‘They put the behemoths in the hold along with the rhinos, the hippos and the elephants. It was a sensible decision to use them as ballast, but you can imagine the stench.’ So begins Julian Barnes’s quirky novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, through which the story of Noah and the flood flows like an underground river. As Philip C. Almond shows in this impressively erudite book, the tale courses through two millennia of western thought with similar power.
The story, found early in the book of Genesis, lurks in the half-remembered shadows of our biblically illiterate age. Fed up with human wickedness, God promises to wash everything away in a universal flood. He warns Noah, a righteous man, who builds an ark and is saved, along with his wife, three sons, their wives and a whole bunch of animals. The menagerie survives the deluge and comes to rest on a mountain, where God makes a rainbow promise never to flood the Earth again. There is then a strange coda in which Noah plants a vineyard, gets drunk, falls asleep naked and is humiliated.
The tale of a universal flood is far from original. The ancient world was awash with such fables, and the Noah story looks like a creative retelling of the much older flood myth in the Epic of Gilgamesh. The Genesis account is carefully crafted, with the author (or authors: our version is probably two tales meshed together) replacing the Gilgamesh gods’ arbitrary actions with a story about human wickedness and its consequences.
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