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| The world's first gay pride float. Get it Noah! You fierce, grrrl! |
The chapter first, uninterrupted, from the English Standard Version of the Bible.
1 But God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the livestock that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided.
2 The fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed, the rain from the heavens was restrained,
3 and the waters receded from the earth continually. At the end of 150 days the waters had abated,
4 and in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.
5 And the waters continued to abate until the tenth month; in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains were seen.
6 At the end of forty days Noah opened the window of the ark that he had made
7 and sent forth a raven. It went to and fro until the waters were dried up from the earth.
8 Then he sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters had subsided from the face of the ground.
9 But the dove found no place to set her foot, and she returned to him to the ark, for the waters were still on the face of the whole earth. So he put out his hand and took her and brought her into the ark with him.
10 He waited another seven days, and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark.
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11 And the dove came back to him in the evening, and behold, in her mouth was a freshly plucked olive leaf. So Noah knew that the waters had subsided from the earth.
12 Then he waited another seven days and sent forth the dove, and she did not return to him anymore.
13 In the six hundred and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried from off the earth. And Noah removed the covering of the ark and looked, and behold, the face of the ground was dry.
14 In the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, the earth had dried out.
15 Then God said to Noah,
16 “Go out from the ark, you and your wife, and your sons and your sons' wives with you.
17 Bring out with you every living thing that is with you of all flesh—birds and animals and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth—that they may swarm on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply on the earth.”
18 So Noah went out, and his sons and his wife and his sons' wives with him.
19 Every beast, every creeping thing, and every bird, everything that moves on the earth, went out by families from the ark.
20 Then Noah built an altar to the LORD and took some of every clean animal and some of every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar.
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21 And when the LORD smelled the pleasing aroma, the LORD said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done.
22 While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.”
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The Bible gives a startling amount of emphasis to this one provably false story, because the Deluge epic was a big deal in Mesopotamian society at the time, as discussed in the previous two posts. There is some inconsistency in terms of how long the Bible claims that the flood went on: in Genesis 7:17, for example, we are told that the rains lasted for forty days, but in two later verses (Genesis 7:24, and Genesis 8:3) it is said that the 'waters prevailed upon the earth' for 150 days. Now, to be fair, there is some flexibility for the ardent believer here: one could easily argue that while the rains fell for 40 days, they did not evaporate until 150 days after they began, when the flooding finally receded.
It is only on the matter of when the flood finally receded that the Bible truly contradicts itself on timing, in a way that is not defensible. If we take it as a given that the interpretation above is correct, we know that the rains fell for 40 days, and the ark floated for 150 days. However, the very next two verses (Genesis 8:3-4) contradict each other completely. In the first, the Bible insists that on 17th day of the 7th month, the ark crash landed on the mountains of Ararat. In the latter verse, we are told that the waters decreased continually, until the 10th day of the 10th month, when the very tops of mountains were first revealed above the waves.
If the mountains of Ararat were not exposed to the air until October, how did Noah crash land on them in July? While I think everyone is attuned to expect contradictions in the Bible, one does not necessarily expect them to be in directly consecutive verses! In any case, Noah crashed at some point in summer or autumn on the mountains of Ararat, a geographical feature that nobody can quite locate in the present day. According to Muslims, it can be found deep in the heart of Islamic territory, in Iran. According to Christian Armenians, it is instead located in their former territory in Turkey. One expects if you ask a member of any relevant religion, he will find a cozy place in his ancestral homeland upon which the ark undoubtedly landed.
Apparently, after either 40 or 150 days floating on rainwater in a tiny boat filled with animal shit, Noah got tired of waiting and decided to do some scientific experimentation of his own. In order to find out whether the waters had receded, Noah sent forth a raven from his ark's tiny 18 inch window. Apparently, it never came back because he decided to repeat the effort again, this time with a dove.
