#25 NOAH: THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY MAN IN TORAH
As a six year old in the first grade, upon hearing Noah’s story of rescuing the birds, animals and his family from a worldwide flood, I had one question. “Did Noah get to Australia to save the kookaburras and the kangaroos?”
The bewildered nun had three possible answers: to deny that God saved our Australian animals, and, therefore, call into question the veracity of the Bible; to maintain God indeed saved our animals and try to explain the logistics of Noah’s journey prior to jet travel from the Middle East to the other side of the world to capture them, or she could retreat to the safety of “when you’re working with God, He moves in mysterious ways and there is nothing that is too hard for Him.” Of course, she opted for safety.
Despite my reservations, no Biblical story delights children more than any other, with Noah building a beautiful boat, taking the animals aboard, two-by-two, surviving a downpour of forty days, before emerging to the wonder of the first-ever rainbow, a symbol of God’s promise never to destroy the world by flood again.
Noah, the hero of the Great Flood (Gen. 6-8), was the ninth patriarch, the grandson of Methuselah. His father named him, ‘Noah’ which means ‘rest’ or ‘relief’. By the time Noah was five hundred years old, he had three sons, Shem, Hain and Japheth. Although God was very displeased with the wickedness on the Earth, he was very pleased with Noah’s goodness; he had no faults. God warned him that He intended to destroy all humankind, animals and birds by a great flood.
So Noah built an ark, which was the largest boat ever constructed in antiquity until the nineteenth century.
At the end of forty days Noah released a raven, then a dove, to see if the water had subsided. When the dove returned with an olive twig in its mouth Noah knew his ordeal was over and upon disembarking sacrificed to give thanks to God. A rainbow spread across the clouds as a sign that God, would in the future, temper justice with mercy and not destroy all life by flood again. The descendants of Noah would spread across the earth and from where the ark finally rested on Mt Ararat, his family would be well placed to spread unimpeded by major seas or oceans or mountain ranges and disperse to Asia and the Middle East.
Conversation with the Gatekeeper
“Is there any historical truth in the story of Noah’s flood?”
“There were many different floods in many different cultures in many different times and someone always survived them on a raft, a chest or a boat. The biblical Noah was called Nuah. This deluge was between 6,500BC and 7000BC, but closer to 7,000BC, very much earlier than your scholars currently date it. The Biblical flood story was limited to the rift valley of the Tigris and Euphrates, and included Northern and Eastern Turkey, Iraq, Kurdistan and down to the border of Palestine and it would affect the whole of the Mediterranean basin as well. The Jews borrowed the Nuah story from the Babylonians because they heard it and loved it, as much as everyone else does. So Genesis and the Sumerian epics about Utnapishtim describe the same flood.”
“Why did the flood occur?”
“The flood was triggered by an earthquake and a massive subsidence of the rift valley followed by a deluge. It was to spread rich mud and help create the fertile crescent of the Middle East. It was, as now, the end of a climatic period.”
“Do you mind if we call him Noah? Who exactly was he?”
“Noah was an exceptional man, a keen agronomist, a mathematician, a bit of a renaissance man. He didn’t knock the ark together in his driveway; rather he employed boat builders from Nineveh, near the Caspian Sea, and from Tyre, Sidon and the Black Sea to construct his massive ship. Altogether it took him two years. He was very clear about his measurements. The cubit corresponds to the Neolithic yard. It is a measurement of the hand and the forearm, which was copied and standardised in a rule. The shipwrights used these rules and plumb bobs and measuring strings to construct the ark. His neighbours watched his enterprise holding their sides with laughter.”
“What you are describing suggests a technically educated man. How did he know a flood was coming?”
“Noah believed in a future flood because he was expert in reading portents in astrology and astronomy. There were also increasing gaps in the dense cloud cover across Sumeria. Noah deducted from the increasing earth tremors, the springs of pitch and tar belching up and from the eruptions of major volcanoes that a catastrophe was coming. God did speak to Noah, if you like, but God used the geothermal signs he could interpret. But God also spoke to him as St Germain, prior to his incarnation, saying: “This is not working. We will have to try again."
