Genesis 6: Noah's Ark & the Fallacy of the Flood.

The chapter first, uninterrupted, from the English Standard Version of the Bible.  

 -----------------------------------------------------------------------

1 When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, 
2 the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose.
3 Then the LORD said, “My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.”
4 The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.
5 The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. 
6 And the LORD regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.
7 So the LORD said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.” 
8 But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD.
9 These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God.
10 And Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
 -----------------------------------------------------------------------
11 Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight, and the earth was filled with violence.
12 And God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth. 
13 And God said to Noah, “I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence through them. Behold, I will destroy them with the earth.
14 Make yourself an ark of gopher wood. Make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch. 
15 This is how you are to make it: the length of the ark 300 cubits, its breadth 50 cubits, and its height 30 cubits. 
16 Make a roof for the ark, and finish it to a cubit above, and set the door of the ark in its side. Make it with lower, second, and third decks.
17 For behold, I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life under heaven. Everything that is on the earth shall die.
18 But I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons' wives with you. 
19 And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every sort into the ark to keep them alive with you. They shall be male and female. 
20 Of the birds according to their kinds, and of the animals according to their kinds, of every creeping thing of the ground, according to its kind, two of every sort shall come in to you to keep them alive. 
 -----------------------------------------------------------------------
21 Also take with you every sort of food that is eaten, and store it up. It shall serve as food for you and for them.” 
22 Noah did this; he did all that God commanded him.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

The first thing to take note of in this odd chapter is the introduction of an entirely new category of being heretofore unmentioned in the narrative: that is, the mysterious 'sons of God,' who are apparently quite different from the daughters of men.  The origins of these mysterious 'sons of God' are shrouded in mystery, as are any details about their numbers, habits, or features, but what is clear is that they decided human females were hot, and so they began to couple with them in odd interspecial marriages.  


Somewhat randomly, God decides at this moment to limit the human lifespan to 120 years.  Nevermind the fact that for over two thousand years previously, according to the poorly constructed timeline in Genesis 5, humans were permitted to live upwards of 800 years; God seems to have noticed, in this far distant time of angels copulating with women, that humans were made of flesh.  One wonders if that is a recent change, and if so what exactly men were made of before this change took place.  


Given that pointless aside about lifespans, likely thrown in by an overeager editor to try to bridge the gap between Methuselah's ridiculous longevity and the reality of human frailty, the narrative switches again to the mysterious non-human sentients that populated the earth right along with mankind.  These creatures are called the Nephilim.  Though this is usually translated as 'giants' in many Biblical texts, the Hebrew word probably originates from the verb npl (נָפַל), which means 'to cause to fall; to kill; to ruin'.  Scholars are split on what exactly this means; some have claimed that it refers to the Nephilim as "the fallen," or as apostates unto God.  


Whomever these creatures were, whether they be giants, angels, or demons fallen to Earth, verse 4 makes it clear that their offspring were not evil, but were instead the champions and heroes of this dark, ahistorical era.  They were the mighty men, the men of renown, seemingly very similar to mythological demigods that one can find in many other cultures of the region.  Curiously, though these men are described as exceptional and apparently benevolent, they are never once individually named.  


Suddenly things turn a little batshit.  God decides (6:5) that the creatures he personally crafted in his own image are not worthy of life.  Though he is variously described as omniscent and omnipotent, somehow God is surprised by the actions of humankind, creatures that he presumably created with all of their faults and flaws, the same features he now uses to condemn them to horrible death.  Like a child vengefully looming over an ant farm in which he has lost interest, God decides to get rid of mankind in the cruelest of ways.


As a deity that presumably knows all, one would think that regret would be an emotion foreign to him; after all, in order to regret something, one must be unaware of the eventual consequences that will result from one's actions.  As God, he would presumably have known at the very moment of creation that things would turn out poorly, and so the idea that he was surprised does not gel particularly well with the entire 'all seeing, all knowing' package of super-powers attributed to him.  


In any case, God gets maudlin over 'wickedness' in man, and decides to purge the entirety of life on earth just to get back at one species with which he took offense.  Even insects, those humble and godly creatures, are not spared the wrath of this vengeful and fickle master, who bellows a curse down upon his creation.  One wonders what 'wickedness' these poor descendants of Adam were up to that required the entire extermination of life on Earth.  After all, when Cain murdered his own brother Abel and thus introduced premeditated killing into the world, he was censured with a mild exile to a fecund land wherein he begat children of his own.  If murder resulted in such a low-key punishment, it's hard to imagine what sin these early settlers could have committed to condemn their wives and children to a violent and uncomfortable death by drowning.  


It is interesting to note that 6:11 gives the reason for God's disgust as ever-present violence; to remedy that unfortunate situation, God apparently decided to violently murder his children.  Maybe men were created in his image after all!


From one side of his mouth God tells Noah that he's going to eliminate all flesh because flesh is weak and evil, but from the other side of his mouth he tells the old man to build an ark out of gopher wood to save some of that flesh from its planned destruction.  Though there are plenty of theories, nobody is certain what gopher wood is, exactly, or why God blueprinted the building materials and specifications for the ark, down to its measurements and room arrangements.  The measurements, truth be told, are really not at all impressive - three hundred cubits only amounts to about 450 feet, which is only a bit longer than a football field; certainly not large enough to accommodate two of every living species on earth (or even in Mesopotamia).   


Still, for an ancient wooden ship, this size is unwieldy at best, and impossible at worst.  A boat of that length, made only of wood, would be so fragile as to be entirely unseaworthy.  In fact, the longest functioning wooden boat ever built was 329 feet long, and that required iron supports along its frame.  Iron, of course, was not in common use until many thousands of years after the purported Deluge, and so would not have been available to Noah.


