We’ve explored “Noah” the movie. Now let’s turn to Genesis to see what the Noah story actually says: Yahweh saw that mankind had become wicked, and he regretted his creation. “It grieved him to his heart.” He resolved to wipe man from the face of the earth, plus all the animals, “for I am sorry that I have made them.” (Genesis 6:6–7)

Noah was the one righteous exception, so God told him to take his family into an ark. God also commanded that he take seven pairs of all clean animals plus one pair of all other animals. After a week to get everything on board, it rained for 40 days and 40 nights. Water covered even the highest mountains, drowning everything—animals, birds, and humans.

After 40 days [this was presumably an additional 40 rain-free days, though the text is unclear], Noah sent out a dove to scout for dry land, but it returned. After a week, he tried again, and the dove returned with an olive leaf, showing that some land was dry. He sent out the dove again a week later, and it didn’t return.

Noah went to the top of the ark and saw that the land was dry. He left the ark and built an altar and sacrificed one of every clean animal to Yahweh. Yahweh was pleased, and he thought: I will never again destroy life on earth, because man is inherently evil. While the earth exists, I will preserve it.

Another version

Does that sound familiar? See what you think about this version:

Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Noah was righteous, but the earth was corrupt, and man was violent. Elohim decided to flood the earth and kill everything, and he gave Noah instructions for building an ark. It had to be 300 × 50 cubits in area, and 30 cubits tall. It needed three decks, with a door in the side and a roof on top, and it must be covered in pitch.

Noah, his family, and one pair of every living thing would be safe in the ark. They must bring provisions for them and the animals.

When Noah was 600 years old, on the 17^th day of the 2^nd month [I’ll abbreviate this as 2/17], “the fountains of the great deep burst forth and the windows of the heavens were opened.” Noah, his family, and the chosen animals boarded the ark. Everything else—animals and human—drowned.

The water covered the earth for 150 days, but then Elohim made a wind blow, and the water receded. The sources of the water closed. On 7/17, the ark rested in the mountains of Ararat. By 10/1, the tops of the mountains were visible.

Noah sent out a raven to see when the land was dry.

By 1/1, the ground was dry [presumably just the nearby land], and by 2/27, the earth was dry. Noah, his family, and the animals left the ark, and Elohim told them to “be fruitful and multiply.”

Contrast the two accounts

Both versions are in Genesis. The first version was from the J source (J because this source refers to God as “Jehovah,” which is another way of saying “Yahweh”). The second version was from the P (“Priestly”) source. They are interleaved to make Genesis chapters 6–8. (I used Richard Friedman’s The Bible with Sources Revealed and Who Wrote the Bible? to identify the two sources.)

Note the differences in our Noah accounts.

• God has different names: Yahweh in J and Elohim in P.
• Yahweh acts like a human—he regrets and grieves—while Elohim doesn’t.
• In the J account, the flood comes from rain. In the P account, water poured in from the two great sources—the fresh water underneath and the salt water in the dome above: “the fountains of the great deep burst forth and the windows of the heavens were opened.” This cosmology comes from the Sumerian creation myth, which we see in Genesis 1, which is also from the P source:

And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. God called the vault “sky.”

And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” And God saw that it was good. (Genesis 1:6–10)

• J uses a dove, and P uses a raven.
• J demands seven pairs of clean animals, but P demands only one pair. This is because only J has a sacrifice at the end of the trip, and you can’t sacrifice animals if they’re the only ones of their species.
• P gives details of the ark’s construction and detailed dates (Noah was 600 years old, plus the precise dating of milestones), while J has none of this.
• In J, the rain lasts for only 40 days, and the entire ordeal takes less than 100 days. In P, 150 days is mentioned, and Noah’s family is on the ark for over a year.

Note also what is the same. Both stories have an introduction that explains that the world was wicked but Noah was good. In the interleaved story, this appears redundant, but this is an additional clue that they were originally independent stories that needed their introductions.

Amusingly, one of God’s justifications is that the earth was full of violence (Gen. 6:11). So what does he do? He responds with a record-setting amount of violence. (Maybe irony hadn’t been invented yet.) It’s also interesting that when God told Abraham about his plans to destroy Sodom, Abraham protested (Gen. 18), and when God wanted to destroy the Israelites after the golden calf fiasco, Moses protested (Exodus 32). But when God wants to destroy the entire world, Noah says nothing in protest.

I’ve written more about the illogic of the Noah flood story here.