The dove flew away happily but eventually came back, and Noah took that as a sign that there was no dry land upon which the dove could set its feet. Reasonable enough perhaps, until one thinks to wonder why Noah didn't just ask God when the trip would be over. God seems to have forgotten that he left this poor man and his family adrift on a temporary sea, with a boat-load of beasts for company.
Speaking of this enormously long-lasting world-wide deluge, it should be made clear is that 40 (or 150) days of flooding seems like overkill when one wants to merely eliminate animal life. Drowning takes a matter of seconds, really - but more troubling is the potential effect of a month of non-stop rain on plant life as well.
Sure, God safeguarded all of his precious animal species on-board Noah's boat, but once they climb off, what are they going to eat? Plants can drown, albeit a bit more slowly than animals; if soil is over-saturated with rainwater, it lacks the air pockets that roots need to obtain oxygen from their environment, and can lead to root-rot and other fungal diseases that completely destroy the life of the plant.
Putting aside the herbivores for an instant, what exactly are the carnivores going to munch upon? God saved only two of each type of beast, and one can imagine that, after 40 (or 150) days of floating, those beasts were a bit hungry. What is to stop the lion, as soon as he disembarks, from hopping upon one of the lambs, devouring it and thus destroying the lamb species for all eternity?
Every meal that any meat-eater enjoys will mean the death of an entire species, on the post-diluvian Earth. That digression aside, Noah completed his dove-experiment again seven days later, and finally the dove returned with an olive leaf in its beak, and Noah took that as proof that the waters were going away. Seven days later he sent the dove out again and it never came back, so Noah ripped the roof off his boat (it sounds like a can of sardines) and saw that there was land underneath him at last. Now, though Genesis 8:4 tells us that the ark crash-landed on the mountains of Ararat in July, we are here informed that Noah didn't see dry land until January 1st.
Even then, it took God until February 27th to finally tell Noah and his family to get their asses off the ark, and one can only imagine how jubilant they were. Noah, in all his wisdom and virtue, immediately set about building an altar, and upon it he burned the corpses of every clean animal as a tribute to God. Now let's think about this for a second... We already mentioned that there were only two of each animal species on the whole ark. If Noah rounded up one of those two from each species God considered 'clean' and promptly slaughtered them for animal sacrifice, this would have meant the extinction of every single species considered 'clean,' and so we would not have them to eat today.
In 8:21, we are gladly informed that God, this omnipotent being who wished the 300 million stars in our galaxy and the 200 billion galaxies in our Universe into existence, very much loves the scent of dead animal carcasses being consumed by flame. So happy is God with the smell of cooking meat that he pledges never to curse the earth again. He admits that he killed all living things because man is evil, but then he says that because man is evil from the very beginning of his youth, he will not go to the bother of trying to kill them all again. Quite confusing, really. In any case, it seems pretty easy to please God and to change his mind when he has decided to murder all humanity; a few well-timed steak filets seem to do the trick. One wonders why we aren't grilling cows on the Church altar in modern times; clearly the sky-wizard loves that shit.
And so we embark on a new journey, where all the animals of the Earth exist only in pairs (barring those that were eaten by the other pairs and/or sacrificed to please our burnt-skin-fetishist creator), and where all the humans on Earth will descend from a single family of four men and four women, two of whom are at least 600 years old.
It is only on the matter of when the flood finally receded that the Bible truly contradicts itself on timing, in a way that is not defensible. If we take it as a given that the interpretation above is correct, we know that the rains fell for 40 days, and the ark floated for 150 days. However, the very next two verses (Genesis 8:3-4) contradict each other completely. In the first, the Bible insists that on 17th day of the 7th month, the ark crash landed on the mountains of Ararat. In the latter verse, we are told that the waters decreased continually, until the 10th day of the 10th month, when the very tops of mountains were first revealed above the waves.
