Summary:
If you take the story of Noah as the revealed truth of God, and therefore true in every detail, this is not for you.
If you view it, however, as an oral myth that was eventually incorporated into the Book of Moses, here are the only things you can be sure of: there was a man named Noah* who experienced a psychic vision around 8000 B.C.** telling him that a great flood was about to occur because of God’s wrath. He built a craft to save himself and his family and a few farm animals and survived.
This skinny story about his vision, boat and flood survival became the seed of the enlarged story that made its way over the milennia into the Bible.
The changes in the Bible's version of Noah are due to two factors (1) exaggeration, which is the nature of preliterate oral tales, and ( 2) as a reflection of the Hebrews' religious vision that redemption would follow God’s destruction of them because of their sins. In many senses, the Biblical story of Noah is a new Genesis.
*(The name Noah comes from the verb (nuah 1323) meaning rest, settle down. This was either the man’s name or a name adopted or given to him by others to honor his survival.)
** The entire world experienced massive flooding around 8000 B.C. as a result of a sudden retreat of the Ice Age. This is why there are hundreds of flood stories.
OK, here's the detail :
The Biblical story about Noah's Ark is is an area alternative thinkers are constantly investigating in efforts to find remains of the ark.
Among the questions we have to answer are these: Did Noah exist, did the ark exist as described , and did the Flood take place as depicted?
If we want to understand the sources of the Biblical Noah, and how accurate that story is, we have to first understand that a number of flood/ark stories existed in other cultures. The scholarship is pretty tight on this.
There is also some dating that has been done by scholars which shows some of these flood stories predate that of Noah.
Or to be more specific, the creation dates of the written versions of these stories indicates that creation of one preceded the other, but this is meaningless and has nothing to do with how old each of these myths actually was.
This is because we also know that these stories existed as oral story poems for hundreds if not thousands of years before they were eventually transcribed into writing somewhere around 1200BC, which is the approximate point in time that humans discovered alphabetic writing, although some like the Sumerians and Egyptians had a written language as early as 2500 B.C.
Thus, the oral story poem about Noah was eventually transcribed into writing around 1200 BC, where it existed in "manuscript" form for about 400 years until it was entered into the Bible around 800 B.C., the period when the Book of Moses was formalized out of hundreds of transcribed oral poems.
What few scholars (and alternative thinkers) really understand is the extent to which a preliterate oral story poem can be trusted.
The answer is this: they can be highly accurate on some matters and highly untrustworthy on others.
700 years (by the way) is the time gap between the Trojan war and the time of Homer, who was an oral epic poet.
The Noah gap is even larger, with some biblical scholars giving the date of the Flood as 2300 B.C., about the time when the pyramids were being built in Egypt.
This date is disputed by others, some scientists placing the Flood at 4500 B.C. or 8000 B.C. Nevertheless, even using the 2300 BC .date, this is a huge amount of time ( 2300 B.C. minus 1200 B.C. = 1100 years) for any culture to maintain a detailed, accurate story .
As an example of this, look how little we really know abut the 1200 AD Knights Templar), but it is mind boggling when we think about it being accomplished by a culture in which no written records exist.
Without going into the thinking backing up my statements (which can be investigated in my books listed below) the answer is as follows for the Biblical Noah:
1) Here's the main rule that is never violated: all oral story poems are based on real physical or psychic events.
They were never imaginary fables, which are modern, literate inventions.
An actual massive flood event did take place somewhere in the middle eastern preliterate world. That can be taken as a fact.
Exactly, when and where is problematic, but there are several well-documented scientific theories about the occurrence of great floods in the middle east and I believe more will appear in time as we uncover instances of meteor collisions in the seas in the middle eastern area.
2) A man named Noah (or a name with a similar linguistic root) did exist and he did fashion some kind of craft to save his family, his belongings and some animals. Here is some scholarship on the meaning of Noah.
(The name Noah (
) comes from the verb 
(nuah 1323) meaning rest, settle down. HAW Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament reports that this root 'signifies not only absence of movement but being settled in a particular place [] with overtones of finality.)