Documentary Hypothesis

The theory explaining many of the duplications and different perspectives jumbled throughout the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) is called the Documentary Hypothesis. It hypothesizes four different sources, with J and P being two of them. There are other doublets besides the two Noah stories—two creation stories, two Goliath stories, two stories of Abraham lying about his wife Sarah to a king, and so on—and the Documentary Hypothesis nicely explains them.

60% of Americans insist that the Noah’s ark story is literally, word-for-word true, but a far better explanation is that it is a composite of several sources of Mesopotamian mythology.

The man who prays is the one who thinks
that god has arranged matters all wrong,
but who also thinks that he can instruct god
how to put them right.
— Christopher Hitchens, Mortality

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/31/14.)

I expected the Noah movie to be a fairly careful following of the Bible story, where the fun would be in quibbling about how various verses were interpreted, but the movie was (surprisingly) more interesting than that.

It has Noah, his wife, and the three sons. There’s the enormous ark, the animals, and the flood. And then there are tangential bits that are nevertheless still in the Bible—the Nephilim, Methuselah, Tubal-Cain, and Noah the angry drunk.

But that’s about it for the Bible. The rest is Hollywood. Perhaps that’s to be expected when you must expand four Bible chapters into 138 minutes.

Spoiler alert: you’d think that everyone already knows the story of Noah (“Omigod! You mean that everyone else drowned? Wow—I didn’t see that coming!”). Not this interpretation.

The Nephilim

In the verses immediately before the Noah story (Gen. 6:1–4), the Bible introduces the Nephilim. Before the Flood, angels came to earth and fathered children with women, and these were the “heroes of old, men of renown.” It’s unclear whether “Nephilim” refers to the angels or their children, but the Bible doesn’t condemn them.

Other ancient Jewish texts do. The Nephilim taught man the secrets of metalworking and weaponry, as well as makeup and jewelry (read: adultery and killing), and one of the purposes of the flood was to get rid of them.

Noah shows these Nephilim as fallen angels and calls them “Watchers,” the term used in these ancient Jewish texts. They came to earth to help man with the gift of technology (nothing about getting frisky with their women), but were cursed by the Creator so that they became gigantic multi-armed rock monsters (duh—what else would cursed angels look like?). Since their previous contact with humans led to no good, the Watchers are ready to kill Noah and his family, but he befriends them and they help build the ark.

There’s nothing like a dozen 20-foot-tall immortal monsters to help make that tough job go a little easier.

The Others

Noah is in the line of Seth, Adam’s third son. They’re the last of their kind. But there are thousands of others living nearby who descended from Cain, Adam’s first son—the one who killed Abel. These are the bad people corrupted by the art of metalworking. They’re led by Tubal-Cain, who the Bible tells us was the first metalsmith—again, with no hint of condemnation.

This distinction between the bad men of Cain, corrupted by weapons and killing, and Noah’s noble line of Seth doesn’t hold up, however. Noah uses metal, both as tools and as weapons, and he kills people when he has to.

The Plot

This is a world of magic. There are visions, spells, incense that makes the animals on the ark hibernate (nicely solving the problem of how to feed them and their eating each other), and lots of magical plants. (The clash between those on the side of magic and those who favor technology reminded me of the 1977 movie Wizards. Technology loses in that one, too.)

The harsh terrain (it was filmed in Iceland) and the clothes (more Viking than Bedouin) made me think of Middle Earth rather than the Middle East.

The Bible says that the three sons have wives. Not so here. There is only an adopted daughter, found as an injured girl, and she and the oldest son are something of a couple. Noah tries to find wives in the Man Village, but the savagery is so extreme that he returns empty-handed and convinced that their job is simply to convey the animals safely on the ark, not to continue humanity. Humans are so inherently evil that their line must end.

On the boat, Noah passes on to his little band the seven-day creation story. Though the flood is accurate to the Bible when geysers burst from the ground, which points to the Sumerian cosmology of water beneath the earth and in a canopy above, the visuals that accompany Noah’s story would be at home in Neil deGrasse-Tyson’s Cosmos series. We see the solar system coalescing and a protoplanet crash into the young earth to form the debris that became the moon. Evolution is shown, as animals evolve from fish to amphibians to reptiles to mammals to primates. Creationists will find no support in this depiction.

Noah says that the Creator demands that humanity must end with them. This causes some friction on the boat when the son and daughter get pregnant with twin girls. It’s not enough that they ignored the sounds of the drowning multitude at the beginning of their voyage, but now Noah is determined to kill the babies. Luckily, love overcomes the wishes of the homicidal Creator in the end.

