Genesis: Chapter Seven (The Flood, cont'd)

In which God becomes judgmental of animals, then kills them all out of self-pity, promoting more incest in the process.

Chapter Seven begins with a recap of Chapter Six with a correction. God tells Noah to take his whole family on the ark and to "take with you seven of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and two of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate, and also seven of every kind of bird, male and female, to keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth." (7:2-3) So God has changed his mind. Now Noah gets to take along seven males and seven females of each "clean" animal, but only two pairs of each "unclean" animal. Who makes this distinction? It doesn't say, but the fact that God approves of such a distinction suggests that God probably decided which animals lay on which side of the cleanliness line.

Noah gets a week's time to load up the ark (I don't think that even a zoo could be organized in a week alone) and then it will rain for forty days and forty nights. (7:4) This is how God plans to kill everything, but save everything at the same time.

Despite the apparent impossibility of the task he's been given, in 7:5, "Noah did all that the Lord commanded him."

7:6 gives us some fun numbers to play with. "Noah was six hundred years old when the floodwaters came on the earth." In Chapter Five, we were told that Noah was 500 years old (or 41, if you subscribe to the Gregorian calendar) when Shem, Ham, and Japheth were born, so 100 years later, when the flood takes place, the triplets are only 100 years old (roughly 8 Gregorian years). That seems pretty young to see this kind of death and destruction, but Noah does what God tells him to do, anyway.

An interesting passage appears now regarding the Biblical calendar. 7:11 says, "In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, on the seventeenth day of the second month - on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened." At first glance, this might just seem like an interesting way to say when death came to town. But a closer examination of this sentence shows us that one Biblical year contains months, and that each month contains at least seventeen days (or at least this month did). Well, if a lunar cycle is 28 days and a lunar cycle also is one Biblical year, how do you figure that there could be at least two months with at least seventeen days in each crammed into one single, 28-day-long lunar cycle? The lunar-Biblical calendar is wrong. Flat wrong. The math doesn't add up. People who came up with this theory to support claims that Adam could have viably lived for 930 years were either lying or completely ignoring the fact that it leaves men having sex and impregnating women at the age five, and also that the Bible itself refutes this theory. Or perhaps they're doing exactly what I just said: coming up with a completely unfounded theory in a failed attempt at defending a book which cites impossible things as truths.

At any rate, all the animals of all types are shuffled on board during 7:13-16. Noah's wife, Shem, Ham, and Japheth go with them. Noah heads in last, and "Then the Lord shut him in."

Rain falls for forty days solidly. The roof keeps the rain out of the boat (no further mention of the giant, foot-and-a-half wide skylight), but the water beneath the boat creates buoyancy and lifts the boat from the ground.

Regarding the properties of the flood itself, "all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered. The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than twenty feet." (7:19-20) I'm going to assume that means that the water rose high enough to cover the tallest mountain, and then rose twenty feet beyond that point because when a mountain is only twenty feet tall, I don't call it a mountain. I call it a mound. Naturally, with no land or trees to perch on, even the birds died off. "Every living thing that moved on the earth perished - birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind." (7:21)

I had to read that sentence twice because for a moment, I thought it said, "swam over the earth." Obviously, not every creature died like the Bible said. I can think of plenty of flora and fauna that survive underwater. I know I mentioned seaweed in a previous chapter. What about fish? Can fish drown?

In the end, "only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark." (7:23) Verse 7:24 finishes this chapter on a cliffhanger: "The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days."

So it rains solidly for about a year and a half (considering previously debunked arguments about lunar cycles and Biblical years), and then the water that fell hangs around for another twelve and a half years. Overall, this was a fourteen-year-long flood. The Bible wants me to believe that Noah had enough food in the ark to last 190 days, enough to feed five humans, and at least four of every single species in existence at the time. Let me break this down a little more clearly.

It can be said that there are three basic types of animals in the world:

• Those that strictly eat various plants (herbivores),
• Those that strictly eat other animals (carnivores),
• And those that eat a little of both (omnivores).

So Noah would have needed enough plants to feed thousands upon thousands of herbivores for nearly 200 days. I can't even think of one single plant that could be edible, even if freshly plucked from the ground on Day 1, for that long. Not to mention that every herbivore requires a different diet, so it's not like Noah could have just gotten a bunch of hay and compressed it and thrown it in a corner to wait. He'd also need berries and fruits and vegetables and specific types of leaves and grass. He would need an extremely large variety of food just for the herbivores alone.

The carnivores surprise me. I think it's safe to say that enough meat to feed thousands upon thousands of flesh-craving lions and tigers and bears wouldn't fit into the ark any more than a large amount of veggies. Yet somehow, not a single lion tried to eat a single gazelle. Not one bear jumped overboard to snatch at a leaping fish. For that matter, animals like to move around. Being cramped into a tiny room is not the best way to work off the energy built up by consuming 190 days' worth of food. Animals tend to get antsy when that happens (their body tries to burn off the energy they've eaten), and Noah didn't lose an arm while feeding an angry wolf.

The omnivores fall somewhere in between. Their bodies require nutrition from both flesh and fruit, but they never got underfed, not even when, two days after the ark set sail, all the millions of pounds of unrefrigerated food stored in open air went to rot. I'm actually surprised that the ark floated at all with that much food and animal on it.

And I know this isn't a very glamorous question to ask, but how could they possibly manage all of the feces and urine put out by the menagerie?

We're left on another cliffhanger, but I can already see where this one is going. Just like in Chapter Four before this, we have a case where the human population is extremely thin. We have four males and an unknown (but small) number of females. The cast of characters has dwindled to Noah, his wife, their three sons, and their wives. Assuming all three sons are married, there are at least four females. But we know from Chapter Six that men can marry multiple wives. It's possible that Shem, Ham, and Japheth have two or more wives each, but I would venture to say that there are probably no more than ten or so females in existence. We know that exactly four males live on. No matter who they have kids with, they will share direct blood relation to one of the other surviving men. This means that, once again, incest is required for the existence of the human race. God just killed off every man, woman, and child in the world, save for these fifteen or fewer people because man had evil in his heart, but God appears to be completely fine with incest.

I'll close out with some food for thought. Saddam Hussein killed thousands of people during his too-long reign over Iraq. We called it genocide, and we called it a Very Bad Thing. When God brought on the great flood, he eviscerated all but four to fourteen individuals of every species of air-breathing animal in all the world. I call that genocide on a scale that Saddam Hussein never could even could have hoped to commit. But when he does it, it's somehow An Okay Thing To Do.