Noah

[Rasputin]

[Rasputin]

Documentary hypothesis
According to the documentary hypothesis, the first five books of the Bible, including Genesis, were collated during the 5th century BC from four main sources, which themselves date from no earlier than the 8th century BC. Two of these four, the Jahwist, composed in the 8th century BC, and the Priestly source, from the late 7th century BC, make up the bulk of those chapters of Genesis which concern Noah. Genesis 5, termed the Book of Generations, is independent of these major sources. The attempt by the 5th century editor to accommodate two independent and sometimes conflicting sources accounts for the confusion over such matters as how many pairs of animals Noah took, and how long the flood lasted. (See Noah's Ark for a more detailed description of the documentary hypothesis as it relates to the Ark story).

More broadly, Genesis may be seen to contain two accounts concerning Noah, the first making him the hero of the Flood, the second representing him as the first husbandman. The apparent discrepancy has led some scholars to believe that Noah was originally the inventor of wine, in keeping with the statement at Genesis 5:29 that Lamech "called his name Noah, saying, 'Out of the ground which the Lord has cursed this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the toil of our hands.'" It has been suggested that the Flood story may originally have belonged to Enoch, Noah's grandfather according to Genesis 5. In Hebrew the names of Noah (נוֹחַ) and Enoch (חֲנוֹךְ) are somewhat similar, sharing three letters.

Mythological connections
Further information: Deluge (mythology)
Many ancient flood stories share similarities to the one above:

Hebrew: Noah's Ark
Egyptian Naunet
Hindu: Manu
China: Nuwa
Sumerian: Atra-Hasis
Babylonian: Utnapishtim, Xisuthrus
Greek: Deucalion
Toltec toptlipetlocali
However, none of the other stories cite occurrences of flood waters from sources quite so supernatural.

The mysterious figure of Enoch is the beginning of a fascinating but inconclusive web of correspondences and similarites between the story of Noah and older Mesopotamian myths. According to Genesis 5:24, at the end of his 365 years Enoch "walked with God, and was not, for God took him" - the only one of the ten pre-Flood Patriarchs not reported to have died. Where did Enoch go when God took him? In a late Rabbinic tradition, Methuselah is reported to have visited Enoch at the end of the Earth, where he dwelt with the angels, immortal. The details bring to mind Utnapishtim, a figure from the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh - the hero Gilgamesh, after long and arduous travel, finds Utnapishtim living in the paradise of Dilmun at the end of the Earth, where he has been granted eternal life by the gods. (Gilgamesh's reason for seeking out Utnapishtim, incidentally, is to learn the secret of immortality - like Methuselah, he comes close to the gift but fails to achieve it). Utnapishtim then tells how he survived a great flood, and how he was afterwards granted immortality by the gods. The story has remarkable similarities with the account in Genesis.

Lamech's statement that Noah will be named "rest" because "out of the ground which the Lord has cursed this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the toil of our hands," has another faint parallel in Babylonian mythology: the gods grew tired of working, digging the channels of the rivers, and so the god Enki created man from clay and blood and spit to do the work for them. Enki fell in love with his creation, and later warned Utnapishtim that the other gods planned to send a flood to destroy all life, and advised him on how to construct his ark.

Curse of Ham
The curse of Ham (more properly a curse of Canaan) remains mysterious. The general scholarly consensus is that it represents an attempt by the authors of Genesis to provide religious justification for Jewish aggression against "Canaanites", a term meaning not so much the genuine Canaanites of the late Iron Age, but the non-Jewish peoples inhabiting historic Judah and Samaria (Israel) at the time of the return of the Babylonian exiles in the mid-5th century BC - a return which would have provided much opportunity for disputes over land ownership. The offense which caused the curse is more mysterious still: Genesis 9:20 says that Ham "saw the nakedness of his father," but what does that mean, and why should it result in a curse on Ham's son instead of on Ham? A similar phrase in Leviticus 20:10, "The man that lieth with his father's wife hath uncovered his father's nakedness," has led some scholars to suggest that this might have been Ham's misdeed, and the explanation of the curse falling on his son (i.e., by Noah's wife), rather than on himself. The explanation, however, seems to raise as many questions as it answers.