One wonders where girls will find a husband. I suppose the logical choice is the last of Noah’s sons, their uncle.

Noah the drunk

The Bible says that Noah took to drink after the ark landed (Gen. 9:18–27). Perhaps he was due a little celebration after all that work, but it got a bit out of hand, and he passed out naked in his tent. His son Ham saw his father in this embarrassing state, but the other two brothers covered him without peeking. Noah discovered this and bizarrely responded by cursing Ham’s son Canaan, presumably to support Israel’s future conquest of the land that Canaan’s tribe would occupy.

Bible scholars have woven many interpretations out of this odd curse, trying to figure out what is euphemism and what is literal, but the Noah film takes a different approach. It presents this wine scene literally, but Ham and Noah had friction that went back a long time. Before the flood, Ham had found a girlfriend, but Noah refused to help save her. On the boat with every eligible female in the world dead, Ham was angry enough that when he discovers the single stowaway—Tubal-Cain, of course—he listens to him.

Tubal-Cain says that the Creator (“God” is never mentioned in the movie) made man in his image to subdue nature. And he kinda has a point. In the creation story that Noah just told, the Bible says, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground” (Genesis 1:28). But you can imagine who wins in the fight scene.

The trailer ends with the text, “The film is inspired by the story of Noah,” which tries to placate everyone. It’s a “story,” so that doesn’t offend those who don’t follow the Bible. It’s “inspired by,” so it apologizes to Christians, Jews, and Muslims who think that it takes too much license. At the premiere, the director Darren Aronofsky said, “Anything you’re expecting, you’re f***ing wrong.”

I explore the various story strands that make up the Bible’s Noah story here.

No prophet of God hates people. . . .
“Noah” is wrong about everything.
— Glenn Beck

[Christians are] mad because this made up story
doesn’t stay true to their made up story.
— Bill Maher

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/28/14.)

Photo credit: IMDb

We’ve made it through Gary Habermas’s minimal facts argument from The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (dismantled here). As we catch our breath, let’s sift through the debris to identify the poor arguments and lessons learned. Some will be familiar, but I hope that a few will help crystalize errors about which you hadn’t been fully aware. These are both problems to avoid in our own arguments and errors to find in others’.

1. It’s a story

I can’t count the number of times that “It’s just a story!” went through my mind as I read this book. For example, Habermas says:

Surely the disciples did have some kind of experience (p. 128).

Yeah, in the story. That doesn’t make it history.

All we can start with is that it’s a story. We have lots of stories—about Alexander the Great and about John Henry. About George Washington and about Merlin the magician. Which are history and which are not?

It’s not like we have security-camera evidence documenting the gospel story. The default position for this and indeed for all supernatural stories is that it is not history. Only with overwhelming evidence can we conclude otherwise.

2. The natural trumps the supernatural

A plausible natural explanation always beats a supernatural explanation.

Habermas seems to have no idea how profoundly crazy his claim of a supernatural creator of the universe is. My response to his claim: like who? To whom can we compare this creator so we can ground Habermas’s claim in something we already accept?

There is no universally accepted supernatural creator of the universe. There isn’t even a single supernatural claim that’s universally accepted. (By “universally accepted,” I’m thinking of something like “germs cause some disease.”)

[The resurrection] is the only plausible explanation that accounts for [the historical data] (p. 141)

Habermas’s claim doesn’t look like anything that either science or society has accepted. What it does look like is all the other religions that Habermas himself rejects. He nonchalantly tosses out his supernatural explanation with unjustified confidence without even acknowledging that it’s a startling claim. To him, I suppose it isn’t. The objective outside observer doesn’t share that view, and if that’s part of his audience, he needs to recast his argument.

3. Avoid straw man arguments

The minimal facts argument is only effective when presented to someone who is eager to accept the resurrection or who has thought little about how historical claims are weighed. See the earlier post to see that evaluation, but we can probably agree that you must respond to your opponents’ best arguments, not caricatures of them.

4. “Given the story up to this point …”

A common argument for the historicity of a Bible story begins by demanding that we take the story up to a certain point as a given. For example, “Given the Jesus story up through the crucifixion, how do you explain the empty tomb?” (The challenge is often abbreviated as “How do you explain the empty tomb?” with the story assumption taken for granted.)

