Holy Moly: You're Gonna Build an Ark-y Ark-y

And God saw that things had gone to shit.

That's basically the crux of the early part of Noah's story.  God regretted making everything and decided to wipe the slate clean.  Creation hadn't gone the way He'd planned.

Seems to me like God should have seen this coming right after Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the Tree of Wisdom, frankly.  My reaction to that would probably have been to squash Adam and Eve back into the clay from which they came and to make some tentacle monsters instead or something.  But God is both capricious and forgiving, so He let it get to this point before deciding to hit that great cosmic Undo button.

I take this as proof of our free will.  And while the question always is: "Could God create a stone so big even He couldn't lift it?" I think the interesting question is, "Could God create a world which would go to so much shit even He couldn't put up with it any more?"  The answer: yes.  So God decides He's going to destroy the world.

But there's this one guy, Noah, who "walk[s] with God."  God likes him.  And I'm pretty sure we all know the story from here because of the fables of our culture or because of Aronofski movies.  God tells Noah, "Build an ark using a large number of cubits.  Take two of each animal, male and female and put them on the ark.  Then get in yourself, for I am going to flood the world."  And that's where Genesis 6 leaves us, waiting in anticipation for the CGI tsunamis and the wailing and gnashing of teeth among the wicked.

But Genesis 7 picks up with God saying to Noah, "Take seven pairs of every clean animal and one pair of every unclean animal and get in the ark with your family."  What gives?  Did God stutter?

We'll come back to this, but remember that the Bible was written on several stone tablets that Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai from a burning bush which apparently could chisel tablets.  So what it says goes, right?

Not exactly.  The Bible was definitely not written in stone by a burning bush, nor did it spring full-formed into Moses' head on Mt. Sinai.  It's a collection of writings by people who were collecting oral tradition thousands of years after said traditions were hatched.  The thing is, clean and unclean animals weren't even a thing for Noah because Kosher wasn't a thing until after Moses.  So that's an anachronism right there.

I'll leave it for smarter people than me to determine why it's there or why the same passage in two forms appears, but I think it probably has to do with an injection of Mosaic Law into a legend from a much earlier time in order to bring some additional "just-so" to bear on this particular legend.  But it's pretty inelegant, especially since a few lines later we've got clean and unclean animals, a pair each, being loaded up.  And then again a few lines after that, with no mention of cleanliness.

Anyway, however many pairs Noah took, he loaded them all into the ark.  Possibly twice, with a flood happening.  Must have been a schlep.

There's a similar confusion with time.  The flood rose for 40 days and 40 nights, or maybe 150 days, or something else.  Again, we're talking about old, old stories being written down much later.  And then collected later than that.  And then edited later than that.  At a certain point, someone must have just said, "Screw it, put it all in there.  Better that than maybe losing something important."  So there was a flood and everything died.

Note also that the waters rose to 23 feet high, which was apparently enough to cover the mountains, plate tectonics not having been invented yet so mountains were much shorter.  I'm sure the Creationists have answers for that too, but why listen to Creationists?

Genesis 8 starts out with some more time strangeness, but suffice it to say that everyone was in the ark for a long time.  I think that's probably all that the ancient authors wanted to convey, and it must have been shitty, both metaphorically and literally, in that ark by that point.  Then the ark comes to rest on Mt. Ararat.

Except it doesn't, because we've got an interlude with some birds first.