Noah, his Boat, and his Ancestors
Okay so there was this dude named Noah. He had three sons. They built a boat and made it into a mobile petting zoo. It rained. All the sinners drowned.
But did it really happen? Various cultures all have stories of great floods, so there was probably a flood of some sort. However, the Bible sure does have a lot of eyebrow-raising passages. Let’s see what I mean:
The bible says in Genesis 5 that Adam lived for 930 years, and his youngest son Seth lived for 912 years. There were a bunch of REALLY old men and then there was Enoch, who had a son named Methuselah at age 65. Then after 300 years, Enoch was taken up to heaven to be with God without dying.
Alien abduction anyone?
Methuselah had Noah’s dad Lamech when he was 187 years old, and Lamech had Noah when he was 182.
Noah apparently had Shem, Ham and Japheth at age 500.
What’s with these ridiculous ages?
The Institute of Creation Research (Thomas, 2014), has plotted the lifespans of biblical figures and fit it perfectly to a decay curve. They explain this by stating that, as time passed genetic mutations caused us to live shorter lives.
(So I’m a mathematician) and I was unable to reproduce their results. When I plotted bible ages over time, I got something that resembled a linear curve. Even this does not make sense.
Think about it. If Adam and Eve were the first people, who did their sons um… procreate… with? Can you say incest? Yuck.
There is countless scientific research showing that groups of people with a more, cough… exclusive gene pool have more birth defects and genetic mutations than those with a more inclusive one (Bittles, 2001; McDaniel, 2011; Scharping, 2022).
I have also heard Christian apologists claim that Adam, Noah et al were not singular people, but rather the names of entire tribes of people. This would make sense if there were any sort of archaeological evidence.
But let’s get silly for a moment and think seriously about Enoch. It says he was taken to be with God. What if this really does mean alien abduction? What if these aliens are several hundred thousand years more advanced than we are, and they travel at a rate close to light speed? Well, quantum mechanics would cause time to move at a different rate on Earth than on the space ship.
Noah and Adam were also said to have “walked with God.”
I think it is equally as plausible to postulate that all of these REALLY old dudes were abducted by aliens, and that’s why they were able to be so old. Alien abduction is at least as plausible as the explanations by the Christian apologists.
Anyway, back to Noah.
The Boat and the Flood
The Bible states that angels found the human women attractive and decided to mate with them. That created a race of humans called “Nephilim.” God thought that humans and Nephilim were both becoming evil, so he decided to drown everyone (Genesis 6).
Well, almost everyone.
He decided to save his best human, Noah, and Noah’s family, as well as two of every kind of animal.
This boat was big, but not aircraft carrier big. Converting to feet from cubits, the ark was about 450 x 75 x 45, not even as big as the Titanic.
And then it rained for 40 days and 40 nights and the entire planet was covered in water. Eventually God “remembered” Noah and his family, and a wind apparently blew all the extra water away (Genesis 8).
Where did all this water come from, and where did it go? Scientifically, there is not enough water to cover the entire planet. If the ice caps were to completely melt, the coast lines would be 70 meters (230 feet) higher than they are, which isn’t enough to cover the whole planet (Mathez, n.d.)
There is no geologic or archaeologic evidence of a melting of the polar ice caps at the time that the Noah’s ark story was supposedly set. I have heard people suggest that the story of Noah is much older than originally thought, and that it might be from the end of the last ice age, about 12,000 BCE.
Obviously the entire earth wouldn’t have been flooded after that because we are not currently living under the ocean.
Research published in Astronomy Magazine (Haynes, 2020), shows that Earth may have been completely covered in water at one point… 3 billion years ago. This would have been long before humans, or even dinosaurs. The reason why it was possible at this point in earth’s history was because volcanic eruptions hadn’t formed continents yet.
Noah’s Descendants
So there are a lot of names mentioned in Genesis 10. Some are important for later.
Noah’s oldest son Ham had some kids named Egypt, Cush, and Canaan. Cush had a son named Havilah (remember Havilah was mentioned in the Garden of Eden story)? Egyptians are probably some of the best note-takers of all time. The beginning of their civilization is said to be around 3,100 BCE (National Geographic, n.d).
Egyptian mythology actually also chronicles a Great Flood. They say that the flood happened because people were no longer obedient to the god Ra.
