Noah had an ark. He also had a hobby. He was the first vintner. It went to his head. As well as building a great seagoing vessel he ventured into wine-making and startled his sons. They took care to see that nobody saw their father drunk. He lived to the ripe old age of 950 and joined the likes of Methuselah as one of the world’s record-breakers.
People of an inquiring mind cannot avoid asking: ‘How can these things be?’ On the face of it, nobody ever lives to be that old. When Swift wrote ‘Gulliver’s Travels’, he conjured out of thin air the Struldbrugs. These strange creatures were born with a birth-mark above the eye that destined them to live for hundreds of years, in fact for ever. They never recovered their youth and became unbearably miserable.
But, like the giants and the miniature men Gulliver met, these were imaginary versions of human beings, part of Swift’s fertile if misanthropic creative activity, and serving a serious purpose in the satire.
Efforts to explain these examples of extraordinary longevity are doomed to failure. Somebody somewhere took the numbers at face-value. Mistakes in copying and the shuffling of folk-stories are not to the point. We are dealing here with imaginative literature, and 18th century literature has its genres just as current literature does. Nobody thinks the worse of Morse for his acumen as a detective or Jesse Stone for his similar skills in detection. Many look upon Sherlock Holmes as a living person who in his day showed remarkable powers of observation. In a digital age digital trickery abounds. We who take advantage of this should be chary of condemning former generations for using different modes. It is like deploring the use of pen and ink.
Noah was of course not just any drunken sailor just as Peter was not just any fisherman. God chose human beings for his long-term purposes.
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