Noah Essay Research Paper The book Noah

Noah Essay, Research Paper

The book Noah: The Person and the Story in History and Tradition, deals with the story of a universal deluge in which many people died and few survived. It also contains the life of Noah.

Although flood stories from around the world vary widely in their content, those from Syro-Palestine and Mesopotamia (the so-called land of the Bible) are strikingly similar. While it is difficult, if not impossible, to believe that the former descended from a single source (or described a single event), the reverse may indeed be the case in the Ancient Near East. It is, after all, an area given to regular and catastrophic flooding, for which adequate archaeological and geological evidence has come to light. Furthermore, it is an area through which the story of “the flood” could easily spread: it is geographically small and well defined (the fertile crescent), its inhabitants spoke closely related Semitic languages, there was occasional political unity of the whole, and commerce was widespread throughout at all periods.

There are four accounts of the flood. The first story is The Sumerian account of the deluge, or the story of Ziusudra. This story is the oldest version that men know up to now, with the single surviving copy dating to the first half of the second millennium (about 1600 B.C.E.). This account can only be understood with the aid of other sources because it is very sketchy; only about one-third of this broken text has survived. It is learned, from elsewhere, that Ziusudras was King of the Mesopotamian city of Shuruppak, and that the place was destroyed by a great flood. The second account is the Akkadian text of the Gilgamesh Epic. In this account we can see how Utnapishtim and his family survived the flood. The larger account tells of the search for immortality by Gilgamesh, king of the city of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia. He learns that such status has actually been achieved by one Utnapishtim (”he who found life”) of Shuruppak, and sets out to find him and learn the secret of eternal life. From the latter he then hears the story of the great deluge. This flood story contains the closest parallels to the biblical account. No reason for the deluge is given, since that is not relevant in the larger epic of which flood story is now a part: ” their heart led the great gods to produce the floods.” The third account is The Atrahasis Epic which is known only from quotations in Greek and Latin writers. This story includes the creation of human beings and resultant divine dissatisfaction with them, and thus it has similarities with the account in Genesis 2-9. The last account is The account of Berosus. Berosus was a Babylonian priest of the third century B.C.E. According to Berosus, Xisouthros (i.e., Ziusudra) was warned in a dream that a disastrous flood was impending, and was told to write a history and bury it for preservation in the city of Sippar. He was then commanded to build a boat, which he was to stock with animals and then ride out the deluge with family and friends. He releases birds in order to check on the withdrawal of the waters. When he disembarks into Armenia, they suddenly disappear, apparently in keeping with the older cuneiform accounts of the survivors becoming immortals and thereafter dwelling beyond the known earth.

NOAH

Readers of the English Bible are sometimes surprised to find that it relates events in the lives of two persons named Noah, and not merely of the hero of the flood story. Their names, although the same in the English versions, are clearly distinguishable in the Hebrew original.

The first, and lesser known, is one of the five daughters of Zelophehad (Num. 26:36;27:I; 36:II; Josh. 17:3). Her name, in Hebrew, is No ah, with two consonants that are different from that of the hero of the flood ( one of them, the feminine, ending in -ah).

The second, and better known, is the son of Lamech (Gen. 5:28-29). His name, in Hebrew, is No ah, a masculine form with a distinct “ah” at the end.

This son of Lamech is mentioned in the Bible in four related scopes. The first is a link in the genealogical chain that stretches from Adam to Abraham in the “primeval story” and beyond. According to the ages in Genesis 5, Adams died in Lamech s fifty-sixth year, and Noah is the first birth recorded thereafter. Perhaps this was meant to suggest a status for Noah as the second father of the human race, achieved as the ancestor of all those who were born in the postflood generations. The second is a man of exemplary virtue, such that he was allowed to survive the great flood that swept his contemporaries away. This subsequent praise of him is based upon acclaim at the preface of the flood story itself. This is one of the basic biblical portraits of Noah even though it falls outside the flood story, and indeed outside the book of Genesis. The author of 2 Peter refers to Noah as “a herald of righteousness” (2:5). While it is true that Genesis 6:9 refers to him as “a righteous man, blameless in his generation,” that is somewhat short of one “who preached righteousness.” The third is the hero of the flood story, and the fourth is the first vinicultualist and the discoverer of wine, whose consequent drunkenness provided occasion for a curse upon one line of his descendants.

In Noah s flood story we see that the flood was a consequence of man s corruption. The relationship between Go