More importantly, though, is the fact that wood wouldn't have been available to him either.  The fact is that Mesopotamia, the land from which Noah originated, was remarkably bereft of timber.  The people of Sumer and descendant civilizations built houses out of sun-baked clay bricks because there simply were no trees from which to obtain wood.  The small amount of lumber that was actually imported from international traders was used to adorn temples and other structures purely decoratively; there simply was not enough of the stuff to build with.  One imagines it might be possible in the fevered mind of a believer to think up a way by which God magically provided the timber, but then one has to ask why the Old Man didn't just pop a fully-constructed boat down at Noah's feet if he's going to go to the trouble of magically transporting building materials.  


Hilariously, God finds it appropriate to tell Noah to ventilate the putrid, unwieldy savage-animal-filled ark by carving a single 18 inch window into its side.  Certainly that would be enough to get rid of the atrocious smell of 150-days worth of thousands of animals' shit and piss.  


Though seconds before (6:13) God had said he would be killing all creatures of flesh, he orders Noah to gather up two examples (one male, one female) of every species on earth and put them on his tiny, unstable wooden boat. The logistics of this event make it laughable to contemplate.  One can only imagine Noah and his three sons skulking about on the plains of modern Iraq, picking up cockroaches and earthworms to protect them from the coming punishment.   As there are upwards of six million different species of insect on earth, it's hard to imagine that these four men had a pleasant boat ride.  With a boat full of predators and prey, one wonders how the animals were kept from eating each other; but perhaps the ones that got eaten went extinct and did not survive the journey.


One day, perhaps, on a Mesopotamian mountaintop we will stumble upon an ancient ark made of magic celestial wood, complete with the fossilized remains of unicorns, fairies, leprechauns, and mermaids, all of whom tragically did not make it through Noah's long voyage, and so were lost to mankind and to history.  The dinosaurs, clearly, were much too large to fit on the vessel and so they were left on ground, relegated to the awful fate of mass drowning.  


Speaking of that fate, mass drowning - it seems an awful way to get rid of all life on earth for a supreme deity.  If God is indeed all powerful and wanted to spare some beings while eliminating other ones, could he not have done that with a mere thought?  After all, in six days this mighty being was able to create everything that exists in the universe; are we to believe that he could not have remade the world without violence with the snap of his fingers?


Could not an all-powerful God simply get rid of the violence instead of murdering children with relentless rains?  If the motivations of the flesh could not be so easily conquered, could not God at least have simply blinked the offenders out of existence instead of putting Noah and his sons through all the hassle of a world-wide animal scavenger hunt?  It seems an awfully cruel way to reshuffle the deck, for a God who can presumably do anything in any way he wishes.  


It's important to point out, in any discussion of the Deluge, that this story is not Biblical in origin at all.  In fact, far more ancient cultures than the Semites have held the Flood to be a true legend, and there is archaeological evidence to support its existence.  I am not talking about the absurd belief that the Grand Canyon and the Great Lakes were carved by Noah's waters, but rather the unmistakable proof that there was widespread flooding in southern Iraq, all the way up to the holy city of Kish.  


In fact, to the Sumerians of the time period, their entire civilization (based in the south of Iraq) was sent into tumult by rising waters, and they were forced to relocate their cities to points farther north; the seat of the kingship moved to the new city of Kish, which was the first build after the great flood.  But the Sumerians were apparently not foolish enough to claim that this massive flooding was world-wide; it took thousands of years of poor retelling by dramatic and simple men for the story to transmogrify into that kind of sensationalism. 


In the Sumerian tale (as it is recounted by descendant civilizations like the Babylonians and the Akkadians), the gods decided that they were too lazy to do farm labor and maintain the rivers and canals that they had just created, and so they formed the human race as a slave class to do their bidding for them.  Unfortunately, the gods did not plan for these men to be able to breed as quickly as they did, and overpopulation and famine quickly resulted.  


The god Enlil, Lord of the Storm, the chief deity of the Sumerian pantheon, decided to send drought and destruction to humanity every 1200 years or so, to keep their numbers happily in check, though the Sumerians are wise enough to view this activity as nasty and vicious, instead of celebrating the mass-murder of presumably thousands of human beings as Judeo-Christians do.  


In the Sumerian work called the Eridu Genesis, the Deluge story revolves around the figure of Ziusudra (whose name means "found long life" or "life of long days").  Just as the Old Testament God regretted his creation, the Sumerian gods had finally had enough of humanity and decided they wanted to eliminate the nuisance once and for all.  Enki, god of crafts and mischief, benevolently betrays his godly compatriots and warns Ziusudra of the coming disastrous flood, and so Ziusudra builds himself a giant boat in order to survive the storm.  Through this singular man, humanity is spared.  


This story is more logically consistent than the Old Testament version; it makes a great deal more sense that the God who wanted to destroy mankind was not the same as the God who sought to save them from destruction, but monotheism requires that all divinities be boiled down into one, and so the Flood epic makes the Biblical God look schizophrenic and fickle. It is hard to imagine how anyone can read the text of the Eridu Genesis (known to have been originally written down during the First Babylonian Dynasty) and not realize that the Noah story is nothing more than a pale and badly-edited shadow of the original myth.  


In Jewish tradition, the first six chapters of Genesis are called the Bereishit (בְּרֵאשִׁית — Hebrew for "in beginning,” the first word in the text); this serves as its end, and the beginning of the Noach ( נֹחַ, Hebrew for Noah).