The Biblical business relationship of the Flood, in the Book of Genesis, is similar to the older Babylonian accounts of a Neat Alluvion. These texts, written much earlier, include the Ballsy of Gilgamesh, an ballsy poem which predates Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and the earliest Old Testament accounts, past more than than a millennium.

It's possible, therefore, that despite the difference in time periods, the Flood recorded in the Gilgamesh story and the Flood from the Book of Genesis are fictionalised versions of a real effect which took place in the Middle East thousands of years ago, the memory of which was preserved through beginning oral and and then written accounts (a Black Sea Deluge some 7,500 years ago has been proposed as one candidate for the Cracking Flood).

Noah and the Flood: summary

God looked downwardly on the human race and saw wickedness, violence, and evil everywhere (Genesis 6:5). He decided to destroy all living things on the earth, except for Noah, who had 'establish grace in the optics of the LORD' (Genesis 6:8).

God instructed Noah (Genesis 6:14–16) to build an Ark that is 300 cubits long, 50 cubits broad, and 30 cubits loftier. How long a 'cubit' precisely is in this context has been disputed: although a mutual cubit was said to be 18 inches (the length of a human being's arm from elbow to fingertip), information technology's been argued that 'sacred' cubits were several inches longer than this. God then instructed Noah (Genesis 6:19-20) to have '2 of every sort' of brute into the ark, so that whilst the other animals would exist wiped out, each species would be preserved through these two specimens. (Though see our analysis below on the number of each animal.)

When Noah was 600 years old, God released the rains that lasted for twoscore days and nights, causing the Flood. Noah and his wife, sons, and their wives, forth with the animals he had taken aboard the ark, were spared the Flood and survived. But every living thing outside of the ark was destroyed in the waters of the Alluvion. The ark eventually came to rest on the 'mountains of Ararat' (Genesis viii:iv) – nonMount Ararat, as is often supposed, because there was no such mountain (Ararat was a region, not a mountain, although Ararat is now the name of a peak in Turkey).

When the waters receded, Noah sent a raven out of the ark to search for dry out state, and then a dove. The dove returned, so Noah waited a week and so sent it out once more. This happened several times before the dove eventually returned with an olive branch in its mouth: a symbol of peace ever since.

In 9:13 God showed Noah the rainbow he had ready in the clouds, which he told Noah was his covenant with homo, that he would never flood the globe again.

Noah and the Flood: analysis

In Judeo-Christian tradition, the story of the Flood symbolises God'south punishment of sin among mankind. He decides to destroy all of homo except for Noah and his family, considering Noah alone among men had lived a life free from sin and evil. Noah and his descendants thus mark the first of a new relationship between God and man, with the rainbow symbolising God's hope not to flood once again. This 'covenant' paves the way for the New Testament and Jesus Christ, whose covenant with flesh will be even more pronounced, since Jesus volition cede himself for all humans, to redeem their sins.

The moral significant or moral message of the Flood story might be interpreted, then, as a warning well-nigh the dangers of evil: life is a rare souvenir, and it is squandered if man spends his lifespan engaged in violence and corruption. (The reason the poor animals have to be drowned also, as it is often stated, is that these were created past God for the purpose of man; if man is to be drowned, there is no point in having all the fish of the sea and the fowls of the air to benefit him. Although how the fish 'drowned' has always been one of the potential plot holes in such a flood story.)

We mentioned at the start of this postal service that the Judeo-Christian account of the Flood and the Babylonian story share a number of features. In the Atrakhasis Epic, Atrakhasis is the Noah effigy, whom the gods warn about their plans to alluvion the world, instructing him to build a boat on which he and his family, and their animals, can take shelter and be spared from the waters.

The gods hither (the Babylonians were polytheistic, and the Flood was a team endeavor on their part) as well promise Atrakhasis and his descendants that they will not flood the world again, although their motives are less noble than Yahweh's in the Judeo-Christian version: they were growing hungry, since the sacrifices humans offered to them had naturally stopped when they drowned everyone.

Curiously, the raven and the dove as well feature in the earlier Epic of Gilgamesh. The 'Noah' figure releases a dove to find land, but information technology merely circles the expanse and returns. After the dove's failures, he releases the raven, and when the bird doesn't return, he concludes that it's found country. This is a reversal of what happens in the Biblical business relationship of the Flood (in Genesis 8:6-12):

And it came to pass at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made: And he sent forth a raven, which went forth to and fro, until the waters were dried upward from off the world.

As well he sent forth a dove from him, to run across if the waters were abated from off the face of the ground; Simply the pigeon found no remainder for the sole of her foot, and she returned unto him into the ark, for the waters were on the face of the whole earth: then he put forth his hand, and took her, and pulled her in unto him into the ark.

And he stayed yet other vii days; and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark; And the dove came in to him in the evening; and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leafage pluckt off: so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth.

And he stayed even so other 7 days; and sent forth the dove; which returned non again unto him any more than.

How long did the Flood concluding? 'For 40 days and 40 nights', every Christian will surely reply. Just this isn't what Genesis tells the states. Or rather, it is and it isn't: the Overflowing lasted 40 days according to Genesis 7:17, merely for 150 days according to 7:24. This is one of several inconsistencies in the Biblical account.

Nor did Noah take two of every creature onto the Ark – or rather, again, he did and he didn't. In 7:2, God tells Noah to take vii of 'every clean beast', 'and of beats that are not clean by two, the male and the female'. This contradicts what had been said in vi:19: 'And of every living thing of all flesh, ii of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark'. The same goes (6:20) for every fowl, cattle, and 'creeping affair'.

Merely every bit disruptive is the material that Noah was told to brand the Ark out of. Genesis 6:fourteen mentions Gopher (or Gofer) wood, but this woods is merely mentioned once in the Bible, and occurs nowhere else. Then what on earth was it? It'south been suggested that it was a Hebrew translation of a Babylonian give-and-take for cedarwood, which would chime with the idea that the Flood story was derived (if but indirectly) from earlier Babylonian accounts. Some other theory is that gopher was dislocated with kopher, meaning 'pitch', and so 'Gopher wood' was really pitched wood, or woods painted with pitch.

Equally intriguing is the word 'ark' itself, which is inextricably linked to the story of Noah and the Flood.

The word 'ark', used of the boat Noah built, is recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary with several meanings: to refer to a large wooden bin or hutch for storing food (Northern English dialect) or equally the name for the wooden coffer containing the tables of the law, which God gave to Moses (i.e., the Ark of the Covenant). The just reference to an 'ark' as a gunkhole is in early English translations of the Noah story, although later, the word did enter extended use to refer to a transport or boat.

Simply originally, 'ark' simply meant a coffer or box, like a treasure breast: the word comes from the Latin arca meaning 'box' or 'chest'.

Image: via Wikimedia Commons.