Here an interesting situation arises. We can assume the Hebrew root "nuah" preceded the date of the flood and
a) the man Noah was given this name at birth in prophetic recognition of the fact he would bring the human race to a "place of final rest".
or
b) the man who built the craft accepted or adopted the name in honor of the fact that he had brought humanity to a "place of final rest".
In other words, he allowed himself to be "reborn and renamed", because "naming" in preliterate cultures was not a casual event. It was considered a sacred, prophetic activity.
You had to be symbolically "reborn" to acquire a new name, which may have been the case with Noah.
In either case, the name Noah would have been rigidly honored after the Flood.
The names of heroes are one of the few things in oral story poems that are always correct, because in oral cultures, honoring a hero meant repeating his name in song correctly and endlessly. Honor, which to us is expendable, was the highest virtue in an oral culture. It would be unthinkable to change the hero's name.
3. The general theme of an oral story poem always reflects the world-vision of that culture.
Like the hero's name, it never changes, nor is it arbitrary because it emerges from the collective unconscious of that culture via the creative act of poetry.
The general theme of the Noah story is not unique. It occurs over and over in many preliterate cultures. In its simplest form it is this: God's destruction of disobedient humans.
But the Noah story is a variation on that general theme. This variation also occurs in many cultures. It is one of divine punishment by Water, which is of immense psychic importance because death by drowning for the Hebrews implies a return to the "darkness of the waters" and thus sets the stage for a new Creation.
It is water's implied ability to create life as well as destroy it that gives the Noah story much of its unconscious power.
Let me put it this way: fire or comets or raging monsters would not have done the trick.
Such powerful story poems emerge when something like a powerful flood occurs at a point in time when the collective unconscious of a culture has been searching for a way to express a yet to be born cultural truth .
It is an automatic, unconscious cultural response, which is the nature of these great preliterate story poems.
This is why the name Noah and the central theme of the Flood are not arbitrary. It is out of the question because both are dictated by the power of the cultural, collective unconscious, which again, is always rooted in an actual psychic or physical event.
4) Here is something else that is never arbitrary : the nature or character of the hero.
Achilles is always courageous, Odysseus is always wily. It is no accident that Noah is depicted as obedient, a drunk , and not a deep thinker, i.e., he is a man driven by his unconscious.
In this, he is a stand-in for God, the ultimate "unconscious" power, in the re-seeding of the earth. There is also an echo of Homer's mysterious , brooding, psychically-rooted "wine-dark sea" in the drunken Noah.
BUT:
5) Everything else in the story is subject to change. Everything.
Oral story poems were never consciously fashioned, as our TV dramas are. They emerged from the unconscious of individual poets in hundreds of songs that ebbed and flowed over hundreds of years. Like dreams they needed no prompting from the conscious mind, because they reflected unconscious cultural truths that needed to be sung of over and over.
So here's the run down on the Biblical Flood:
1) Noah existed and his nature and name as well as the theme of the Flood were orally preserved over hundreds if not thousands of years until they were transcribed into writing.
2) A flood event existed and triggered the initial story poem.
3.)The theme of Noah's Flood was a cultural vision of destruction and redemption that remained intact over hundreds of years until it was transcribed into writing.
4) Here's the kicker: everything else was subject to change, usually through exaggeration. Colors, dimensions, times, minor characters, costume, habits, etc.
Tall tales wer
en't invented by Paul Bunyan. Thus the dimensions of the craft, the number and type of animals, the family members, the duration of the flood, where it finally grounded, etc., were all subject to exaggeration and change.
It happened organically out of the poet's unconscious. and the collective unconscious of the culture. It's the nature of oral story poems to grow in this manner over hundreds of years.
Don't forget, there are no written records, none. A change that took place in a retelling may not even have been noticed. Or if it was, it was easily accepted because the culture was ready to hear it.
For instance, the 40 day period of the flood before it receded most probably does not reflect any actual duration. If it was a flash flood it may
have lasted for a few days or if by glacial melting, a very long time.
Forty days is a highly spiritual number: it signifies the time period most preliterate cultures held as the time between death and the body's decomposition and the soul's departure from the physical world. Most probably the 40 days fit a cultural/spiritual need.
