I found Noah's Ark in Indiana, and I wasn't even looking for it. It was Bakelite jewelry that my daughter, Anna, and I were perusing in an antique store in Huntingburg, the small town next to my hometown. But lo and behold, I looked up and there, perched atop a cabinet, was a wooden Noah's ark! It was thrilling for a number of reasons, not just because I found it without having to set out on an exhausting expedition up Mt. Ararat. My friend, Liz Neumark, collects Noah's arks and how cool would it be to bring one back to New York City from Indiana?
This particular ark had been constructed in the 1800s and still contained traces of the original red paint. Like most of the arks that were made back then to quietly amuse children on Sundays, the Christian day of rest, it was homemade, but the animals that came with it were not - obviously, the original animals, which would have been carved in wood, had been swept away on the waters of time. When I got home, I delivered the ark to Liz's apartment building in New York City, where she moored it with her pagoda ark (sent to her by a cousin in Hong Kong), and the various other arks she's collected over the past 19 years.
"How did it start?" I asked Liz. She explained that when her daughter, Nell, was born, she was named in synagogue the following Sabbath. On that Sabbath, the Noah story was being read in synagogue. Three months later, Liz was in Texas and saw an ark in a gift shop. Then, a few days later, another ark, and "Okay, ark, Nell, Noah, I get it," Liz said. "And my need to acquire was activated." Suddenly, arks were everywhere she looked, and today she possesses a variety of arks - only three-dimensional ones, no placemats or other ark-themed products - including a farm ark with farm animals, an endangered species ark, and her favorite, from Maine, a glass ark with hand-blown glass pieces. "It gets dusty and I'm very strict about not letting the cleaning lady dust them lest she mix up the animals. That would be very traumatic, to end up on the wrong ark!"
The wrong ark, or the right ark, has been in the news lately, with Noah's Ark Ministries, a group of Chinese Christians claiming to have found Noah's ark on Mount Ararat in Turkey. Apparently, there is a wooden object which they say carbon dates to almost 5,000 years atop the mountain. However, there are already many within the scholarly world accusing them of having planted the wood up there and staging a hoax.
The search for Noah's ark, and presumed ark discoveries, are not new. The book of Genesis states that the ark, which was built according to God's specifications to save Noah and his family and animals from the flood, came to rest on Urartu, which is assumed to be today's Mt. Ararat in Turkey. Around the year 425, Philostorgius wrote of Mt. Ararat, "...they say that considerable remnants of its wood and nails are still preserved there." Within this last century, photos have been released of the "Ararat anomaly," an odd, vessel-like formation encased in ice near the summit of Mt. Ararat and which, ark enthusiasts believe, might be the remains of the ark. The anomaly has been captured in film and high-resolution digital images from satellites, but thus far, Turkey's government has not green-lighted the site's exploration, and it's anybody's guess what lies beneath the snow and ice.
For centuries, the Biblical stories were accepted by adherents to the Judeo-Christian traditions as containing literal, historical truths. This assumption began to change in the 17th and 18th centuries, when rationalism and the Enlightenment insisted that intellectual rigor and critical faculty be applied to religion in order to arrive at what was empirically "true" about the Biblical text. Subsequently, scientific scrutiny cast a long shadow of doubt on the Bible's veracity. Today, there are perhaps more doubting Thomases than not. The scholarly world often seems at odds with, and sometimes antagonistic toward, believers, as if the two communities are mutually exclusive, and as if anyone who believes in the possibility of a flood and a God who personally served as the architect and on-site contractor for the ark's construction is unsophisticated and simple, and cannot also recognize science as valid and important.
To be sure, there are many like Noah's Ark Ministries who would believe that archaeology can corroborate events mentioned in the Bible, and they make that agenda perfectly clear. Less clear is the agenda of some in the scholarly world who can be close-minded in a different way, for many are unwilling to entertain the possibility that there are objective, historical truths in the Biblical stories. Those truths have many times been re-enforced by archaeological finds, like the "House of David" inscription dating from 850 BC found in the ancient Israelite city of Dan which provides the first extra-Biblical evidence of a Davidic dynasty and perhaps of David himself.
One wonders what effect the discovery of an ark might have on rationalists who have thrown the Bible out with the floodwater. Would they say, "Okay, ark, no steering mechanism, God as Navigator, I get it."? Would the presence of a tangible ark encourage their buried faith to float to the surface? Personally, for me, faith is not tethered to a distant mountaintop; it is, in fact, moored comfortably with the rational, intellectual world, much as an old, painted ark from Indiana can rest side by side in New York City with a pagoda from Hong Kong.
This post was originally published at Zeek.net
John R. Coats: Five Human Lessons from Genesis That Still Apply Today
The Flood narrative is interesting. God decides to destroy His creation, sorry that he made man (remarkable feelings for an all-knowing deity!). God tells Noah to build an ark and put representative breeding pairs of all animals aboard.
Some unanswered questions: If that is the ark, how did koalas get back to Australia? There were only two koalas, and they don't travel fast. They need specific food. And there are so few animals around that the two lions and the two tigers must have thought, "lunch!" How did Noah get the giraffes off that treacherous mountain ledge?
Biological geodiversity demonstrates the idea that all animals migrated from Ararat to be erroneous. Geology demonstrates that there is no evidence of a universal flood overflowing the whole earth at one time.
Faith is great. Blind faith which hopes that there will be some great religious discovery that blows away the doubts of unbelievers is, well, "blind."