[Rasputin]

In Rabbinic tradition

According to a Jewish apocryphal legend, Noah was born with a body white like snow and hair white as wool (an albino); light shone forth from the newborn baby's eyes the moment he opened them and illuminated the entire house, and he immediately stood and addressed a prayer to God. His grandfather Methuselah, afraid of what this might mean, journeyed to the end of the earth to consult Enoch, who gave the child the name Noah and foretold that in his days the earth would be destroyed.

The righteousness of Noah is the subject of much discussion among the rabbis. The description of Noah as "perfect in his generation" implied to some that his perfection was only relative: In his generation of wicked people, he could be considered righteous, but in the generation of a tzaddik like Abraham, he would not be considered so righteous. They point out that Noah did not pray to God on behalf of those about to be destroyed, as Abraham prayed for the wicked of Sodom and Gomorrah. This led such commentators to offer the figure of Noah as "the man in a fur coat," who ensured his own comfort while ignoring his neighbour. Others, such as the medieval commentator Rashi, held on the contrary that the building of the Ark was stretched over 120 years, deliberately in order to give sinners time to repent.

The planting of a vineyard and his drunkenness caused Noah to lose much if not all of his former merit. He was one of the three worthless men that were eager for agricultural pursuits; he was the first to plant, to become drunken, to curse, and to introduce slavery. God blamed Noah for his intemperance, saying that he ought to have been warned by Adam, upon whom so much evil came through wine. The vine had been cast out with Adam from paradise, and it was Noah who took it into the Ark. According to several midrash, Satan assisted in the planting of the first vineyard, first sacrificing a sheep, a lion, an ape, and a hog, for after drinking the first cup of wine, one is mild like a sheep; after the second, courageous like a lion; after the third, like an ape; and after the fourth, like a hog who wallows in mud.

According to Sefer Noaḥ and the Book of Jubilees (considered deuterocanonical in Eastern-rite and apocryphal in Western-rite churches), Noah was taught by the archangel Raphael how to cure the diseases sent to punish his grandchildren for their sins. He recorded in a book all the herbs and plants the use of which he had been taught by Raphael; and this book was transmitted from one generation to another. Later it was translated into many languages, copies of it coming into the hands of the most famous physicians of India and Greece, who derived therefrom their medical knowledge.

Yalkut Hadash tells that Noah should have lived 1,000 years; but that he gave Moses fifty years, which, together with the seventy taken from Adam's life, constituted Moses' hundred and twenty years. According to Jubilees, Noah was buried on Mount Lubar, where he had settled after the Flood. But Ibn Yaḥya records that Noah after the Deluge emigrated to Italy, where he became Janus, deriving the name from the Hebrew yayin (wine). Others[citation needed] identify Noah with Melchizedek, and declare that he founded Jerusalem.

Noah's wife is not named in Genesis. Some traditions identify her as Aretitia, from the Hebrew ereẓ (earth), on account of her being the mother of every living thing; after her death she was called "Vesta" (ie, "Eshta", from esh, "fire"), on account of her ascension to heaven[citation needed]. A separate tradition in Jubilees gives her name as Emzara, while later Midrashic writings and the Book of Jasher give it as Naamah.



In Christian tradition

The Drunkenness of Noah, Michelangelo Buonarroti, ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the Vatican, Rome, 1509. Michelangelo shows Noah drunk before his sons, and simultaneously, in the background, Noah planting his vineyard.The New Testament treats Noah as a righteous man in the same category as Abraham and Jacob, one who had absolute faith in God. The Gospel of Matthew, for example, reads: "For the coming of the Son of Man will be just like the days of Noah; for as in those days which were before the flood they were eating and drinking, they were marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark" (Matt 24:37-38 According to the First Epistle of Peter 3:18–20 and the Second Epistle of Peter 2:5, an interval of 120 years elapsed while the ark was being built, during which Noah tried to convince the people to repent so they could avoid the wrath of God. In later Christian thought, the Ark came to be equated with the Church: salvation was to be found only within its walls. (See, for example, St Augustine of Hippo (354-430), who demonstrated in The City of God that the dimensions of the Ark corresponded to the dimensions of the human body, which is the body of Christ, which is the Church. The equation of Ark and Church is still found in the Anglican rite of baptism, which asks God, "who of thy great mercy didst save Noah," to receive into the Church the infant about to be baptised).

