain, and not the
beginning of another all consuming flood.
Chapter 9
Noah
needs something to do now he has survived the flood, and he makes himself a
vineyard. He then proceeds to get drunk on the wine produced. He falls asleep
one day, drunk and naked. Ham sees him, and unsure what to do, he tells his
brothers about the situation.
Two
of Noah's sons, Shem & Japeth decide to put their cloaks over him to
presumably help keep him warm, but Noah wakes up enraged by their action. As
punishment, he insists that Caanan, son of Ham, his own grandson, be made a
slave with Seph as his master.
Quite
what is going on here is unclear. Ham’s punishment seems to be for exploiting
his father’s embarrassment, gossip, or possibly for insinuation of some kind of
sexual disgrace by Noah. To God,
Noah was one of the
good people who deserved to live.
Noah
lives on to the ripe old age of 950 and then dies.
Chapter 10
A linage chapter
outlining a host of generations spawned by the sons of Noah. Some will be
important later, most notably Nimrod,
or is he?
These lineage family
trees also led some literalists to work out from the ages of the various
personages how old the World was. James Ussher, in the 17th Century, calculated that the World was
created in 4004 BC; by his calculations the Flood occurred in 2348 BC. Yeah,
right.
Chapter 11
Noah’s
descendants multiply and scatter off round the globe, though everyone still
talks the same language, and consider themselves of one nation and race.
In
Shinar, the people get not only highly civilized but conclude that by working
together they can build a tower so tall it will touch Heaven, and that it will
match the wonders created by God.
God is not impressed.
He actually feels threatened by the human act of solidarity and unity in the
building project. He punishes the people of Shinar by confounding their
language, causing them to fail to communicate, fall out and scatter. The great
tower project is abandoned, and the city renamed as Babel, for the babble of confusion
caused by a spiteful petty God.
Many
legends outside the Bible attribute the tower of Babel to Nimrod, though he is
never directly linked to it in Genesis itself. He is merely one name in the
lineage of descent from Noah.
The lineage continues
after the Babel incident, to verse 29, and the first mention of Abraham, father of the Jews, initially
called Abram. He is married to Sara, who cannot bear him a child. Together they
settle in Haran, in Caanan, as the chapter draws to a close.
All text quotations
from http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/r/rsv/rsv-idx?type=DIV1&byte=1801
Arthur Chappell
© Copyright. Arthur Chappell
LINK TO THIS PAGE http://arthurchappell.me.uk/bible-genesis-6-11.htm
E-mail arthur@chappell7300.freeserve.co.uk
LINKS TO OTHER PEOPLES PAGES UPDATES MYSPACE - http://www.myspace.com/arthurchappell
FACEBOOK - http://www.facebook.com/arthur.chappell
FACEBOOK BLOG http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blogpage.php?blogid=85623
FACEBOOK FAN PAGE http://www.facebook.com/pages/ARTHUR-CHAPPELLS-WRITING-POETRY-MODELLING-PHOTOGRAPHY-FAN-PAGE/366778907731?ref=mf
MY BOOKS - http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=952521
MY FLIXYA PHOTO PAGES http://www.flixya.com/user/arthurchappell
MY TWITTER
PAGE - http://twitter.com/arthurchappell
PHOTOS OF ME & GENERAL PHOTOGRAPHS
MY WOOPHY
PHOTO SHARING PAGE - http://www.woophy.com/member/Arthur+Chappell
MY FLICKR PAGE http://www.flickr.com/photos/arthurchappell/
MY MODEL MAYHEM PAGE http://www.modelmayhem.com/arthurchappell
MY MODEL URL WEB PAGE http://modelurl.com/arthurchappell
BOOK REVIEWS AND ABSTRACTS - http://www.shvoong.com/writers/arthurchappell/
MY SHARE A LINK PHOTO PAGES http://www.shareapic.net/user/arthurchappell
Shetoldme – Website summaries portal – many reviews of my pages - http://shetoldme.com/referral/7368b651
YOUGOV SURVEY
PAGES - http://my.yougov.com/go.aspx?id=83d4324b-e38d-4022-af7d-44ee3ab4f4c9