An Atheistic Bible Study Of Genesis Chapter Six And Seven – Prelude To The Flood

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Chapter Five ended with the 500 year old Noah fathering three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth. Chapter Six starts with a global population explosion as others also do a great deal of begetting and fornication. This is blamed on the women being very beautiful causing men to long for them and take them as wives, though no clear wedding ceremony is defined or explained yet. God laments that men are not always doing what he wants and decides to think about our fate over the next 120 years. Why he can’t or won’t just say something to steer us in the right direction is unstated. Men of that time that this 120 year indecisiveness by a God able to see and preordain futures are described as giants, (Nephilim, often confused with the same word being used for angels), described as mighty heroes, but they were also seen as very evil to God. (in what way is unstated. The sex seems unimportant or acceptable to God). The confusion between the giants and angels may be an implication that the heroic men were revered. This may be a dig at the heroes of Greek, Egyptian, Mesopotamian and regional pagan beliefs and what we now think of as mythology. People revere them, so God is jealous. God decide to wipe humanity off the Earth, as we have come to disgust him. For some reason, the beasts, birds and insects equally disgust and repel him. (how the molluscs, wombats and antelope upset him is anyone’s guess). The one exception who still pleases God is Noah. We are told he is righteous, but how he stayed so noble despite the evil all around him is unstated. This information is then pointlessly repeated from the naming of Noah’s sons to the corrupt nature of all life on Earth. God tells Noah his plan to destroy everyone and instructs Noah on how to build an Ark. It should be built of Gopher Wood (Cyprus trees) , three hundred cubit long (450 feet), fifty cubits (75 feet) wide and thirty cubits (45 feet) tall. There should be one window and one door only. There should be three decks. That is a very big boat, about half the size of the Titanic. Being made of wood it would have warped and flexed itself apart on water, as happened with much smaller wooden ships. It was not remotely seaworthy. A single door and single window was woefully inadequate ventilation for its vast menagerie, their dung, or food resources. They would not just be uncomfortable – most if not all of them would die. Given that building such a craft would tax modern shipwrights and engineers, how did a five-hundred year old farmer, three sons and their wives build it so quickly? Even getting that much wood in one place would be a major challenge. God tells Noah again about his plan to flood the Earth, but pledges a covenant to protect Noah, his wife, son and their three wives (eight people in all). Lots of innocent babies and concieved but unborn foetuses are also doomed - delightful! Then things get really silly as God demands that Noah fills the Ark with a single male and a single female of every land and sky creature on Earth. God tells Noah to provide enough food for all of them too. Some translations and interpretations have Noah rounding up the animals. Others have the animals migrating to the Ark by themselves. Noah has come to be regarded as an environmentalist by many. The sheer number of animals there are is way beyond what the Ark, big as it is, could concievably carry. There are an estimated 14 million ‘different’ species of animal on Earth. Mammals 5,500 plus. Insects, over a million; birds, 10,450, reptiles, 10,000 plus. Spiders, 102,000. That’s without the many bacteria’s and viruses surrounding us. Many will wish Noah had left the E-Coli behind. Remember that Noah was expected to find two of each creature, one male and one female, including creatures no one else discovered for centuries, not to mention beasts from undiscovered countries and continents. How did Noah catch koala bears and other Australian marsupials? Australia wasn’t found until 1770. How did he catch American Bison or mountain lions? America wasn’t found until 1492). Did he personally go to the Antarctic to fetch in the penguins? Did Noah have to check the gender-sex of each Mexican Panda Ant, and Australian Red Fanged Funnel Web Spider (The Vampire Spider).(Real but extremely rare creatures). How did Noah master the feeding habits of each critter he looked after? Many animals can only eat certain foods. Koala bears need eucalyptus leaves. Big cats need meat. Elephants eat 660 KG of food daily, mostly grass. They also need about fifty gallons of water a day – add that to the water needs of every creature, including eight people, that is way too much weight for the ship. Then there is how the animals were caged or contained. Surely Noah didn’t have alligators and tigers roaming around the decks loose. How could a family of eight cope with such a complicated zoo in a very confined, badly ventilated ship’s hold for about half a year in a raging tempest? The sheer volume of dung and other waste to dispose of would also have been too much and might in itself have sunk the Ark. Some creationists think Noah took dinosaurs on the ark too, as they had to die off after the Flood or the creationists fear we would otherwise have to accept the story a nonsense. No mention is given to plant life but virtually no tree, flowering plant or its seeds could survive underwater (alt water at that) for as long as the pending Flood was believed to last. Coral reefs would also be destroyed as they need lots of light and shallow water, and take a very long time to grow. The flood as described, would lead to total extinction, as not even Noah and kin or their ship could survive it. Back to the Bible story itself. - Noah starts work and does all this right away. Not bad for such an old man. In Chapter Seven God asks Noah to add the number of all clean, (edible and kosher beasts) up to seven mating pairs. This was before kosher laws were developed in the later books of the Pentateuch (though they were written before Genesis). The references to seven mating pair was probably copied into Genesis by later editors. still, seven pairs of these creatures added at least another million or so mouths to feed. That ship is going to sink for sure. Noah is given just seven days to round up all these creatures before the rain starts. 7 days to gather fourteen million non-human passengers - yeah right! I’ll examine that in the next feature in this series. Arthur Chappell