One last note. Whether the Hebrews adopted the Flood story from earlier cultures so as to flesh out their own "punishment /redemption" story poems , or if it originated with the Hebrews out of their own flood experience is anyone's guess.
We have to remember that the Hebrews in their early preliterate stage were wanderers. They were herders and craftsmen. Here is some scholarship on that:
The term Hebrew means "to cross over a boundary". (ISBE, revised, Hebrew) Included in this thought is that a "Hebrew" would be one "who crossed over" or one who went from place to place, a nomad, a wanderer, an alien.
Thus, while the final transcribed versions of the various Flood stories have originating dates as to their written publication, the question as to where the stories originated orally, and when, is essentially unanswerable. Even members of those ancient cultures would have no idea.
An oral world has few artistic boundaries, because oral story poems existed on the wind as poets and listeners came and went across vast areas.
It could be that one of the great flood stories originated with the Hebrews, or it could be they adopted one to fit their own flood story and cultural vision.
The fact of that adoption, however, would soon be forgotten. It would become theirs, because it expressed an unconscious cultural truth that needed expressing.
Outside o
f the art work and stone structures that have survived, there are no permanent records of what those preliterate cultures were like.
We must never forget that in oral cultures, there is only the foggy past (many moons), the immediate present, and the great oral story poems that came and went on the wind.
Some of those great story poems, however, didn't fade away, but were retold over hundreds and even thousands of years until they were thrown upon the shores of literacy and transcribed into writing.
We must always remember, however, that they were subject to the kind of changes I have been indicating.
Let the buyer beware.
So anyone who is looking for a 500 foot, 3-story boat capable of carrying every animal known to the Hebrews should think twice before setting out on an expedition.
This is why it pays to understand that the so called "document" you're relying on for facts is not a physical description like you'd find in Popular Science, but a (hopefully) somewhat accurately transcribed (and translated) Hebrew metaphor for the Divine destruction and re-creation / redemption of the Hebrews.
In short, it is a work of art. It is as much about the interior world as the exterior world.
An interesting note: this is a replica of the biblical Ark, built by Dutchman
Johan Huibers as a testament to his faith in the literal truth of the Bible. Johan got the idea to build the ark after having a dream about the Netherlands being flooded. He plans to set sail and travel to other parts of the country and eventually to major cities in Belgium and Germany.
Don't confuse this remarkable feat, however, with the preliterate myth of Noah. They are two different things, created by different eruptions of the imagination. No one will be reading or thinking about Johan 3000 years from now, in the same way as we have been reading and thinking about Noah for the past 3000 years. Think about it
I welcome your comments on anything in this blog or in my videos .
Among the questions we have to answer are these: Did Noah exist, did the ark exist as described , and did the Flood take place as depicted?
If we want to understand the sources of the Biblical Noah, and how accurate that story is, we have to first understand that a number of flood/ark stories existed in other cultures. The scholarship is pretty tight on this.
There is also some dating that has been done by scholars which shows some of these flood stories predate that of Noah.
Or to be more specific, the creation dates of the written versions of these stories indicates that creation of one preceded the other, but this is meaningless and has nothing to do with how old each of these myths actually was.
This is because we also know that these stories existed as oral story poems for hundreds if not thousands of years before they were eventually transcribed into writing somewhere around 1200BC, which is the approximate point in time that humans discovered alphabetic writing, although some like the Sumerians and Egyptians had a written language as early as 2500 B.C.
Thus, the oral story poem about Noah was eventually transcribed into writing around 1200 BC, where it existed in "manuscript" form for about 400 years until it was entered into the Bible around 800 B.C., the period when the Book of Moses was formalized out of hundreds of transcribed oral poems.What few scholars (and alternative thinkers) really understand is the extent to which a preliterate oral story poem can be trusted.
The answer is this: they can be highly accurate on some matters and highly untrustworthy on others.
700 years (by the way) is the time gap between the Trojan war and the time of Homer, who was an oral epic poet.The Noah gap is even larger, with some biblical scholars giving the date of the Flood as 2300 B.C., about the time when the pyramids were being built in Egypt.
