The Flood (Genesis 6-9)

[Gen. 6:]

The first few verses of Genesis 6 are - how to put this? - let's try freakish and horrifying.

"The sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair, and they took to wife such of them as they chose." So the spawn of God, whoever they are, are out running around forcibly mating with human women.

Cooool.

But never mind that. You see, in God's eyes the problem on earth is the humans, who are wicked. Everybody's just going at it, their wickedness, each blessed one of them every bit as wicked as the day is long. I don't know what these people are doing that's so wicked - but brother let me tell you that it is wicked. In fact, people are so wicked that God concludes he's "sorry that he had made man on the earth." The only reasonable thing to do is not just to exterminate humanity, but also to take out the beasts and birds and "creeping things" (fish and sea monsters will apparently get a pass).

In other words, God chooses to perform a retroactive abortion.

But well... there is this one guy named Noah. God decides he likes Noah. After all, how wicked can Noah be? He's 600 frigging years old: he can hardly be getting himself into much trouble.

And thus Noah, as we all know, is enjoined by God to build a 1.5-football-field long, three-story wooden boat and take care to stock it with a male-female pair of every variety of land-dwelling animal.

The - utter! - silliness of this story is, of course, breathtaking. Lay aside your preschool familiarity with this old fable for a moment, and consider it with fresh eyes. A 600-year-old man builds a boat about the size of Donald Trump's new hotel in SoHo, and collects therein two members of every nonaquatic animal species on the planet. How are these animals captured, fed, and maintained? (I mean, this job is the equivalent of asking one person to gather up a couple hundred San Diego Zoos). Why does it not seem to matter that a 450' boat is orders of magnitude too small to house so many animals? What about the geographically unique distribution of species from continent to continent?

Where, simply, does Noah get the wood?

And have you ever tried sexing fruit flies? It's not always easy figuring out which ones are male and which ones are female.

And: why am I even asking these questions, when it's so blazingly self-evident that this story never took place? Well, the reason I am asking these questions is that there are human beings in this world - grown adults who can presumably tie their own shoes and chew their own food (they've put up websites, for god's sake) - who believe the story of the flood took place as written.

Let me repeat that. There are grown, educated adults who think this stuff happened.

Sure, yes, enlightened religious folks don't get caught up taking the Bible so literally: what matters to them in reading the Bible is the communion with a Divine Other which occurs through one's ecstatic experience of the scriptures' spiritual content.

Well - the starting point of this story's spiritual content is that God hates humankind so much he wants to annihilate us all. It's hard to win with this one.

[Note: I don't exactly plan to pause on every crazy occurrence in the Bible and point out how crazy it would be for a person to take said craziness literally. If so, I'd surely never find my way out of Genesis. But since the flood story is one of the first big ones, I hope I can be excused.]

[Gen. 7:]

Well. The ark's built and boarded, and Noah and his family and the many millions of animals he's collected wait in place for seven days till the rain starts - which goes on for 40 days, or maybe 150 days, depending on which paragraph you prefer.

That must have been a pretty edgy seven days, holed up there with your family and a couple hundred San Diego Zoos waiting for the rain to begin. Neighbors strolling by to make fun of you and all.

I can't help but be reminded of Bill Cosby's great old bit about Noah....

[Gen. 8:]

After the 40 days or 150 days or whatever, the waters recede and the ark comes down onto mount Ararat in eastern Asia Minor. Noah sets up an altar and sacrifices a pair of every kind of "clean" animal (not to fear, he'd brought extras of them on board).

God is so moved to compassion by this bloody scene that, like a wifebeating husband repenting on the morning after, he promises not to annihilate humankind again:

I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done. While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease. (Gen. 8:21-22)

Couple interesting things about that. One, God acknowledges that if humans are wicked, it isn't their fault. Not to point any fingers around here, but somebody made us that way...

(Question: didn't God realize that "the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth" before bringing down a worldwide deluge? This guy is more than a little capricious.)

Two, he pledges not to destroy all life on earth "while the earth remains." So it's still fine just wiping out the planet wholesale.

As the wifebeating husband might have said it:

Baby, I know you can't help it that you make me as angry as you do. It's not your fault - I know that. I'm sorry that you make me so crazy! Baby, I will never, ever try to kill you again - or your cat - unless you absolutely make me do it.

[Gen. 9]

Noah's sons are told to be fruitful, to multiply, and to eat lots of meat. Don't eat blood, though!

God repeats his promise not to destroy humanity again (this time narrowing his terms to a destruction by flood), and seals the promise this time by giving us rainbows. It's a bit of a maudlin touch if you ask me (pink unicorns instead, anyone?); but more importantly, one wonders how things on earth had been working all these generations in the absence of light refraction....

And now we encounter a story that doesn't make much sense (surprise!). To begin with, Noah farms up some grapes, makes wine, gets drunk, gets naked.

(Gets naked? I've got as much experience being drunk as the next guy, but I've never noticed a specific propensity toward disrobement. I guess this must just be Noah's thing. Still - odd behavior from a man God so recently identified as the sole unwicked human on earth.)

Then Noah's son Ham walks in on his father accidentally. Accidentally, mind. There was no sign over the tent flap reading, WARNING: YOUR DAD IS IN HERE NAKED. Nor would it have been much use for Ham to try knocking when (1) Noah was passed out, and (2) he was in a tent. Still, trying straightaway to make the best of this situation, Ham gets his brothers and has them carefully cover up dad without peeking. But you know what? Not good enough. Noah wakes up, sees what Ham "did" to him, and curses Ham's offspring forever to be "the servants of servants".

Dear reader: have you ever seen your own dad naked? I think lots of us have; it's all but unavoidable among people living for years together in close quarters. So are we all cursed? Or is Noah just psycho? --And where did he get the power to make all his son's descendants into servants in the first place? (NB: this passage was later cited by American slavery enthusiasts on the at-least-questionable belief that all the world's black people were fathered by Ham.)

And then, a couple hundred quick years later, Noah dies at age 950.