Noah’s name lives on. As long as children enjoy playing with Britain’s farmyard and zoo, that is likely to continue. Noah also makes us think. Uncomfortably so: about geological time-frames, pre-history, myth, written records and the nature of truth. If we cannot stomach such problems, we should avoid reading Genesis.
Whoever wrote and edited the story of the great flood was not there at the time. Perhaps a terrified man or woman saw water gushing into what we now know as the Black Sea. Perhaps there was something even more frightening: a Niagara Falls on steroids that brought the Mediterranean into existence. We can hardly be sure. We are far from knowing all the truth about everything in the ancient world. It is likely that as far as the flood goes, there were as many tales to tell as there were submerged villages. Whatever accounts there may have been, we have no written records or oral recollections other than the biblical one and similar stories like Gilgamesh. We have to make what we can of the narratives available. Foremost among these is Genesis.
This is not a hopeless undertaking. We find ourselves similarly perplexed by records of events in which the victor wrote the story. The European invasion of north America would doubtless have been described in different terms had the Apache or Sioux or the Maya told their own versions of the story. We have to consider the origins and the mind-set of the writers. We may conclude that its nature of the account is conditioned by its origin and its literary form.
Signals suggesting a literary form come in plenty. We are told that Noah was 500 years old when he was begetting Shem, Ham and Japheth. We read that Noah was the first to cultivate the soil and to produce grapes and wine. His drunkenness is presented in poetic commentary as a step towards understanding the distinctive future that lay before Shem. And Noah was 950 years old when he died. Few of us would like to vouch for the mundane truth of these points. We find ourselves driven to recognise the form in which we find them and the purpose in the mind of the writer and editor.
In short, we approach the early chapters of the Bible with a recognition of the type of literature we have before us and the point of view of the writer. Similar issues rear their heads when we read a daily newspaper.
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