This date is disputed by others, some scientists placing the Flood at 4500 B.C. or 8000 B.C. Nevertheless, even using the 2300 BC .date, this is a huge amount of time ( 2300 B.C. minus 1200 B.C. = 1100 years) for any culture to maintain a detailed, accurate story .
As an example of this, look how little we really know abut the 1200 AD Knights Templar), but it is mind boggling when we think about it being accomplished by a culture in which no written records exist.
Without going into the thinking backing up my statements (which can be investigated in my books listed below) the answer is as follows for the Biblical Noah:
1) Here's the main rule that is never violated: all oral story poems are based on real physical or psychic events.
They were never imaginary fables, which are modern, literate inventions.
An actual massive flood event did take place somewhere in the middle eastern preliterate world. That can be taken as a fact.
Exactly, when and where is problematic, but there are several well-documented scientific theories about the occurrence of great floods in the middle east and I believe more will appear in time as we uncover instances of meteor collisions in the seas in the middle eastern area.
2) A man named Noah (or a name with a similar linguistic root) did exist and he did fashion some kind of craft to save his family, his belongings and some animals. Here is some scholarship on the meaning of Noah.(The name Noah (
) comes from the verb (nuah 1323) meaning rest, settle down. HAW Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament reports that this root 'signifies not only absence of movement but being settled in a particular place [] with overtones of finality.)Here an interesting situation arises. We can assume the Hebrew root "nuah" preceded the date of the flood and
a) the man Noah was given this name at birth in prophetic recognition of the fact he would bring the human race to a "place of final rest".
or
b) the man who built the craft accepted or adopted the name in honor of the fact that he had brought humanity to a "place of final rest".
In other words, he allowed himself to be "reborn and renamed", because "naming" in preliterate cultures was not a casual event. It was considered a sacred, prophetic activity.
You had to be symbolically "reborn" to acquire a new name, which may have been the case with Noah.
In either case, the name Noah would have been rigidly honored after the Flood.
The names of heroes are one of the few things in oral story poems that are always correct, because in oral cultures, honoring a hero meant repeating his name in song correctly and endlessly. Honor, which to us is expendable, was the highest virtue in an oral culture. It would be unthinkable to change the hero's name.
3. The general theme of an oral story poem always reflects the world-vision of that culture.
Like the hero's name, it never changes, nor is it arbitrary because it emerges from the collective unconscious of that culture via the creative act of poetry.
The general theme of the Noah story is not unique. It occurs over and over in many preliterate cultures. In its simplest form it is this: God's destruction of disobedient humans.But the Noah story is a variation on that general theme. This variation also occurs in many cultures. It is one of divine punishment by Water, which is of immense psychic importance because death by drowning for the Hebrews implies a return to the "darkness of the waters" and thus sets the stage for a new Creation.
It is water's implied ability to create life as well as destroy it that gives the Noah story much of its unconscious power.
Let me put it this way: fire or comets or raging monsters would not have done the trick.
Such powerful story poems emerge when something like a powerful flood occurs at a point in time when the collective unconscious of a culture has been searching for a way to express a yet to be born cultural truth .
It is an automatic, unconscious cultural response, which is the nature of these great preliterate story poems.
This is why the name Noah and the central theme of the Flood are not arbitrary. It is out of the question because both are dictated by the power of the cultural, collective unconscious, which again, is always rooted in an actual psychic or physical event.4) Here is something else that is never arbitrary : the nature or character of the hero.
Achilles is always courageous, Odysseus is always wily. It is no accident that Noah is depicted as obedient, a drunk , and not a deep thinker, i.e., he is a man driven by his unconscious.
In this, he is a stand-in for God, the ultimate "unconscious" power, in the re-seeding of the earth. There is also an echo of Homer's mysterious , brooding, psychically-rooted "wine-dark sea" in the drunken Noah.
BUT:
5) Everything else in the story is subject to change. Everything.
Oral story poems were never consciously fashioned, as our TV dramas are. They emerged from the unconscious of individual poets in hundreds of songs that ebbed and flowed over hundreds of years. Like dreams they needed no prompting from the conscious mind, because they reflected unconscious cultural truths that needed to be sung of over and over.
