Why do adults think that the story of Noah’s ark is so appropriate for children? And the answer that it is all about animals wont do. This is a story about the destruction of the human race. This is a story in which it ought to be impossible to turn a blind eye to the fact that men, women and children are clinging to the tops of trees or the roofs of their houses, crowding on to the last available pieces of high ground, desperate to avoid the swirling waters which threaten to engulf them and which do in the end engulf them and not only them but all the wild life that didn’t make it on to the ark. I wonder how many children have heard this story and secretly felt that it was all rather horrid really, but because the grown ups were telling it to them it must some how be all right. And perhaps the feeling that it was all rather horrid doesn’t go away; it just gets buried. And when the children grow up do they discard the story as one of those weird entertainments that their parents thought was appropriate; or do they tell the story to their children, because you have to tell children stories from the Bible, even though so much of it is so scary, but at least this one has animals in it?
And yet of course, such things happen outside the world of biblical legend; we live in a world where over and over again natural disasters test the credibility of God almost to the limit. The story of Noah seems to have a simple answer; ‘God saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become,’ so God decides to wash mankind right out of his hair. And yet that wont do either. The long Jewish tradition of reading this story is full of questions – questions which come from the text of Genesis itself; when God threatens the destruction of Sodom for the same reason – its wickedness – Abraham argues with him about the possibility that there might be some righteous people left in Sodom who would also suffer. In an extraordinary inverse bidding procedure Abraham knocks God down from fifty to ten righteous persons as a reason for not destroying Sodom. God, he says, can’t do such a wicked thing – he can’t treat the righteous and the wicked just the same. ‘Will not the judge of the earth do right? – indiscriminate destruction would be bad for God’s reputation – his power must not be more evident than his discrimination – his speciality is justice, he cannot be seen to behave in an arbitrary and petulant manner – wiping people out when he gets angry. But that seems to be the case in the Noah story; even so it forces us to look at the fact that such things happen, and it generates in its readers a critique of behaviour which is all too common amongst human beings – the desire to wash people right out of our hair. It is a very human trait to want to get rid of a problem rather than to face up to it and try to analyse what is really going on, just as we have to ask what is really going on in this story.
And so the story proceeds and God continues to be enigmatic – he picks on Noah to be the survivor of the human race. Noah finds favour with God because he is said to be a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time. But the story never shows us in what way Noah merits this title and again the rabbis point out that if he is being compared with the people of his time – it means he must simply be the best of a bad lot. Does God choose him because he is a really good man or because he has a potential to learn – is he saved by works, by his own merit, or is he saved by grace – God’s vision of his potential? It is as though God the artist goes on experimenting with his creation, discarding each failed attempt until he comes to one which might approximate to his original idea.
So what is it that has gone wrong with the world and what is it that Noah has to learn – these are the questions at the heart of this story. What goes wrong is in many ways the mirror image of the flood itself. Noah’s story is preceded by a strange account of sexual license leading to what is described as an evil inclination of the heart. The Rabbis see this as a kind of deluge of indiscriminate self-indulgence. Human behaviour has become chaotic so the waters of chaos return as in the time before creation. When human beings give way to indiscriminate desires, when their attention is only on their own needs and no-one else’s, people suffer indiscriminately whatever their values. In creation boundaries are important; Eden is boundaried by four rivers; the waters of chaos are separated by the heavens and the earth; the sea is gathered together and separated from the land. When human beings fail to respect one another’s boundaries, chaos and violence ensue; the floods come and wash them away just as they themselves have morally and spiritually begun to dissolve. And in every generation there is something of the people of the flood generation.
So Noah and his family and the animals go into the ark. There is something oddly passive even characterless about Noah in this story. He never speaks – he just does what God tells him; he doesn’t challenge God as Abraham does – he simply acquiesces. So we have to imagine what is going on inside his head. In fact reading and understanding this whole story has to be an act of imagination. It’s a story we ought not to tell children about. It’s a story in which we should constantly be asking them questions; why do you think God did thus, what does this mean, what was Noah thinking, and what did he have to learn in the ark? And the answer is there in the story – he had to learn how to feed every kind of animal.
What did he feed them with? Some of the rabbis thought it might have been pressed figs! Looking closer at the story we see that God tells Noah to take every kind of food that is to be eaten and to store it away as food ‘for you and for them’. So Noah has to spend all his time finding out when all the different animals need to be fed and what to feed them. He is in fact playing a God like role – he is learning to meet the needs of all living beings; his passivity has to give way to curiosity and kindness – to observe need and to respond to it.
And what did it feel like in the ark surrounded by all that need and noise and smell and danger. The ark must at times have felt like a term of imprisonment and yet the containment it involves is in strong contrast to the previous lack of boundaries; that previous disordered behaviour is replaced by a generous and ordered response to others’ needs. So what feels initially like a prison is in fact a laboratory of kindness; and that of course is why the ark is often seen as an image of the church. When churches ceased to be round and began to be built in an oblong shape, then the comparison could be made with the ark; and the central part of church where the congregation sits or stands is known as the nave, from the Latin ‘navis’ for a ship.
Luke in Acts provides us therefore with another image of life aboard the ark; they share their resources with one another as any had need, they have all things in common and they eat their food with glad and generous hearts. And that is what we come aboard this ark to learn Sunday by Sunday in this laboratory of kindness.
All the information about the rabbinic interpretations of this story is taken from Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg’s wonderful commentary ‘Genesis – the Beginning of Desire’ (JPS 1995) as is the phrase ‘laboratory of kindness’.