Noah's three sons were generally interpreted in medieval Christianity as the founders of the populations of the three known continents, Japheth/Europe, Shem/Asia, and Ham/Africa, although a rarer variation held that they represented the three classes of medieval society - the priests (Shem), the warriors (Japheth), and the peasants (Ham). At the same time, some European thinkers proposed that Ham's sons in general had been literally "blackened" by sin. In the 18th and 19th centuries, this view merged with the Protestant interpretation of the curse of Ham to provide a quasi-religious justification for slavery. As late as 1964, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia read the text of the Noah story into the Congressional Record as part of a filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, saying, "Noah saw fit to discriminate against Ham's descendants."

[Rasputin]

In Islamic tradition

Noah is a prophet in the Qur'an. References to نوح Nūḥ, the Arabic form of Noah, are scattered throughout the Qur'an, but no single narrative account of the entire Deluge is given. The references in the Qur'an are consistent with Genesis, and Islamic tradition generally follows the Genesis account, emphasizing Noah's preaching of the monotheism of God, and the ridicule heaped on him by idolators.

Particularly:

We sent Noah to his people: He said, “O my people! worship God! Ye have no other god but Him. Will ye not fear (Him)?”
The chiefs of the Unbelievers among his people said: “He is no more than a man like yourselves: his wish is to assert his superiority over you: if God had wished (to send messengers), He could have sent down angels; never did we hear such a thing (as he says), among our ancestors of old.”
(And some said): “He is only a man possessed: wait (and have patience) with him for a time.”
(Noah) said: “O my Lord! help me: for that they accuse me of falsehood!”
God later instructed Noah to build the ark:

Build the ship under Our eyes and by Our inspiration, and speak not unto Me on behalf of those who do wrong. Lo! they will be drowned. (Surah Hud: 37) (Surat al-Mumenoon: 23-26)
The Qur'anic account contains a detail not included in the Biblical account: a reference to another son who chose not to enter the ark:

And it sailed with them amid waves like mountains, and Noah cried unto his son - and he was standing aloof - O my son! Come ride with us, and be not with the disbelievers.
He said: I shall betake me to some mountain that will save me from the water. (Noah) said: This day there is none that saveth from the commandment of God save him on whom He hath had mercy. And the wave came in between them, so he was among the drowned. (Surah Hud: 42-43)
The Qur'anic account does not include several details of the Genesis account, including the account of Noah's nakedness and the resultant cursing of his grandson Canaan.

Some Muslims assert that the flood during Noah's time was a local event, in contrast to the Biblical account which asserts that it was global. They infer this from several Qur'anic verses. Other Muslims, however, hold that the flood was indeed global. The Qur'an is not explicit on the point, allowing for some variety of interpretation.

[Rasputin]

