2012: Re-inverting an Ancient Epic

Last updated on: May 1, 2010 at 11:11 pm by James F. McGrath

2012: Re-inverting an Ancient Epic 2010-05-01T23:11:00-04:00 James F. McGrath

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I just finished watching the movie 2012, which uses religious imagery and ideas in interesting ways. On the one hand, there is a strong anti-religious message. It is as though every time someone prays in the movie, their death is ensured to follow shortly thereafter. Now it may be fair to poke fun at those who would choose prayer rather than science when facing a disaster of which science is the prophet predicting it. But 2012 seems to go further, for instance when it highlights that the Italian prime minister does not survive, because he chooses to remain behind and join others in prayer in Rome. As they do so, a highly symbolic crack cuts through the depiction of creation in the Sistine Chapel, separating God the Creator from Adam his creation.

Yet the message is mixed, because there is also a suggestion that the Mayans knew, and the crazy sign-carrying street corner preachers knew, and thus religion somehow had an inside track. But as will be clear to most people in 2013 if not before, precise predictions simply do not get made so long in advance. Sometimes prophets get lucky, but those who have studied the Bible in an academic rather than a superficial way know that most seemingly precise predictions tend to be either examples of pseudo-prophecy (the Book of Daniel is a famous example) or involve texts being applied to an individual in non-straightforward ways (as in Matthew’s use of prophetic texts in his story of Jesus’ infancy).

The message of the movie is that science is the force truly capable of detecting and predicting imminent disaster, and the only place to look for a solution, however meager it may be. Yet in proclaiming this message, the movie nevertheless echoes religious themes and even plays into the hands of so-called literalist interpretations of the Bible. The movie 2012 seems to imply that a global flood (or at least a tsunami) reaching the highest mountains is scientifically feasible. It offers arks filled with animals and people as a solution. It even alludes to the theme of creation being undone and redone as found in Genesis, for instance when the year when the ark can be opened is designated “Year 0001.”

If we use the movie as a starting point for reflecting on the Biblical story of Noah, we notice that, just as the movie inverts key themes in the Noah story while preserving others, likewise the Noah story inverted elements of the traditional story of Utnapishtim from the Epic of Gilgamesh while preserving others. This is important information for interpreters to have, since without it, we are left merely with a disturbing portrait of a God who behaves in seemingly inexplicable ways. That a global flood would be an odd means for a truly omnipotent God to use to punish humans rarely occurs to readers of the story, due at least in part to our overfamiliarity with it. But simply willing wicked humans into non-existence would have been much simpler than gathering animals onto a boat. And an all-merciful divine parent who drowns children who anger him is disturbing. And so anyone who takes comfort when they hear reports that the ark has been found, proving the story to be literally true, probably needs to go back and reread the story more carefully once again.

We can only make sense of the story of Noah in the Bible if we realize that it is the work of one or more ancient Israelite authors trying to retell a classic story with a monotheistic twist. But where once there were some gods working against other gods, having one sovereign and almight character pulling all the strings meant that the same God had to be responsible for sending the flood and for saving Noah and his family. And so an appeal to divine anger at human sinfulness was brought in, and it saves the coherence of the story to a large extent – but at a price.

So what is the appropriate thing for scientifically-informed individuals, almost as far removed in time from the Biblical version’s composition as that version was from the origin of the story that inspired it? Perhaps it is better to go even further, and retell the story as Roland Emmerich does in 2012, replacing a personal but angry and perhaps even cruel God with unfeeling nature. It is one thing to say that “God is not benevolent” and quite another to talk of nature, or of an underlying rational principle of nature, in this way, as the Daodejing does when it says “”Heaven and earth are not benevolent, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs.” While some view the shift away from personalized, anthropomorphic thinking about God as a departure from an essential element of the Judeo-Christian tradition, there is a sense in which this is a natural progression along a trajectory that begins before the ancient Mesopotamian flood epic and continues through the Priestly source’s creative reworking of earlier notions about God, creation and flood. Where once we had multiple personified forces of nature, Israel rolled them into one, a singular Elohim, responsible for all that happened, whether good or evil. Is there not something fitting about carrying on the process and recognizing that we do not need to posit a personified actor, much less a multiplicity of them, in order to account for things that happen? Might it be simply another step along the Biblical trajectory to adopt the stance of so-called “radical theology” and treat God and the Universe as at least overlapping, if not identical?

I suppose the big question is what one thinks about this psychologically, theologically and even pastorally. If there were a global catastrophe of the sort depicted in Noah or in 2012, would you take greater comfort from believing that a mighty God was doing it for a reason, or would it be more comforting to believe that there are no such powerful and capricious wills that may send torments upon humanity at a whim, even though that leaves you at the impersonal “whim” of forces of nature? As food for thought, I leave you Thomas Hardy’s famous meditation on this subject, his poem “Hap”:

Hap, by Thomas Hardy

IF but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!”

Then would I bear, and clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased, too, that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.

But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
–Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan….
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

Most people are well aware that the sheer weight of geological, textual, comparative and other considerations indicate clearly that the story of Noah can no more be taking as literally historical or factual than can the story of Utnapishtim. The harder question for many of us is whether the theology of the flood story is not every bit as much something that we need to move beyond – even those of us who in many respects are heirs of the Israelite tradition that bequeathed the story to us.

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