There was a great flood. A man named Noah and his three sons, at God’s command, built a great Ark and on it, they put two pairs of every unclean animal and seven pairs of every clean animal on the Earth. How many animals were there? That depends on who’s counting.

According to paleontologists, one million years ago, the planet was covered with dinosaurs and huge, flying reptiles. But according to Genesis, God created animals after he created Adam and Eve and Noah came along even later. So by Noah’s time, there had to be lots of them. So God instructed Noah to build the Ark 480' long, 80' wide, and 48' high. (The dimensions were in cubits, each cubit measured as 19?..) Think of that. A vessel this awesome would be over 20,000 tons and would carry the same cargo as 539 railroad cars, a train that would be over five miles long. That’s immense.

Unfortunately, all Noah had to build with were his three sons and maybe some prehistoric stone tools - primarily cutting stones and bores. With these ancient tools he had to accomplish an enormous task.  He had to

(1) cut down about 250 or 300 very large trees. He had to

(2) rip 2,000 planks from these trees. He had to

(3) smooth the cut planks with a stone tool boring thousands of connecting holes with still another stone tool. He had to

(5) build the Ark and fasten it with thousands of wood pegs that he also had to make himself and lastly, he had to

(6) caulk the entire vessel with hot pitch and get this monstrosity down into the water to see if it floated. Considering the huge size of the Ark and its 20,000+ lbs., that alone would be a tall order for three or seven guys regardless of the problems building it. My guess? God had to help push.)

Even then, Noah’s work wasn’t done. Next he and his sons had to go around the world - on foot - collecting many pairs of all the animals and birds on Earth. Plus they had to gather enough food to last them all six months, a gigantic task in itself.

When that was done, they then had to herd this huge mass of living creatures - animals and birds - along with tons of food - all the way back to where the Ark was waiting. How they could have accomplished any of this is beyond me. I would have figured it would take up to 10,000 men 5-10 years to get it all done back in Noah’s time. But I could be wrong. Faith does move mountains, they say.

Lastly, once they got everybody and every creature and all that food up on the Ark and set out to sea, the seven of them had the unenviable task of handling the waste matter and manure from all these creatures for the next six months. Every day, sometimes many times a day, these folks would have to enter these cages of wild beasts, gather up the tons of waste material they would generate, and find a way to transport that mess to the sides of the arc, and throw it overboard. The trouble with that is the Ark has no sides. It is a closed vessel, so I don’t have the slightest idea of how they would have been able to discard these tons of waste material without flooding the boat. It’s just one more question that is left unanswered in the Bible’s rendition of the story like how did they feed the animals that live off other animals? Think on that for a while.

So that’s the story of Noah and his Arc. Unbelievable? Of course it is. In fact, it’s so unbelievable you wouldn’t think anyone would take it seriously. Yet, every few years, someone finds the Ark buried in the mountains somewhere. I’m waiting for it to show up in Disney World.

The truth is, it never happened. The story is maybe allegorical, maybe apocryphal; but certainly it is fictional. Maybe there was a local flood and maybe a guy built a boat and took his family and his pets with him until the water went down in a few days, but that’s about it. (Actually, I believe that’s exactly what happened. Let’s take a look at that possibility.)

The first known civilization appeared about 3500 BC in the area between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers then known as Mesopotamia, now called Iraq. In the 1800’s, archeologists excavating an ancient Sumerian site uncovered a series of clay tablets covered with a form of wedge-shaped characters now called cuneiform writing.

This earliest form of writing was used to depict stories of the culture and events of the early Sumerians. (Later these same people invented the more traditional form of writing that we know today.)

The clay tablets uncovered in this ‘dig’ were packed up and brought back to England were they were promptly stored and just as promptly forgotten. It wasn’t until one hundred years later that someone remembered them and began the tedious task of translating them. They were astounded at what they found.

On a series of tablets was discovered the story of a great flood in the valley between the Tigris and the Euphrates - since thought to be the site of the Garden of Eden. The flood was so severe, that much of the surrounding land simply disappeared. The tablets went on to say that an observer on a raft on the river was unable to see land in any direction.

A local merchant  who made a habit of shipping cargo down river to the towns that lay below Sumeria, became apprehensive about his supplies and decided to construct individual rafts to save them from the approaching flood waters. When he was finished, in order to keep his rafts together on the river, he fastened the rafts together. (The Bible makes reference to the Ark having ’sections’.) When everything was ready, the merchant ordered the raft loaded and he, his family, his animals, and his cargo set off down river to safety.

The story put down on the clay tablets is long. It states how the passengers lost all sight of land as the water rose to levels never seen before and the raft drifted down river until finally, it entered the Persian Gulf that bordered Mesopotamia. There the raft continued to drift for about seven days, finally coming to rest on an island. Because the Gulf waters are salted, the passengers had no fresh water to drink so they drank their cargo which was beer, a substance which preserves well and which is full of nutrients. The story ends with drawings of the passengers and animals disembarking from the raft and being greeted by a large crowd of angry people. The people have been since translated as angry creditors demanding some sort of payment from the merchant without which he would be put into slavery as was the custom in those days.

That is the story of a great flood recorded on ancient Sumerian clay tablets and written in cuneiform, the oldest writing known to man. It is easy to see how this story could have been transformed thousands of years later into the Bible story of Noah and his Ark as we know it today. All the Bible writer had to go on was a word of mouth story handed down over the millennia like an urban legend.  Certainly there was a great flood.

The tablets support that. Certainly it covered a large area. The tablets support that too.

But the flood was still a regional rather than an international event.  And God didn’t appear to the merchant to tell him to save himself and his family; the merchant was simply trying to save his merchandise. Nor were two of every unclean animal and seven of each clean animal in the world taken aboard the Ark which would have been impossible. What was on the Ark were a few pack animals intended to be sold down river along with a few people, some merchandise cargo, and some beer.

So it is written on the tablets.

As to the voyage itself, far from taking seven months which would have been impossible, it took one week, which was very possible. All the unanswerable questions about gathering, feeding and caring for all those wild animals also disappears with the Sumerian version. There aren’t any wild animals to worry about. And the questions of supplying fresh water for so many creatures for so long a period of time, also disappear.

It seems clear to me that the Sumerian version of the flood is factual while the Biblical version, complete with God and a series of mythical religious extensions, is basically fiction. It is the lesson that is real.

I leave you with this thought. While non-members can read articles on boomeryearbook.com only members can make comments. My section is called Joey’s Talk and Controversy. I hope I’ve given you food for thought and you will
join boomeryearbook and respond.

Have a nice day,

Joey

For www.boomeryearbook.com