Popular culture
In 1998 a made-for-tv movie entitled Noah depicted a carpenter who is visited by an angel and told to build another ark so he may survive another world flood.
Two books in the Dr. Doolittle series by Hugh Lofting feature Mudface, a giant turtle and acquaintance of the Doctor who lived through the Great Flood aboard Noah's Ark. The story portrays Noah as a grumpy curmudgeon and suppresses the religious aspects of the Flood, focusing mainly instead on the fates of the various animals involved in the aftermath.
Shane Johnson's 2002 novel Ice portrays Noah in a manner consistent with the Christian tradition: as the head of a household consisting of the only kind-hearted persons on the planet, a man on a mission from God, and a leader who sometimes had to make hard, not-quite-pleasant decisions. In one memorable scene, Noah--or a simulacrum of him--orders a man left behind, not because he didn't deserve to be taken aboard the Ark, but because God's orders were that only eight people--Noah, his wife, his three sons, and their wives--board the Ark.
American composer and recording artist Daniel Decker has achieved critical acclaim for his song “Noah’s Prayer” , which is a collaboration with Armenian composer Ara Gevorgian. "Noah's Prayer" chronicles Noah’s journey on the ark to Mount Ararat. In the shadow of Ararat, the song was debuted in 2002 in Sardarpat, Armenia to celebrate Armenian Independence day. In attendance were Armenian President Robert Kocharian, His Holiness Karekin II, Supreme Patriarch and Catholicos of All Armenians (head of the Armenian Apostolic Church), as well as ambassadors from countries around the world. The concert, which was broadcast live on Armenian television, and via satellite to over 30 nations, has catapulted Decker to celebrity status in Armenia. "Noah's Prayer" is featured on the recording "My Offering" by Daniel Decker.

[donsaeid]

ماجراى قوم نوح درس عبرتى بود!

