Noah and his ark are perennial, and now fashionable too

Noah was the first believer in climate change. He saw it coming and acted in time. So it’s odd he is not the hero of the greens. But then they are all atheists. The two things go together, for being green, a secular form of pantheism, is a substitute for religion. Hence the fanaticism, so typical of primitive beliefs. Certain green scientists even want denial of climate change made into a criminal offence, as Holocaust denial is in some Continental countries.

Another reason Noah is unsatisfactory to the greens is that he believed that climate change would be temporary: hence the ark and its passengers, to be saved ‘that they may breed abundantly on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply’. After the waters abated and dried up, things returned to normal as the Lord promised: ‘While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.’

What the Bible does not make clear is that the Flood was regional as well as temporary. There can be no doubt that some kind of huge inundation did occur. As far back as 1872 George Smith of the British Museum discovered a version of the Deluge in cuneiform tablets found in the Palace of Sennacherib at Kuyunjik. In the 1920s Sir Leonard Woolley, excavating Ur, found an alluvial flood deposit, eight feet thick, which he dated 4,000 to 3,500 bc. The literary evidence shows that not only the Assyrians but the Babylonians and the Sumerians before them treasured memories of a great flood. Summarising the archaeological evidence in the early 1960s, Sir Max Mallowan concluded that the Deluge was a historical fact, and this was quickly followed in 1965 by publication at the British Museum of two tablets which describe not only the Flood but a Noah-like figure called Ziusudra, who built a boat and so survived.