Uncle Aaron’s Bible Stories – The Flood Part 2

The flood waters rose and covered even the tallest mountains covering all of them in at least twenty two feet of water. Noah and his family stared at the utter destruction of everything they knew. God killed everything that lived on the land and draws air for breath. 

For one hundred and fifty days the ark floated on the water and Noah and his family desperately tried to keep the lions from eating the gazelles. Finally God remembered the people and animals on the ark and caused the wind to start blowing. God then realized this was a terrible way to get rid of that much water as it would take over five thousand years to evaporate nearly five miles of water with just wind and sunshine. Not to mention the water had to go somewhere. So He just punched a hole in the earth again and caused it to drain away faster. That wasn’t quite fast enough, and still ran into the problem of where to put it all, so He just made some of it disappear entirely.

The ark came to rest on Mount Ararat and Noah could not really see the ground. Mostly because Mount Ararat is a volcano and the ark landed in the caldera. Since he couldn’t get out of the ark, he took the smartest bird he had and let it go. He reasoned the bird wouldn’t come back if it found a place to land. So he let out a phoenix. The phoenix suffocated and died because of the lack of air at that height. This was unfortunate because they had to toss the other one out when it started molting to keep the ark from catching fire. A few days later he tried a raven, which circled a few times and came back.

Noah’s wife convinced him not to use a raven again because they only had two ravens, but they did have fourteen doves. The doves are kind of stupid but at least they won’t go extinct if a few of them died like the phoenix. So seven days later he sent out a dove, which returned after flying around a few times. After a few tries the dove came back with a leaf from an olive tree in its mouth. Noah waited another week before sending the dove out again, and this time it never came back.

Over the next seven days Noah had his family get the the animals ready to depart the ark. The people on the bottom deck put on their animal costumes and made sure they were mixed in with the animals.

“Ug not sure costume fool God,” the giant said, adjusting his giraffe costume over his head. Ug was twelve feet tall and while significantly taller than a juvenile giraffe, he was not nearly as tall as the average adult giraffe. His costume fit very tightly over his shoulders.

“Let me worry about God, you just follow the giraffes out for a while then ditch the costume. Remember the plan, we all meet back in the valley just west of here in a month,” Noah said.

“How Ug eat on trip? Ug need much food,” the giant asked.

Noah motioned for Ug to lean down, “See this olive leaf? Know what it means?”

“No.”

“Olive trees take years to get big enough for a dove to rest in much less make leaves. It only stopped flooding about a month and a half ago. It means God did not flood the whole world, just a part of it, and it probably was not as bad as it looked. There is plenty of food out there, I am sure of it.”

“Ug trust Noah, Ug be back in few days,” the giant said, getting in line with all the giraffes.

On the first day of the week Noah opened the door to the ark and he and his family somehow managed to herd the animals out in an organized fashion. Noah then started building an altar out of rocks and had his boys herd up a bunch of the clean animals for his sacrifice.

It was then that Noah put on the greatest, most elaborate barbecue of his life while the stowaways snuck off with the animals. His wife, daughter in laws and a few grand children nearly collapsed from exhaustion cleaning and butchering the animals so they could be grilled up. At the end of the day Noah’s sons had to prop him up and practically guide his hands like a puppet to slit the animal’s throats.

God smelled the barbecue from on high and descended to the earthly realm to partake. He and the family enjoyed the meal until they could simply not force any more meat in their mouths. The next day Noah’s wife would invent meat jerky so that all the food would not go bad.

“Noah I feel guilty for flooding the whole world like that. Look, you know I like your barbecues, and I’m setting aside all the animals of the world for my, I mean your consumption. Also I’m going to make the animals all afraid of you, that way you don’t have to worry so much about getting eaten,” God said.

“They’re already afraid of us, it makes it hard to hunt. What if you made them a bit less afraid? Especially the wild cattle.”

“Nah, I think it is better this way. Oh yes, don’t eat the blood with the meat, let their life-blood return to the earth. Also if anyone or anything kills a person, I am going to require a life. So if an animal kills a man, it will die. If a man kills another man, I will require his life. Also, tell your children to get to humping. I want you to populate the whole world again.”

“Will do God. Anything else?”

“I am putting my hunting bow up in the sky as a reminder to all of us that I won’t destroy the world again by water. Until the Earth is gone, days, nights and seasons will never cease.”

Noah turned back around and saw two rainbows in the sky, “A double rainbow. What do they mean?”

“Means I have two bows,” God replied, “Got to have a spare in case the main one breaks. Leviathan is not going to kill himself.”

And that’s how Furries populated the earth.

Notes

There will have to be a part three to cover what little happened after the flood. The post would be a bit lengthier than I am comfortable with otherwise.

As I’ve written before, the flood story in Genesis is two narratives that have been woven together. These two narratives are good examples of an ancient near eastern understanding of the cosmos. The tallest mountains the authors would have been aware of were Mount Ararat in Turkey and Mount Damavand in Iraq. They are sixteen thousand and eighteen thousand feet tall respectively and the two tallest mountains in the middle east (unless you count Afghanistan as part of the middle east).

This shows how small the authors thought the world really was. It did not extend past a week or so trip from their home region. It also implies that they had the same idea of how earth is shaped as their contemporaries.

All the water on earth could not flood all of the dry land, much less cover the earth sufficiently to submerge the tallest mountains by 20 feet or so. It would be about four miles deep just to cover Mount Ararat. However, if you believed the earth existed in the middle of an essentially infinite ocean, and above the hard dome of the sky was also an infinite expanse of water, it appears plausible. It is also evident they had no idea about what happened to water when it evaporates. They must have thought it disappeared entirely instead of just being absorbed into the air and eventually released somewhere else.

In spite of what the young earth creationists say, there is no evidence for a world-wide flood. There is, however, some evidence of the Black Sea catastrophically flooding within human memory. Sometime between 12,000 B.C. and 5600 B.C. the Black Sea probably flooded violently. There are temples in Turkey that are dated from about 11,000 B.C., so people were building things there when this happened. The flood myths from the Middle East might just be a really ancient cultural memory of this event. Considering many people who have oral histories sometimes talk about events that happened hundreds and even thousands of years ago like it happened recently, this appears plausible to me.

The scholarship indicates that the story of Noah is a copy of the flood myth from the Epic of Gilgamesh. Having looked that story up, I have to agree. It’s basically a point for point retelling. The biggest difference seems to be that Utnapishtim’s flood might not have been global, just a really bad one. Also Utnapishtim took friends and family aboard his boat at the god’s command, I thought it might be interesting if Noah did the same.

As far as my portrayal of God liking barbecue, I think it is fitting. Most of these stories involve an animal sacrifice of some kind. It is my understanding that only part of the animal was burned up in most sacrifices, the rest was eaten either by the priests, or communally. It seems like the only time God gets involved in these old stories is when He smells the burning meat, which is what people use to get His attention. I can sympathize, I think grilling meat smells amazing.

Because of the emphasis on God desiring the meat of sacrificed animals I decided Noah must have been an amazing grill master with six centuries of practice under his belt. Noah might have used his grilling skills to distract God while his friends and family snuck off the ark in animal costumes. Hence, furries.


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