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سـنـت قرآن بر اين است كه در بسيارى از موارد بعد از انذار كفار و مجرمان شرحى از سرگذشت اقـوام پـيـشـيـن و عـاقبت دردآلود آنها را بيان مى كند, تا به اينهابفهماند كه اگر به راه نادرست خويش ادامه دهند سرنوشتى بهتر از آنان ندارند.
در ايـنـجـا نـيـز بـه دنبال بحثى كه در آيات گذشته آمد اشارات كوتاه و در عين حال پرمعنى به سرگذشت پنج قوم سركش از اقوام پيشين مى كند كه نخستين آنهاقوم نوح (ع ) است .
مى فرمايد: ((پيش از آنها قوم نوح (پيامبر خود را) تكذيب كردند)) (كذبت قبلهم قوم نوح ).
آرى ! ((بـنـده مـا (نـوح ) را تكذيب كرده و گفتند: او ديوانه است ! و (سپس باانواع آزارها از ادامه رسالتش ) بازداشته شد)) (فكذبوا عبدنا وقالوا مجنون وازدجر).
گاه ((به او مى گفتند: اگر دست ازكارخودبرندارى سنگسارت مى كنيم ))(شعرا/116).
و گاه گلوى او را چنان مى فشردند كه بى هوش به زمين مى افتاد, اما هنگامى كه به هوش مى آمد مى گفت : ((خداوندا! قوم مرا ببخش كه نمى دانند)).
(آيه )ـ سپس مى افزايد: هنگامى كه نوح از هدايت آنها بكلى مايوس گشت ((به درگاه پروردگار عـرضه داشت : من مغلوب (اين قوم طغيانگر) شده ام انتقام مرا از آنها بگير)) (فدعا ربه انى مغلوب فانتصر).
آنـها هرگز در دليل و حجت و برهان بر من غلبه نكرده اند ولى از طريق ظلم وجنايت و تكذيب و انـكـار, و انواع زجر و فشار بر من غلبه كردند, اين قوم ديگرشايسته بقا نيستند از آنها انتقام بگير و مرا بر آنها پيروز كن .
(آيـه )ـ سپس اشاره گويا و تكان دهنده اى به كيفيت عذاب آنها كرده ,مى فرمايد: ((در اين هنگام درهاى آسمان را با آبى فراوان و پى درپى گشوديم ))(ففتحنا ابواب السما بما منهمر).
تعبير به گشودن درهاى آسمان تعبير بسيار زيبايى است كه به هنگام نزول بارانهاى شديد به كار مى رود, همان گونه كه در فارسى نيز مى گوئيم : گوئى درهاى آسمان باز شده و هرچه آب است فرو مى بارد.
(آيه )ـ نه تنها از آسمان آب زيادى فرو ريخت كه از زمين هم آب جوشيد, چنانكه در آيه آمده : ((و زمين را شكافتيم و چشمه هاى زيادى بيرون فرستاديم (وفجرنا الا رض عيونا).
((و اين دو آب به اندازه مقدر با هم درآميختند)) و درياى وحشتناكى شد(فالتقى الما على امر قد قدر).
از سراسر زمين آب جوشيدن گرفت و چشمه ها سر برآوردند و از تمامى آسمان آب باريدن گرفت و به هم پيوستند و دريائى عظيم و طوفانى تشكيل دادند.
(آيـه )ـ در ايـنـجـا قـرآن دنـبـالـه مـساله طوفان را رها ساخته ـچرا كه آنچه بايدگفته شود در جمله هاى قبل جمع است ـ و به سراغ كشتى نجات نوح رفته ,مى فرمايد: ((و او را بر مركبى از الواح و ميخهائى ساخته شده سوار كرديم )) (وحملناه على ذات الواح ودسر).
(آيـه )ـ سـپـس خـداونـد بـه عـنايت خاصش نسبت به كشتى نجات نوح اشاره كرده , مى فرمايد: ((مركبى كه زير نظر ما حركت مى كرد)) (تجرى باعيننا).
سـپـس مـى افـزايـد: تمام اينها ((پاداشى بود براى كسى كه [ نوح ] مورد انكار قرار گرفته بود)) و كيفرى براى كسانى كه او را تكذيب كردند و كافر شده بودند)) (جزا لمن كان كفر).
آرى ! نـوح همانند همه انبيا از مواهب بزرگ الهى و از نعمتهاى عظيم او بود كه بى خبران كفرانش كردند, و به آئينش كافر شدند.
(آيه )ـ سپس به عنوان نتيجه گيرى از اين ماجراى عظيم مى فرمايد: ((و مااين ماجرا را به عنوان نـشانه اى درميان امتها باقى گذارديم , آيا كسى هست كه پندگيرد)) (ولقد تركناها آية فهل من مدكر).
و بـه راستى كه همه گفتنيها در همين ماجرا گفته شده , و آنچه بايد انسانى بيدار بفهمند از آن مى فهمند.
(آيـه )ـ و در ايـن آيه به عنوان يك سؤال تهديدآميز و پرمعنى نسبت به كافرانى كه همان راه كفار زمـان نوح را مى سپرند مى گويد: اكنون بنگريد ((عذاب وانذارهاى من چگونه بود))؟ (فكيف كان عذابى ونذر).
آيا واقعيت داشت يا داستان و افسانه بود؟!.
(آيـه )ـ و سـرانـجـام در ايـن آيـه بـر ايـن حقيقت تاكيد مى كند كه : ((ما قرآن رابراى تذكر آسان ساختيم , آيا كسى هست كه متذكر شود))؟ (ولقد يسرنا القرآن للذكر فهل من مدكر).
آرى ! اين قرآن , هيچ پيچيدگى ندارد, و شرائط تاثير, در آن جمع است ,الفاظش شيرين و جذاب , تـعـبـيـراتـش زنده و پرمعنى , انذارها و بشارتهايش صريح وگويا, داستانهايش واقعى و پرمحتوا, دلائلش قوى و محكم , منطقش شيوا و متين ,خلاصه آنچه لازمه تاثيرگذاردن يك سخن است در آن جـمـع است , و به همين دليل هر زمان دلهاى آماده با آن تماس يابد, مجذوب آن مى شود و در طـول تـاريـخ اسـلام نـمـونـه هـاى عـجيب و شگفت انگيزى از تاثير عميق قرآن در دلهاى آماده ديده مى شود, كه شاهد گوياى اين امر است .

[Rasputin]

Did a catastrophic flood of biblical proportions drown the shores of the Black Sea 9,500 years ago, wiping out early Neolithic settlements around its perimeter? A geologist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and two Romanian colleagues report in the January issue of Quaternary Science Reviews that, if the flood occurred at all, it was much smaller than previously proposed by other researchers.

Using sediment cores from the delta of the Danube River, which empties into the Black Sea, the researchers determined sea level was approximately 30 meters below present levels—rather than the 80 meters others hypothesized.