Actually Understanding the Bible (Pt 3-A)
(Note: As is customary, every 4th or 5th post I set aside as thanks for paid subscribers. As usual, I am putting about half of this post out in a “free preview” with the remaining half behind a paywall. However, this post is over 6,000 words long and Substack informs me it that it actually exceeds Gmail’s 102 KB limit. I could get the full post under that limit by removing all the images but I think they’re informative and help you get a better handle on what I’m saying. That being the case, I’m releasing “Actually Understanding the Bible (Part 3) as two posts, A & B. A is the first half, and free, and B is the second half behind the paywall. You can become a paid subscriber to get both but if you’re not a paid subscriber please enjoy part A.)
Introduction
♫ The Lord told Noah to build him and arky arky,
The Lord told Noah to build him and arky arky,
Build it out of hickory barky barky,
Children of the Lord. ♫ — A Common Children’s Song
The argument could be made that Noah’s Flood is the central barrier to belief in our time. Creation narratives? Okay. People can swing those. You know, the parts they life they can hold onto and the parts they don’t like or don’t understand they can chalk up to an allegory or a metaphor or something. Right? But the Flood? No. It’s too fantastical a story. Old guy with a beard saving all life on earth by use of a floating zoo? “Give me a break,” they say. People just can’t buy it.
More to the point, even if they could they’re not sure they’d want to. A deity who drowns all life on earth is hard for folks to square with the loving God they believe they encounter through Jesus. You know, we make the whole affair cutesy with children’s songs like arky arky and barky barky, but the story is actually about a world ending apocalypse where millions die and become floating, swollen corpses. Intense. In my garage I have a half finished painting to this effect. Noah’s ark on the water in the midst of a thunderstorm, the sea around it filled with floating skulls. Never finished it. Probably never will. Much as I try, paint and canvas is just not my medium. I’m never happy with how it looks. Mostly when I paint it’s in hopes of giving the rough idea of a picture to some better artist in the future who will redo what I’ve put down but with real proper skill. Maybe one day. Stranger things have happened.
In this part of the series I hope to cover the following important ground:
That The Flood is an indispensable part of the Biblical narrative that cannot be allegorized away. Indeed, the entire Biblical story up to and including Jesus makes no sense without it.
That most of the “plot holes” in the flood story that modern people cannot accept are likely the result of a misunderstanding of the text.
That The Flood literally happened. To this end I will provide a hypothesis explaining one means by which it could have. There are other hypotheses and theories, some of which are perhaps better. There is neither time nor space here to discuss all of them, but I’d like to open your mind to at least some of the possible solutions.
That the Symbolism inherent in the actual, literal event of the flooding of the world is both coherent and revealing as to the nature of the cosmos.
To accomplish these goals we will first turn to मानवधर्मशास्त्र.
Story Time
“Evil actions performed in this world do not bear fruit immediately like the cow, which gives milk after being fed, but gradually gnaw the roots of him who commits them.” — Manusmriti
Long ago and far away a man was washing his hands in a bowl. Looking down at his hands, he noticed a tiny fish swimming about in the bottom of the vessel.
“Sir,” the fish began, “please, I beg of you, this bowl is too small for me. I will die if I remain here. Please remove me from here and place me in a larger bowl of water to save my life.”
A talking fish? Ha! The man was no fool. Surely this creature was some angel or god in disguise. Surely this was some kind of message, or some test from Heaven. He would do well to tread wisely.
“What will you give me in exchange for my kindness,” asked the man. “If I do this thing for you, what will you do for me in return?”
“Wait and see,” said the fish. “As surely as God is, debts of kindness never go unpaid.”
This seemed good to the man and so he took the fish and placed it in a larger bowl. Some time later, he returned to the bowl and found that the fish had grown significantly.
“Sir,” the fish began again, “please, I beg of you, this bowl is too small for me. I will die if I remain here. Please remove me from here and place me in a larger body of water to save my life.”
Again the man knew this creature must be some sort of messenger from heaven so again he tested the fish.
“What will you give me in exchange for my kindness,” asked the man a second time. “If I do this thing for you, what will you do for me in return?”
“Wait and see,” said the fish. “As surely as God is, debts of kindness never go unpaid.”
Again this seemed good to the man so he took the fish and placed him in a small pond.