“Did God send the flood, as the Bible claims, as a punishment for human wickedness?”
“Noah was a believer in the Sun God, Ea, but he was not particularly pious, he was just very practical. His immense piety was attributed to him afterwards. The forces of nature are neutral and the deluge did not occur for any supernatural reason at all. This was a rationalisation by people afterwards, reinforced by their own priesthoods.”
“Why such a large ark? Even so, how did he accommodate the world’s biodiversity?”
“Noah had a very large family to accommodate: there were twenty-seven adults and nineteen children to be carried. He had nine wives and eight children with them. Shem, Hain and Japheth were his sons by his principle wife and with his concubines he had two more sons and three daughters, while each of his first three sons had three wives. That’s twenty-seven adults before you get to their children.
When the earthquake occurred the rain started and Noah loaded up the ark. He rounded up about one hundred animals: cattle, donkeys, sheep, goats, dogs, quail, and doves; but not wild animals. He’d calculated the logistics of feeding them together with his family and built animal stalls on the ark with sluices to flood out their waste.”
“How did Noah navigate, keep warm and dry in a deluge?”
“He didn’t navigate, he just drifted. Here is St Germain who will be the world’s greatest navigator, just drifting with no rudder, no charts and no stars. Noah designed the ark with skylights on top allowing him to clamber on deck to see the stars but instead that was where he’d get wet. He got dry and warm in a special room lined with bronze where he kept live coals.”
“Did Noah recognise where he landed?”
“No! Noah, like Columbus after him, came down from the ark and did not have a clue where he was! All he saw was the filthy countryside covered in sludge, dead bodies, carrion, rotten fish, wrecked buildings, landslides, sheer devastation. Mud, mud, mud, everywhere and a nauseating stench.”
“Where did the ark rest when Noah’s family disembarked?”
“The deluge lasted about six weeks and the ark came to rest not where you’ve been taught. It was not in Kurdistan on Mt Nisir nor on Mt. Ararat in Turkey but on the island of Dilman on what is now the Sultanate of Bahrain. While the flood was extensive it was not deep enough to strand them above the snow line on any mountain. Flood, tide and current took them across the swollen Persian Gulf to Bahrain.”
“What happened to the ark? Are there any remnants left?”
“The ark was broken up and used to build their shelter, sleds and carts. Eventually, they would use the wood to build rafts to pull over the boggy areas as they worked their way up the coast of Arabia. He travelled home over land and water. There were wetlands everywhere and they needed rafts to carry seed, tools, implements and furniture. After nearly nine thousand years, the remains of the Ark, which you are still searching for in all the wrong places, I can only say I’m sorry but there are only splinters left.”
“After the deluge?”
“Noah was one of the first bankers and his commercial ability led to his recovery after the deluge. He had previously established an early system of “notes of exchange” sending huge deposits of gold and silver on guarded caravans to Greece. He would keep a copy of “the note” for himself and send a copy with the bullion to ensure it arrived without pilfering. Now I am speaking figuratively because writing was not yet invented. He used clay disks stamped with symbols, which would eventually become writing. In China, I can boast we were already writing, but in Sumer it was still marks on clay disks. Noah was able to redeem his gold and silver after the deluge and re-establish himself on the best land in Mesopotamia.”
“The Bible describes him living for nine hundred and fifty years. Was that so?”
“He did not live to nine hundred and fifty years, but he did live to be well over a hundred. Giving age, or a long life to their patriarchs was a way of deifying Jewish heroes.”
“And the rainbow which was God’s promise?”
“After the Deluge there was a superb rainbow and Noah knew that a rainbow would come after rain in five colours, he did not see the other two colours which were combinations but God did not give him the rainbow nor make any promise to him.” (Litchfield, 2005).
