Noah and his ark are perennial, and now fashionable too
Noah was the first believer in climate change. He saw it coming and acted in time. So it’s odd he is not the hero of the greens. But then they are all atheists. The two things go together, for being green, a secular form of pantheism, is a substitute for religion. Hence the fanaticism, so typical of primitive beliefs. Certain green scientists even want denial of climate change made into a criminal offence, as Holocaust denial is in some Continental countries.
Another reason Noah is unsatisfactory to the greens is that he believed that climate change would be temporary: hence the ark and its passengers, to be saved ‘that they may breed abundantly on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply’. After the waters abated and dried up, things returned to normal as the Lord promised: ‘While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.’ What the Bible does not make clear is that the Flood was regional as well as temporary. There can be no doubt that some kind of huge inundation did occur. As far back as 1872 George Smith of the British Museum discovered a version of the Deluge in cuneiform tablets found in the Palace of Sennacherib at Kuyunjik. In the 1920s Sir Leonard Woolley, excavating Ur, found an alluvial flood deposit, eight feet thick, which he dated 4,000 to 3,500 BC. The literary evidence shows that not only the Assyrians but the Babylonians and the Sumerians before them treasured memories of a great flood. Summarising the archaeological evidence in the early 1960s, Sir Max Mallowan concluded that the Deluge was a historical fact, and this was quickly followed in 1965 by publication at the British Museum of two tablets which describe not only the Flood but a Noahlike figure called Ziusudra, who built a boat and so survived. But there is no evidence that giant floods took place outside the Mesopotamian region, and the non-biblical texts, though confirmatory in many respects, leave out the moral dimensions which give the story of Noah so strong a resonance: for Noah is just and righteous as well as prescient.
All the same, it is impossible to conceal the fact that Noah is also a comic figure, whether seen through the biblical text or the images provided by archaeology. J.C. Morton, whose Beachcomber column in the Daily Express I read as a child, put it neatly in a quatrain that stuck in my mind:
Recent research has discovered In the region of Mount Ararat That Noah on the eve of the Deluge Wore a little round wickerwork hat.
This hat appears in mediaeval illustrations to Genesis. The Swiss craftsman who first put Mr and Mrs Noah in his combined barometerclock got the tone right. The Noahs were tidy people, very clean and proper, with rather stocky looks, a bit wooden. They made a point of storing things against a rainy day. The word ‘ark’ originally meant a chest for precious or scarce goods, hence Ark of the Covenant, which held the Mosaic tablets. Noah’s ark was a store-ship of living beings. It gave its name to a species of large, flat-bottomed barges which the American settlers built when they were opening up the Mississippi basin, and later applied to the moral mission of their country. The theme was taken up by the great English parliamentarian John Bright during the Civil War (1863), when he told the Commons, ‘The United States has been an ark of refuge to the people of Europe’ — a concept which America’s generosity in taking and enriching refugees now applies to the entire world.
I should very much like to know who made the first Noah’s ark as a children’s toy. He or perhaps she — was one of the great inventors, for the ark is the most successful toy ever conceived. Teddy bears and gollywogs and Mickey Mouses come and go, but the ark sails on forever in the imagination of children. We bought ours half a century ago when our eldest son Daniel was two. All our children, and all their children, and the friends of both, have played with it. The number of tiny hands which have lifted the lid with delight is beyond computation. It is big and, like Mr and Mrs Noah themselves, sturdy, and still intact. The inmates have changed, however. The original Noahs have long since gone and been replaced by a succession of menagerie-overseers: crusader knights, cowboys, mandarins, redcoats, Daleks, Mary and Joseph, Napoleon and Josephine, George V and Queen Mary. Currently no one seems to be in charge. The animals have changed too. Some are on wheels. What children like about the ark is that they can lift the lid and take animals out and then put them back, endlessly. Ours has two extra means of ingress and egress, sloping, treaded gangplanks down which the wheeled animals can roll with a satisfying noise.
I like to watch children playing with the ark because it shows how quickly and early they learn, indeed teach themselves, complex and abstract concepts, like taxonomy, arranging the creatures in clearly defined groups, and collectivity. My granddaughter Daisy, just two, refers to the ark as ‘the animals’ or ‘the animals’ ark’ (she has written the Noahs out of her script). She uses the generic term ‘animals’ quite correctly and knows it means them all, and that a rhinoceros and a giraffe are individual species.
Actually, though there are still dozens of proper animals in our ark, more than half the denizens are now dinosaurs. A five-year-old visitor, John, immediately got all the inhabitants out and divided them into two groups: dinos and non-dinos. The latter did not interest him. Why? ‘Because when I grow up I am going to be a palaeontologist.’ He had difficulty pronouncing the word but knew what it meant. John is at present learning the cello (he has a small-sized version) and has already composed his first tune in notation. While he took the dinos out and arranged them he discussed time, a necessary concept to master if you are dealing with the prehistoric. I said that time was baffling, that lots of wise men from St Augustine onwards had puzzled about it, and no one — not even Professor Einstein — really understood it. He said: ‘But if no one understands it, why is it allowed?’ I had no answer to this question, which would have intrigued Wittgenstein.
It was the story of Noah and his ark which finally destroyed the Christian faith of Leslie Stephen, then a clergyman. He went on to create an ark of his own, full of strange creatures, the first edition of the Dictionary of National Biography. Of course the Flood had not been confirmed by archaeologists in Stephen’s young days. All the same, it is odd that his faith should have been blasted by such a powerful, enduring and lovable tale. No one, except God of course, could possibly have invented it. And now, with its strong echoes of climatology, species preservation and environmental zoology, it is highly fashionable. One would like to hear Mr Noah explaining things on TV. Wearing his wickerwork hat, of course.
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