Sometime later the man returned to the pond and, yet again, he found the fish much increased in size! Again the fish asked to be moved to a bigger space and again, after testing him, the man obliged. On and on it went like this. From the small pond to a big pond. From the big pond to a creek. From the creek to a river. From the river to a lake. And then, finally, the man returned to find the fish so large that even the lake seemed too minuscule to hold him.
“Sir,” the enormous fish began once more when the man approached., “please, I beg of you, this lake is too small for me. I will die if I remain here. Please remove me from here and place me in a larger body of water to save my life.”
“Now see here,” said the man. “Many times now we have played this game. And each time it is not good enough for you. Now in fact you are so large that only the ocean is a fitting home for you, and after that there is no larger body of water to place you in. If, as you say, debts of kindness never go unpaid, then if I do this thing for you this last time, you must surely pay me, for, if you do not God will be sore displeased.”
The fish smiled. “You speak truly.” It answered. “As surely as God is, if you do me this last kindness I will repay you with a great treasure.”
This seemed good to the man and so, with the great effort of many years he dug a long canal connecting the lake to the ocean and, once it was completed, the fish swam out with great zeal to the sea.
“There now,” said the man at last. “I have done as you requested. Pay me the debt of kindness that you owe.”
“So you have.” The fish answered from the waters. “As surely as God is, I will repay you this very instant with Wisdom, the greatest of treasures. Now, know you this oh man. Heaven is displeased with Earth and with all the creatures whom are in it. Therefore the gods have decided to send a flood upon the face of the earth to destroy it, and to wipe clean from it all creatures which have grown weary with evil and bad acts. Therefore, take heed, and built for yourself a great ship, that when the waters come you alone will be saved. And take you likewise two of each kind of animal on your boat, and seeds from every sort of plant, that the life God has made shall not die.”
This the man did. He constructed a boat of goodly size and proper proportion, and he filled it with two of every animal and the seeds of every plant. When the flood came, the man used a rope to tie the boat to the great fish, and the fish pulled the ship through the turbulent waters until it came to the highest mountains. There, the fish instructed the man to tie the rope to the top of the mountains and wait until the waters receded and the earth appeared once more.
This happened. After the flood, the man let loose the animals from his ship and they ran hither and yon to the places they would be from, and were fruitful and multiplied. And likewise the man planted the seeds from every kind of plant and they grew, and in the course of time once more covered the earth in green. But of course, the man was lonely. He only of his kind had been spared and the animals and plants were not sufficient company for his soul. He prayed to Heaven therefore, and made a sacrifice and an oblation of butter and sour milk into the remaining waters and then, from those waters there was born a woman. She and the man lived happily for a good long time and had many children. They are the father and mother of all, the first law givers, and worthy of great respect. The man’s name was Manu, and for this reason his descendants are called Man, and his race, Mankind.
The Everybody Myth
What I’ve just told you is the story of Manu. Manu is the “Noah” character of the Rigveda, one of the Hindu scriptures. That bit at the end about his name being the origins of the words Man and Mankind is true by the way. The word Man actually does have its roots in the Indo-Aryan word “Manu,” referring to this character. “Mankind,” therefore, essentially means “Children of Noah.” Funny how you never learn that it school. We are everywhere disconnected from our ancient past. So much so I cannot help but imagine it is on purpose.
The first laws of Hindu culture were said to have been written by Manu himself, Manu being a master of Dharma, or the Divine Law. I quoted a line from the “Manusmriti”, aka, “The Laws of Manu” for you at the beginning. Indian culture is very old. It is not impossible that some of the sayings attributed to Manu in that text are actually direct quotes from Noah himself. Wild to think about. Strange how a story you’ve heard since you were knee-high to a grasshopper can seem strange and exotic again if told through a slightly different cultural lens. It’s important to reinvigorate these ancient stories into our lives once more. They have to be a living tradition for us. A story that we’re apart of. Nothing could be more vital for rediscovering our roots than seeking to understand a story that literally every single one of our ancestors believed in. That’s not hyperbole by the way. All your ancient ancestors believed in the flood. Like, every single one of them. Every single one of them, no matter who you are.
Why?