If the mountains of Ararat were not exposed to the air until October, how did Noah crash land on them in July? While I think everyone is attuned to expect contradictions in the Bible, one does not necessarily expect them to be in directly consecutive verses! In any case, Noah crashed at some point in summer or autumn on the mountains of Ararat, a geographical feature that nobody can quite locate in the present day. According to Muslims, it can be found deep in the heart of Islamic territory, in Iran. According to Christian Armenians, it is instead located in their former territory in Turkey. One expects if you ask a member of any relevant religion, he will find a cozy place in his ancestral homeland upon which the ark undoubtedly landed.
Apparently, after either 40 or 150 days floating on rainwater in a tiny boat filled with animal shit, Noah got tired of waiting and decided to do some scientific experimentation of his own. In order to find out whether the waters had receded, Noah sent forth a raven from his ark's tiny 18 inch window. Apparently, it never came back because he decided to repeat the effort again, this time with a dove.
The dove flew away happily but eventually came back, and Noah took that as a sign that there was no dry land upon which the dove could set its feet. Reasonable enough perhaps, until one thinks to wonder why Noah didn't just ask God when the trip would be over. God seems to have forgotten that he left this poor man and his family adrift on a temporary sea, with a boat-load of beasts for company.
Speaking of this enormously long-lasting world-wide deluge, it should be made clear is that 40 (or 150) days of flooding seems like overkill when one wants to merely eliminate animal life. Drowning takes a matter of seconds, really - but more troubling is the potential effect of a month of non-stop rain on plant life as well.
Sure, God safeguarded all of his precious animal species on-board Noah's boat, but once they climb off, what are they going to eat? Plants can drown, albeit a bit more slowly than animals; if soil is over-saturated with rainwater, it lacks the air pockets that roots need to obtain oxygen from their environment, and can lead to root-rot and other fungal diseases that completely destroy the life of the plant.
Putting aside the herbivores for an instant, what exactly are the carnivores going to munch upon? God saved only two of each type of beast, and one can imagine that, after 40 (or 150) days of floating, those beasts were a bit hungry. What is to stop the lion, as soon as he disembarks, from hopping upon one of the lambs, devouring it and thus destroying the lamb species for all eternity?
Every meal that any meat-eater enjoys will mean the death of an entire species, on the post-diluvian Earth. That digression aside, Noah completed his dove-experiment again seven days later, and finally the dove returned with an olive leaf in its beak, and Noah took that as proof that the waters were going away. Seven days later he sent the dove out again and it never came back, so Noah ripped the roof off his boat (it sounds like a can of sardines) and saw that there was land underneath him at last. Now, though Genesis 8:4 tells us that the ark crash-landed on the mountains of Ararat in July, we are here informed that Noah didn't see dry land until January 1st.
Even then, it took God until February 27th to finally tell Noah and his family to get their asses off the ark, and one can only imagine how jubilant they were. Noah, in all his wisdom and virtue, immediately set about building an altar, and upon it he burned the corpses of every clean animal as a tribute to God. Now let's think about this for a second... We already mentioned that there were only two of each animal species on the whole ark. If Noah rounded up one of those two from each species God considered 'clean' and promptly slaughtered them for animal sacrifice, this would have meant the extinction of every single species considered 'clean,' and so we would not have them to eat today.
In 8:21, we are gladly informed that God, this omnipotent being who wished the 300 million stars in our galaxy and the 200 billion galaxies in our Universe into existence, very much loves the scent of dead animal carcasses being consumed by flame. So happy is God with the smell of cooking meat that he pledges never to curse the earth again. He admits that he killed all living things because man is evil, but then he says that because man is evil from the very beginning of his youth, he will not go to the bother of trying to kill them all again. Quite confusing, really. In any case, it seems pretty easy to please God and to change his mind when he has decided to murder all humanity; a few well-timed steak filets seem to do the trick. One wonders why we aren't grilling cows on the Church altar in modern times; clearly the sky-wizard loves that shit.
And so we embark on a new journey, where all the animals of the Earth exist only in pairs (barring those that were eaten by the other pairs and/or sacrificed to please our burnt-skin-fetishist creator), and where all the humans on Earth will descend from a single family of four men and four women, two of whom are at least 600 years old.
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