God sees that the people that he made had gotten a bit out of control. They run amok and behave badly. He regrets making them at all and decides that in 120 years, he's just going to wipe it all out.
But he likes Noah. Noah and his family are ok. It's just the rest of humanity that sucks.
God tells Noah to build a boat, 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, 30 cubits tall. A cubit is about 18" so this ark is to be 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet tall.
Someone in the Netherlands built one. It's even seaworthy.
He tells Noah he's going to wipe out everything on the earth, but he should bring his wife, his sons, and his sons' wives, along with the animals. He's supposed to bring seven pairs of all the clean animals, seven pairs of each kind of bird, and one pair of each unclean animal, plus enough food for everyone.
How'd he fit them all in there? It would be tight. There are a lot of people who think it could work, depending on how you define "kind" of animal. If you bring one "horse-like" animal that could cover all the zebras, horses, ponies, donkeys, etc., that would keep the numbers down. But they'd need to evolve into different species pretty quickly after the flood because fairly soon afterward there is mention of horses and donkeys.
But they need a full year's worth of food for all of them, too. A single wild African elephant eats between 220 to 440 pounds of vegetation a day.
Shortly after Noah's 600th birthday, the flood starts. It rains 40 days and 40 nights. It covers the mountain tops by about 22 feet. For this to happen, there would have to be five times the amount of water that's currently on the earth.
Then God blows a wind and makes the water recede. After 5 months, the ark grounds on the top of a mountain. Three months after that, they could see the tops of the mountain.
| The dove gets all the attention... |
40 days after that, Noah peeks out and sends a raven, and the raven just flies around. So he sends out a dove but it comes back. He waits a week and tries again and the dove comes back with the leaf of a very fast growing olive tree. A week later he sends the dove again and it never comes back.
A year and 10 days after the rains first started, God gives permission to disembark.
Noah promptly builds an alter and burns one of every clean animal and bird as an offering. God loves the smell of roasting animals so much that he promises to never wipe out all the animals and mankind again.
He blesses Noah and tells him that from now on all the animals are going to be afraid of man, but he can eat them, just so long as he doesn't eat the blood. He tells them to go repopulate the planet, with the warning that if a man kills another man, the killer will die. He promises again not to do the whole angry "wipe everything out with a flood" thing again, and says that a rainbow is a sign of this promise.
Noah plants a vineyard, makes himself some wine and gets so drunk that he passes out naked in his tent. His son Ham walks in and sees dear old dad laying there naked. No one likes walking in on their naked father, so he probably yells in surprise, wishes he could unsee everything, and goes to tell his brothers, Shem and Japheth. Shem and Japh walk into the tent backwards so they don't see their father and toss a blanket on him.
Noah is the Bible's first angry drunk. He wakes up and is completely pissed that Ham had walked in on him while he was passed out drunk and naked. He doesn't curse Ham directly, but curses Ham's son Caanan (who had nothing to do with any of this). He blesses Shem and Japh and makes Caanan their servant.
Can you imagine being Caanan? You're minding your own business, off hunting for some food or tending sheep or whatever, and you come back to camp to find that you're now a servant to your uncles because your dad accidentally walked in on your drunk, naked, passed out grandfather. THANKS!!!
Eventually Noah dies at 950 years old.
This is great! All of it! :-)
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