Because every ancient culture has a flood myth. Truly it’s almost all of them. The Abrahamic faiths have Noah, naturally. And the Hindus have Manu. The Mesopotamians had Utnapishtim, the man tasked by the god Enki to build a ship named “The Preserver of Life,” which, you know, preserved all the life. The Chippewa of the American mid-west had Waynaboozhoo, the man who made a raft of floating sticks and pulled all the animals trapped in the deluge to safety upon it. The Koreans had a boy and all his animals riding on the log of a huge tree. There was Lycaon of the Greeks. The wicked man who performed human sacrifices to Zeus. Zeus was so appalled by this offering that he decided humanity was too wicked to live and so sent the flood. Deucalion, the Greek Noah, was warned by his father Prometheus to build a chest to float in during the flood, and he uses this device to survive the storm with his wife Pyrrha.
So yeah.
The Flood happened.
I’m not sure what other conclusion could reasonably be drawn from that available data. Every ancient culture in the world, with a smattering handful of possible exceptions here and there, tells us the same thing. Long ago, Heaven was very displeased with humanity. A flood was sent to make the world clean and only one man, or a chosen few, survived by means of divine forewarning and a big-ass boat. Far be it from me to ignore the testimony of every single one of our great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandfathers and grandmothers, over the entire world. If every ancestor from Mesoamerica to the Korean peninsula is telling us the same story, I think we ought to be listening. Something that universal must be based on something true. Something true and something rather big and horrifying. I therefore believe that at some point in the not so distant past there was indeed a global cataclysm. A Flood.
In fact, as it happens, I believe the earth remains flooded to this very day.
A Hypothesis About How It Happened
I’ve thought for a long time about how to reconcile the preponderance of ancient testimony about a literal cataclysmic flood with what we understand about natural history from science. There are, of course, many big problems with the Noah story. Plot holes you might say. First among them just the simple logistics. Two of every single kind of animal? On one boat? And the lions don’t eat the gazelles? Where does all the poop go? How could you feed them? Just how many species of beetle are there anyway? Even if you could manage all that, once the ark sets down on land again a single male and a single female of each species doth hardly a breeding population make. How did the kangaroos get to Australia anyway? Or the penguins to Antarctica? If the whole globe flooded, all the plants would be drowned. I’m not sure but I think the algae would suffer too. Where’s the oxygen coming from? Wouldn’t the soil be ruined for ages? Even if Manu did have some seeds, could a crop even happen? And really, where the heck did all the water go!? For that matter, where did it come from in the first place? Gopher wood?
Unfortunately, all the flood myths are rather bare bones. Once upon a time around the ancient camp fire a lot of these missing details were probably filled in but sadly we’ve only got pretty short, condensed versions. The entirety of the Biblical account is only three to four pages. We have to do a lot of the leg work in filling in the gaps ourselves and, frankly, it is vital that we do so because a strictly metaphorical interpretation of the flood will not work. It just won’t.
Listen. It’s not like I haven’t tried okay? I have. I’ve listened to thousands of hours of priests and pastors and theologians try to allegorize the flood away, read a thousand paragraphs about how “it doesn’t matter if it really happened, all that matters is what the flood story means.” All that. I’ve tried it. Doesn’t wash. Just doesn’t. If there was never a literal, world-wide flood that wiped away a corrupted humanity then the whole book is nonsense. Seriously. Just toss out your Bible right now and hurl your Rosary beads into a fire. The flood happening, literally happening, is the pretext for almost everything that comes after in the Christian story. Believe it or not, it even explains what demons are. You know, Jesus’s principle adversary in the New Testament. If you make the flood into a metaphor or an allegory you have to do the same with everything that comes after the flood too. The whole thing just becomes one big Aesop’s fable. Something maybe useful for teaching us a moral lesson or two, but nothing to build a faith around. Nothing to dedicate your life to.
So. Let’s work from the assumption that it happened.
I’m going to tell you how.
My best guess anyway. I might be wrong on one or all counts but maybe the exercise will prove illuminating regardless. Perhaps afterwards Noah will make a bit more sense to you. I hope so. He’s your great great great great granddad after all.
(Here endeth Part 3, section A. Section B, the paid portion, will be published shortly.)
I haven't read past part 3b yet, but I already feel the need to just shower you with appreciation for what you are doing. The intent you have with all of this is what is so precious and worthy. I just think that the honest attempt to reconcile these ancient stories with the general current prideful worldview most people have is a truly noble task. I just applaud and support you so much. It is your honest intent that is so rare and needed, and I thank you so very much!
Wow, what a cliffhanger. I appreciate that you've put the next section behind a subscription because it really makes me consider the value of your writing. I suppose I do find it insightful and will actually subscribe in order to continue reading.