Wasn’t there more to Noah? After hearing the Gatekeeper’s account I was deflated: no two-by-two, no saving of the biodiversity of the planet, no God-promised rainbow, and certainly no kangaroos. Stripped of its adventure and divine intervention, the wonderful flood story became prosaic and rather dull. Surely there was more to Noah than that!
“How did Noah cope before he retrieved his gold and silver? What did he do next?”
“He started small. Noah needed to quickly till the soil to produce food; he planted crops enough to feed his large family and produce seed for next year. He grazed his animals on the hillsides where grass was emerging and there was fodder from trees. Then he built enclosures to keep predators away, chopped down trees to build crude shelters; built carts, but, of most importance, they built sleds to slide on the mud. Yes, they had wheels for their carts, but it was some time later before spokes would be added.”
“When did they return home?”
“To make their way from the wreck of the ark to the land between the two rivers which he called Sumer, was a journey of one thousand kilometres and would take him several years to journey back and some of his family stayed along the way. Settlement then was very sparse because the death list was in excess of three million. He wasn’t the only escapee but he was the best organized to re-establish his livelihood.”
“There is a biblical account of Noah, finally reaching his land and getting drunk.”
“Yes, he got drunk, wouldn’t you? Winemakers fall into two categories, tea-totallers and alcoholics. In later life, Noah became an alcoholic, in his youth he had been very fond of wine. He brewed beer from barley like the dark beer Australians’ favour. He developed wine and beer making and took them to a new complexity. After he was seventy, sexually impotent, his sons would encourage him to drink, it kept him quiet and out of their way. This is described in the Bible but he was frequently intoxicated … many great men are!”
“What was Noah’s legacy to us?”
“Noah was a very successful farmer and discovered, albeit in a simple form, the genealogy or the study of blood lines in his livestock whereby he excluded some characteristics and enhanced others. In that, he advanced animal husbandry, he used selective breeding stock to produce improved progeny. The cattle he bred were bigger, fatter beasts and better for ploughing. He did the same with grain to continually improve his yield. He saved the best strains of barley, wheat and rice and peas, lentils and green beans from which came dried beans for vegetable protein.”
“Gatekeeper, I am struggling with Noah. How is it possible to understand a man who lived so long ago?”
“Noah was the most extraordinary man in the Torah in the contribution he made to the advancement of civilisation. If you look at the later lives of this Pan aspect of St Germain you will gain an insight into his character. He was Jethro Tull, the inventor of the stump jump plough and King George I of England (1660-1727) Farmer George. However, to the delight of women, he invented Champagne as Dom Pierre Perignon, a Benedictine monk who, like Noah, had keen observation of the fermentation process. This line of St Germain will invent printing, the lighting rod, the Franklin stove and the aeroplane and we’ve met it before … in Imhotep. Here is one of the delights in studying St Germain.”
“What did Noah bring into his incarnation from St Germain?”
“He brought in his love of order as a codifier of information. He brought in observation skills from which he would draw deductions and conclusions. He would be the first to observe the simple repetitive pattern in genetics. He brought in St Germain’s trading and merchant abilities. He understood intuitively the possibility of trading his surplus to trade produce to gain what he desired but didn’t make or grow. He brought in his courage, his strong libido, his inventiveness and his love of a beaker of red.”
“Why did he have to incarnate?”
“Noah was to be the father of agronomy and animal husbandry. His contribution would allow the movement from hunters and gatherers to the establishment of the first urban civilization. He was to be the progenitor of the next step to civilization which would allow humans to live in settled environments and develop a complex structure of tabular law needed in civilized societies.”
“Was that his life purpose?”
“Yes. It was to establish and make possible an ordered society by starting with husbandry to make farming more successful. He was to be a transitory agent between a nomadic society and a cultivated land and trading society; his steps will eventually lead to cities.”
“Did he have a spiritual purpose?”
“If he did, he didn’t know what it was. He was fairly vague about spirituality. His God was a narrative device added thousands of years later. I think God allowed him to make his spiritual advances in other more pedestrian lives. Now we are going to jump forward five thousand years to a life of Mary.”