Scholars do indeed have an agenda -- "evidence" and "context". No "truth" is disconnected from other truths and facts. We are indeed "rationalists" -- a position Himsel evidently disparages. What is wrong with being rational? What's wrong with wanting evidence before believing?
Blind faith is unreasonable. Rationalists are not the enemy. In a world where people deceive to get followers, a rational faith is not wrong.
'Gone With the Wind' makes mention of Washington and Atlanta. There is archeological evidence that Washington and Atlanta existed at the time of the Civil War; THEREFORE... 'Gone With the Wind' is 'true', and Rhett Butler, Scarlett O'hara and the Tara plantation can be presumed to have existed, beyond any reasonable doubt.
It's a real hoot, how God-bots use 'rationalism' in a way that makes it seem as though it's some sort of a belief system, on the same intellectual plane as creationism... Calvinism... Catholicism. Might it not be better... and more honest... to use something like "the DIMINUTION of gullibility, ignorance, irrationality and toxic, drooling stupidity" in place of 'rationalism'?
Himsel wrote: "Less clear is the agenda of some in the scholarly world who can be close-minded in a different way, for many are unwilling to entertain the possibility that there are objective, historical truths in the Biblical stories."
The agenda isn't CLEAR? Looking for the TRUTH isn't clear?... it's 'closed-minded'? Look... rejecting... after thousands of years... the dogmatic adherence to a world-view that depends directly from the myths, superstitions, fairy-tales, fables, and fantastical delusions of an ignorant gaggle of Bronze Age fishermen and peripatetic, militant, marauding, murdering, genocidal goat-herders... AFTER finding compelling evidence that IT IS NOT TRUE... IS NOT 'closed-minded'... it is SANE.
The physical ark is the least of the problems with the story being literally true.
There's all those birds and animals gathered from South America, Australia, Antarctica etc. and sent back to their natural habitats after the Flood.
There's all that water, six miles deep that came from nowhere and went back to nowhere.
There's all the ethnic groups of the entire human population - Asian, African, European, Semitic, etc - descended from three couples, differentiating in physical appearance and repopulating the aforesaid Americas, Australia, Polynesian Islands, etc., in considerably less than 4,000 years.
There's all those extinct species from many kinds of dinosaurs to woolly mammoths and megatheria. They died out awfully quickly after being released from the Ark.
And last but certainly not least, did Noah bring a pair of Neanderthals on board, or were the Neanderthals just malnourished descendants of one of Noah's children?
One with the dinosaurs, which sank.
One with the marsupials, which was blown off course and ended up in Australia.
Now I have no problem with people of faith, that's up to them and if it helps them in some way, who am I to rock the boat but please, to all you literalists, they are fairy stories, which means, 'not to be taken literally'
You condemn witchcraft and voodoo yet perpetuate this stupidity.
The only good thing about these fairy tales is they once worked on the ignorant who either knew no better or faced death by opposing such myths but since science has taken over the mainstay of human thought, you fundamentalists are now being shown up for what you really are....delusional; excuse me while I go talk to my Irish friends at the bottom of the garden!!!
Wow. Next time could you have the common courtesy to state that you are a zealot at the beginning of the article?
Thanks in advance.
None. This is something that is unprovable. Even if a boat is found and it's the right age more or less, unless Noah's kids left some graffiti, how could we ever prove that it was the one? Like the Shroud of Turin, it could only be disproved, not proved with what means we have today.
OF COURSE there are many historical truths in the Bible (the Assyrian invasions, the reigns of Omri, Hezekiah, et.al., the edict of Cyrus, and on and on). Picking out the "Tel Dan" inscription is a poor example, because there are many doubts about what it means. We could also say that the Bible got it right when it said that Jerusalem is west of the Dead Sea, or that the sun rises in the east.
To mix up facts like those with myths like Noah's Ark shows a poor grasp of both historical science AND the meaning and composition of the literary and mythic material in question.
My view is that religion serves many functions that are worth preserving. But my arguments are all undercut by examples like this. If this is religion, we don't need it at all.
"One wonders what effect the discovery of an ark might have on rationalists who have thrown the Bible out with the floodwater."
A discovery of an ark does not inherently have anything to do with the Bible for a rationalist. That connection would have to have evidence, consistency, and credibility. This highlights the vast difference between rationalists and those prone to magical thinking. One group says, "I found an ice formation that could sorta look like the bow of a ship...It's Noah's ark!" The other group says, "You have found an ice formation that sorta looks like a lot of things, and you are biased in favor of an ark because of your pre-existing beliefs."
And Noah lost his deposit when he a) let the animals crap all over it and b) left it parked on a mountaintop far from the lake....
;;
Apparently, there have been floods between the Aegean Sea and Black Sea going back and forth, and flooding down into Mesopotamia. There was one about 7500 years ago that most probably is the one of the Old Testament.
Check out the theory at the following link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_theory
In any case, you can't argue with mythomaniacs who believe every myth told to them by their priestshoods.
Bollocks.
It sounds like god has never really been happy. Pissed at the angels, pissed at us. Maybe the devil is getting a raw deal. Gods seemed satisfied with his creation of the heavens and earth, adam and eve,
but then satan steps in, gives us self-awareness, he's pissed again.
I would wonder if we had it all backwards. This angry creator is really just a mad scientist and the devil is trying to rein him in. Seeing that it is really best to just let people live, have free will and thought, and that most will do the right thing, treat others well, help them and they don't need to be bullied, punished and threatened to acting right.
www.mrdeity.com