No, it’s a story! You can’t prove that one part of a story is correct by appealing to another part of the same story. This is the yellow brick road problem (“Of course there’s an Emerald City. Where else would the yellow brick road go to?”). Only when you have historical evidence do you have an argument.

The apologist might argue that “Jesus was crucified” is hardly a remarkable claim and assume that as a starting point. But that’s like demanding, “Oh, c’mon—surely you can give me ‘Dorothy went into her house during a tornado.’ Lots of people have done that.” No, the whole thing stands as a unit. Picking apart a legend and demanding that the commonplace bits must be history (without actually providing the evidence) doesn’t work.

Given the empty tomb, the immensely large rock, Jesus being dead, and the guards ensuring that he was put in dead and no one took the body as historical facts, then we can consider the resurrection. But those are big givens, which I won’t grant. Just because the gospels sort of say that doesn’t make it history.

To be concluded with four more lessons learned in part 2.

At Lourdes, you see plenty of crutches
but no wooden legs.
— John Dominic Crossan

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/26/14.)

Photo credit: Keene Public Library

Saul Steinberg’s famous “View of the World from 9th Avenue” mocks the outlook of the self-absorbed New Yorker. Manhattan is shown in sharp detail, but that detail fades with interest. Looking west, beyond the Hudson River is a featureless “Jersey” and a rectangle of land with a few scattered state labels representing the United States. Beyond that, the Pacific Ocean and a couple of distant countries. That’s it. That’s enough.

The Myopia of Genesis 1

And that’s the view we get in Genesis.

God created the sky as a vault to separate the saltwater sea above from the earth below and the freshwater sea beneath (Genesis 1:6). This is from Sumerian cosmology, which preceded the Bible, and which the Judean priesthood probably picked up while in exile in Babylon during the 500s BCE. We see this prescientific cosmology later during the flood story: “All the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened” (Gen. 7:11). Water comes from above and below because of the two hidden seas.

Over subsequent days, God’s creative focus narrows as he makes vegetation (Day 3), lights hung in the vault of the sky (Day 4), sea creatures (Day 5), land animals, and then Man (Day 6).

“He also made the stars”—it takes half of one verse, and in Hebrew, it’s a single word. That’s all the Bible says about the 99.9999999999999999999999999% of the universe that’s not the earth.* It’s just a blue watery dome over Mesopotamia holding little stars hung by strings to guide us at night.

“View of the World from the Bible”

Let’s recreate this famous magazine cover as the biblical version. This myopic view of the world would show the newly rebuilt Temple in sharp detail, as well as Jerusalem. Looking east, we’d see the Jordan River valley and the Dead Sea, and beyond that, a featureless Moab and Ammon, the desert, and then Persia. Out at the horizon beyond Persia, we’d see the edge of the water dome that covered the world. High up in the sky, we’d see the sun, moon, and little bitty stars.

The Bible is a human document. Its only perspective was that of Iron Age men.

Maybe the Bible is supposed to be that way

You could respond, of course, by saying that this was a natural view for a primitive people. It was all they could handle. But these people 2500 years ago weren’t fundamentally different from us. They had the same mental capability. If we can understand and marvel at the view of the universe provided by modern science, why wouldn’t God document the modern scientific view?

The God of Genesis was a primitive, stunted god. He’s given a very limited palette to work with. Many Christians today whip up (without justification) all sorts of extraordinary qualities of God—new qualities that the authors of Genesis couldn’t imagine. That he’s infinite, beyond time, omniscient, omnipotent. The Genesis god needed six days to shape his limited earth, while today’s god is said to have created the entire universe with its 100 billion galaxies, each with 100 billion stars.

Whatever science comes up with, the Christian response from many quarters is, “Oh yeah—we knew that. Let me tell you how we modify our god concept to adapt.”

Christians quickly co-opt the awe that science gives to add to the majesty of God’s creation—from the aurora borealis to Saturn’s rings to a distant nebula. But if awe is important to modern believers, why not give it to ancient ones?

Science is where awe comes from, not from the Genesis story or the Bible’s assurance that God can move mountains.

If the Bible were from a god, it would look like it.

Atheists read the Bible the way we have to read the Bible:
in the same historical manner with which we read every ancient source.
To do anything else is special pleading.
— commenter vorjack

* That’s not an arbitrary number.  The mass of visible matter in the universe is 6×10⁵¹ kg, while the mass of the earth is 6×10²⁴ kg.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/5/14.)

Image credit: Donnie Ray Jones, flickr, CC