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Lost in the flood

Lost in the flood

Last updated on: January 8, 2025 at 7:00 am by Fred Clark

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Lost in the flood 2025-01-07T20:00:44-05:00 Fred Clark

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This is just a really dumb, really irresponsible headline from Evangelical Focus: “A 3000 – year- old tablet that may reveal the location of Noah’s Ark discovered.”

That headline was written for a “news” story that’s hardly news — it’s about semi-recent study of a Babylonian artifact that has been held by the British Museum since 1882. But the bigger problem is that it spins the story into something palatable for the illiteralist fundamentalist readership of Evangelical Focus and the story just isn’t anything at all that they are willing or prepared to accept.

Because this tablet isn’t talking about “Noah’s Ark.” It’s talking about Utnapishtim’s Ark, from the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Irving Finkel, the Mesopotamian scholar at the British Museum touting this translation work, is quite skilled at targeting his publicity toward Christian fundamentalists searching for “the real Noah’s Ark.” But he also highlights — right here, in this Evangelical Focus article — that this finding is evidence of the priority of the Babylonian version of the story: “This is quite an interesting thing to think about because it shows that the story was the same, and of course that one led to the other but also, that from the Babylonian point of view, this was a matter of fact thing.”

That clear truth — “that one [story] led to the other” — is taboo for the kind of Christian readers who want to believe “the location of Noah’s Ark” is a literal thing that might be literally “discovered.” The article dances around this, switching back and forth and trying somehow to dress up the Babylonian source material as confirmation of the latter story (with it’s not-quite-successful attempt at a monotheistic retelling).

And then the article segues at the end to the realm of hucksters and scam-artists — the various groups raising funds for “ark research” in the mountains of Turkey.

This is all quite depressing because it underscores how those most fervently committed to a “literal” interpretation of the biblical story of Noah’s flood literally seem not to have read it.

They seem, instead, to have skimmed it.

I think that’s what happens to most Bible readers when they get to this story. “This is the account of Noah and his family,” it says in Genesis 6, verse 9. But the pages preceding that are a weird slog that set you up not to be reading carefully or attentively. Genesis 5 is a wall of genealogy, a list of “begats” that instructs the reader to start skimming rather than paying full attention. And the short bit of Genesis 6 just before Noah’s story starts is that bewildering business about the Nephilim. The names and numbers in that genealogy were probably all significant and meaningful to the original writers of that passage, but several millennia later, that meaning is opaque and elusive to those of us reading it now. So that chapter and the first eight verses of chapter 6 train the reader to skip over or shrug off the weird or incoherent elements of what they’re reading.

So at first there’s relief — ah, Noah, at last a proper story, and a familiar one thanks to the Sunday school and children’s story books that convince us all we already know what we’re about to read. But when the actual text of the next few pages — the whole thing is only 88 verses, about 2,200 words — turns out to be quite different from that expected version, we revert to skimming and skipping, reading what we expect more than what’s actually there.

Reading this in skip-and-skim mode is what keeps us from tripping over the awkward seams of this loosely stitched-together collection of narratives.

That’s what helps those readers get through the 88 verses of the Noah story. Or, rather, stories — plural. Because if you’re not in skim-and-skip mode, then you’re going to wind up tripping over the seams of this unsuccessfully stitched-together narrative.

Like, OK, if you’re a good fundie reader of Evangelical Focus, then you’re not gonna like the kind of textual criticism going on in Paul Davidson’s post “Reading the Fractures in Genesis: Noah’s Flood.” But what he describes here as —

… the redundant and sometimes contradictory doublets in Genesis 6 through 9 imply the interweaving of two sources. Consider, for example, the two separate but similar reports of Noah and his family entering the ark with the animals …

— is something you’re still going to trip over if you’re reading carefully and not just skimming like you did through all those begats in chapter 5.

See for yourself, here is Genesis 7:7-16:

7 And Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives entered the ark to escape the waters of the flood. 8 Pairs of clean and unclean animals, of birds and of all creatures that move along the ground, 9 male and female, came to Noah and entered the ark, as God had commanded Noah. 10 And after the seven days the floodwaters came on the earth.

11 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. 12 And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.

13 On that very day Noah and his sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, together with his wife and the wives of his three sons, entered the ark. 14 They had with them every wild animal according to its kind, all livestock according to their kinds, every creature that moves along the ground according to its kind and every bird according to its kind, everything with wings. 15 Pairs of all creatures that have the breath of life in them came to Noah and entered the ark. 16 The animals going in were male and female of every living thing, as God had commanded Noah. Then the Lord shut him in.

Verses 7 through 12 tell a story. Then verse 13 backs up to the same starting point and repeats that story, with slight variations, new and different details. If you’re paying attention, it’s jarring. It’s a speed bump. You can trick yourself into gliding past that like you did past the Nephilim-weirdness and exhausting genealogical stuff, projecting the familiar, expected story back onto the text you’re trying to read. But the speed bump is still there.

That speed bump doesn’t have to lead you into some contemplation of documentary hypotheses or transmission theories or musings about the multiple sources of this text. But it ought to be a reminder of the kind of text you’re trying to read here — an ancient text, cobbled together by people still in the process of inventing writing and editing and composition. A text that predates anything like the kind of text that you might expect to read as a “literal” historical record, like some modern history or work of journalism.

At the bare minimum, those speed bumps ought to at least invite Bible-loving readers to step back and acknowledge that this text they love and revere is often a stranger, more complicated thing than whatever they might have expected or preferred it to be. It’s darkly ironic that the rejection of that fact — the refusal to accept that the Bible is often bigger, stranger, more complicated and polyvalent — is referred to as “a high view of scripture.”

That’s not a high view, that’s just looking down on something.

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