So here's the run down on the Biblical Flood:
1) Noah existed and his nature and name as well as the theme of the Flood were orally preserved over hundreds if not thousands of years until they were transcribed into writing.
2) A flood event existed and triggered the initial story poem.
3.)The theme of Noah's Flood was a cultural vision of destruction and redemption that remained intact over hundreds of years until it was transcribed into writing.
4) Here's the kicker: everything else was subject to change, usually through exaggeration. Colors, dimensions, times, minor characters, costume, habits, etc.
Tall tales wer
en't invented by Paul Bunyan. Thus the dimensions of the craft, the number and type of animals, the family members, the duration of the flood, where it finally grounded, etc., were all subject to exaggeration and change.It happened organically out of the poet's unconscious. and the collective unconscious of the culture. It's the nature of oral story poems to grow in this manner over hundreds of years.
Don't forget, there are no written records, none. A change that took place in a retelling may not even have been noticed. Or if it was, it was easily accepted because the culture was ready to hear it.
For instance, the 40 day period of the flood before it receded most probably does not reflect any actual duration. If it was a flash flood it may
have lasted for a few days or if by glacial melting, a very long time.Forty days is a highly spiritual number: it signifies the time period most preliterate cultures held as the time between death and the body's decomposition and the soul's departure from the physical world. Most probably the 40 days fit a cultural/spiritual need.
One last note. Whether the Hebrews adopted the Flood story from earlier cultures so as to flesh out their own "punishment /redemption" story poems , or if it originated with the Hebrews out of their own flood experience is anyone's guess.
We have to remember that the Hebrews in their early preliterate stage were wanderers. They were herders and craftsmen. Here is some scholarship on that:
The term Hebrew means "to cross over a boundary". (ISBE, revised, Hebrew) Included in this thought is that a "Hebrew" would be one "who crossed over" or one who went from place to place, a nomad, a wanderer, an alien.
Thus, while the final transcribed versions of the various Flood stories have originating dates as to their written publication, the question as to where the stories originated orally, and when, is essentially unanswerable. Even members of those ancient cultures would have no idea. An oral world has few artistic boundaries, because oral story poems existed on the wind as poets and listeners came and went across vast areas.
It could be that one of the great flood stories originated with the Hebrews, or it could be they adopted one to fit their own flood story and cultural vision.
The fact of that adoption, however, would soon be forgotten. It would become theirs, because it expressed an unconscious cultural truth that needed expressing.
Outside o
f the art work and stone structures that have survived, there are no permanent records of what those preliterate cultures were like.We must never forget that in oral cultures, there is only the foggy past (many moons), the immediate present, and the great oral story poems that came and went on the wind.
Some of those great story poems, however, didn't fade away, but were retold over hundreds and even thousands of years until they were thrown upon the shores of literacy and transcribed into writing.
We must always remember, however, that they were subject to the kind of changes I have been indicating.
Let the buyer beware.
So anyone who is looking for a 500 foot, 3-story boat capable of carrying every animal known to the Hebrews should think twice before setting out on an expedition.
This is why it pays to understand that the so called "document" you're relying on for facts is not a physical description like you'd find in Popular Science, but a (hopefully) somewhat accurately transcribed (and translated) Hebrew metaphor for the Divine destruction and re-creation / redemption of the Hebrews.
In short, it is a work of art. It is as much about the interior world as the exterior world.
An interesting note: this is a replica of the biblical Ark, built by Dutchman
Johan Huibers as a testament to his faith in the literal truth of the Bible. Johan got the idea to build the ark after having a dream about the Netherlands being flooded. He plans to set sail and travel to other parts of the country and eventually to major cities in Belgium and Germany.Don't confuse this remarkable feat, however, with the preliterate myth of Noah. They are two different things, created by different eruptions of the imagination. No one will be reading or thinking about Johan 3000 years from now, in the same way as we have been reading and thinking about Noah for the past 3000 years. Think about it
I welcome your comments on anything in this blog or in my videos .
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