Cush also had a son named Nimrod, who apparently founded a lot of prominent cities: Babel, Nineveh, Sodom, Gomorrah, and Ai. So Babel dates to about 2,300 BCE (History.com Editors, 2022). Ninevah goes back to about 6,000 BCE (Library of Congress, 2022). Even if the long lives from back then really are true, it’s still highly implausible that Nimrod lived for almost 3,000 years, and thousands of years before his uncle Egypt.
According to the Babylonian flood mythology, the gods decided to flood the earth to reduce the human population because the humans’ voices were annoying.
It’s also mathematically implausible that these cities could grow to a large enough population as is verified by archaeologists in three generations.
The Israelites apparently descended from Shem, Noah’s middle son.
Other Ancient Civilizations
Since the flood supposedly covered the whole earth, it would be academically dishonest to not look at the ages of some other ancient civilizations around the planet.
Ancient India started near the Indus River at around 3,000 BCE.
Mayan civilization began in the Yucatan Peninsula about the same time as Ancient Egypt, around 3,300 BCE (IPL, n.d). Yet, none of Noah’s sons were mentioned in the Bible as having a son that went to North America.
Gobekli Tepe in Turkey has been dated by archaeologists to about 8,000 BCE (Curry, 2008), a few thousand years before Noah’s Ark supposedly happened.
Naked Noah
So one day Noah was drinking too much and fell asleep naked. Supposedly Ham saw his dad naked and went to tell his brothers. His brothers didn’t look (no homo!) and covered him up. So the punishment is that Ham’s kid Canaan would be punished as being slaves forever (Genesis 9).
That seems like a pretty extreme punishment, right?
The thing is… the same word for “naked” is used in Leviticus to mean rape, specifically when the phrase “saw their nakedness” is used.
This passage gets a little confusing because it confuses Ham for “his youngest son.” Ham was Noah’s oldest son. Japheth was the youngest. However, Canaan was Ham’s youngest. Some scholars think that the editors made a “mistake” with this and that the original story was about Ham and Canaan, not Ham and Noah. (Remember, this is the divine, inspired word of God.)
Descendants of Ham to be Punished
This passage (Genesis 9) has been used by white people in history to justify why it was okay to take black people as slaves, because black people (Cushites) were descendants of Ham.
One thing I get asked from time to time as an atheist is how I can have morals without God. I don’t know. But, I don’t have any aspirations to own another human being.
Sources:
Bittles, A.H. 2001. Incest, Inbreeding, and Their Consequences. Science Direct. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B0080430767033830
Curry, A. 2008. Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple? Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gobekli-tepe-the-worlds-first-temple-83613665/
Haynes, K. 2020. Ancient Earth may have been a “water world” with no dry land. Astronomy Magazine. https://astronomy.com/news/2020/03/ancient-earth-may-have-been-a-water-world-without-any-dry-land
IPL. n.d. Compare and Contrast Egyptian Culture and Mayan Culture. https://www.ipl.org/essay/Compare-And-Contrast-Egyptian-Culture-And-Mayan-FCRJ26WTYV#:~:text=The%20Egyptians%20originated%20in%204%2C000,Yucatan%20Peninsula%20in%20North%20America.
Library of Congress, 2022. History of Babylon and Nineveh. https://www.loc.gov/item/2021666206#:~:text=Settlement%20at%20Nineveh%20first%20occurred,a%20vast%20and%20splendid%20palace.
Mathez, E. n.d. Will the world ever be all under water? American Museum of Natural History. https://www.amnh.org/explore/ology/earth/ask-a-scientist-about-our-environment/will-the-world-ever-be-all-under-water#:~:text=The%20simple%20answer%20is%20no,70%20meters%20(230%20feet).
McDaniel, B.T. 2011. GENETICS | Selection: Topics. Science Direct. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780123744074002053
National Geographic. n.d. Ancient Egypt. https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/resource-library-ancient-egypt/
Scharping, H. 2022. What Scientists Found After Analyzing Cases of Human Inbreeding in the UK. Discover Magazine. https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/what-scientists-found-after-analyzing-cases-of-inbreeding-in-the-uk
Thomas, B., 2014. Did Adam Really Live 930 Years? The Institute of Creation Research. https://www.icr.org/article/did-adam-really-live-930-years
