Noah’s Ark | Kollage Kid/Flickr
Noah and the Flood in Western Thought
By Philip C. Almond
Cambridge, 396 pages, $44.99
In this erudite yet accessible book, Philip C. Almond recounts the efforts of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim writers to “create a coherent narrative” from the account of Noah and the Flood. We learn of parallels and origins in the Ancient Near East and Hellenistic worlds, early Christian allegorical readings of Noah as a prototype of Christ that “stretch interpretative ingenuity” to interpret his later drunkenness and nakedness (Gen. 9:20-27), rabbinic readings that recognize Noah’s righteousness and reluctance while criticizing his intoxication, and Islamic readings in which Noah never touches alcohol. (The nakedness and the ill-fated connection between his son Ham and slavery remained.)
Later readings became more literal, focusing on the architecture of the ark and questions about how the animals were kept. (Almond says we know of only one attempt to build an ark.) By the 18th century, “interpretive ingenuity” was being stretched here, too—there were too many animal species. The story also required reconciliation with natural history, at least, until the philosophe Comte de Buffon (1707-88) replaced the idea of one final Universal Flood with “convulsive movements” that left early humans with “a common feeling of baleful terror.” Nature was no longer Fall and redemption; it was an immense time scale and archaic fears.
Noah’s story was also used to make sense of human history, so his descendants were imagined as having become Native Americans. Or Druids. This may seem fascinatingly weird and outdated. But the historical use of the Flood story could turn sinister, as in the ill-fated connection between Ham, slavery, and Blackness. The story proved more lastingly useful in emphasizing human unity, so, in 1786, William Jones drew upon it to argue for the common linguistic roots of not only Greek and Latin but also Sanskrit. As James Turner has written, Jones put India on the “biblical family tree.”
Almond ends with the attempts at literal enactment at the Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Kentucky, and the belated realization in Darren Aronofsky’s film Noah (2014) that the Flood story calls us to environmentalism in our certainly threatened and (almost?) godless world. This fundamentalist or secular terminus ad quem means that Almond’s learned book overlooks some of the theological wrestling with the Flood story.
Almond notes that Muslim, Jewish, and Christian interpretations “soften” God’s destruction by suggesting Noah tried to preach repentance to those around him (see 2 Pet. 2:5). Almond mentions rabbinic and patristic ideas of a grace period before the Flood. We do not, however, read about Luther’s arresting (and autobiographical) image of a Noah interceding and grieving for his benighted contemporaries, like Abraham for Sodom or Jesus before Jerusalem.
Also not here: the figure of Noah’s wife, as Shannon Gayk has discussed, presenting a subtly tender counternarrative in medieval drama. In one play, she resists entering the ark because of kinship with even “wesills, squerrells, and fyrrett.” In another, on the ark, she still mourns those “overeflowen with floode.” When Almond discusses Aronofsky’s film, he neglects the cinematic Noah’s finally choosing mercy despite witnessing humanity’s wickedness, which is why God chose him in the first place. There’s no chapter on compassion here.
Besides surprisingly evoking our capacity for mercy, the Noah story may also have a different endpoint than disenchanted environmentalism. The story’s emphasis on human unity was the subject of the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s address to the Lambeth Conference in 2008. Sacks spoke of the Flood as enacting a “covenant of fate” between a humanity bound together by suffering. “Humanity after the Flood was like the Jewish people after the Holocaust.” God then promised not to destroy the world again and taught humanity how to live in solidarity: respect the sanctity of human life, the integrity of the created world, and human differences. Perhaps attentiveness to that wider covenant, alongside the covenant of faith, is essential in these ominously divisive times.
Readers of The Living Church may want more theological history than what Almond offers and will likely notice other omissions, such as the Colenso affair, in which John William Colenso, Bishop of Natal, was asked by his Zulu assistant about the dimensions of Noah’s Ark, which led him to the biblical criticism that led to the first Lambeth Conference and everything after.
But Philip C. Almond has provided an excellent historical overview of (much of) the interpretation of the story of Noah and the Flood.
Neil Dhingra, PhD is an academic adviser at the University of Maryland.
