In The Shadow Of The Ark

I just finished In The Shadow Of The Ark by Anne Provoost (no relation to Anne Provooost :-) which, as a work of fiction, transports us back into that fictional past that many of us culturally share - the past in which Noah, his sons and their wives and lots and lots and lots of animals survive the ultimate (wet) Act of God. We have descended from the elect, from those chosen ones. Doesn't that make you feel special?

It's that same old harp I want to play, I'm afraid. Provoost plays it well too - and the tune is so familiar to readers of this blog. It goes like this: what in God's name makes anyone deserving of life at God's hand, when others are deserving of death? You can of course turn that question around. Let's ask a related question - why were Noah and his family spared the fate of the rest of the world? By answering this I think we identify a trend in the bible, one which would probably surprise many a Christian today.

According to the bible - a strict, unaided reading of the Old Testament text - Noah was seen as righteous by God, therefore, he was to be saved from the coming calamity. What does it mean to be righteous? Does the bible tell us? Not in this story. Noah is spared because of possessing this quality, yet we have no description of what this translated to in his life. So were his family saved for their righteousness too? They were saved because they were related to Noah, of course. God didn't look down and see "Shem, a righteous man" for example. Shem lived through the flood because his father was a righteous man, whatever that was, whatever that is (it's, as with most biblical texts, open to interpretation). An even worse demarcation occurs, highlighted by Provoost, when we consider that Noah's son's choice of wives was in effect a sentence of death upon other women they could have chosen instead. And really thinking out of the box now (pun intended) - think of all the children, no really think about what the bible is saying happened to the children: clinging, scared and crying, to mothers who are trying to swim whilst keeping their childs head above the water, maybe having to leave other children to fend for themselves in the attempt to save one, please one...these children died because they were born to a parent other than Noah, it's cruelly simple. As Provoost points out, why didn't Ham (or any of the others) give up their place for a child, or an invalid? I'll go one obvious step further - surely some of the animals could have been left out of the ark in favour of some more people? Who needs 350,000 species of beetle anyway - surely leaving a few thousand of those behind would have made room for a few more people??!! No "women and children first" in this story. Beetles and Noah and (his) children first.

Hang on, the Christians say, Noah preached to the people, he tried to save them! Not according to the Old Testament he didn't (why don't you look). If you've read (St.) Peter saying anything else about Noah (of course you have), the word he uses for "preacher" (Greek: keryx) can "refer...to the fact that his lifestyle condemned sin and proclaimed righteousness to his contemporaries" (expositors bible dictionary). And surely if Noah did preach, to those (probably) millions of people, the huge attempt to do so would have been recorded at the time? It would have been at least as massive an effort as building the ark was! No, it seems that being saved for the majority wasn't at all about what you knew or did, it was who you knew that counted - or at least who you were related to.

Things didn't get much fairer after the flood. God's people were a specific nation - you were born saved or born not saved (the majority of mankind) depending on whether you were born in Israel or not.

Things are fairer now though, right? Christianity opened the door to "people of the nations" and now anyone can be "righteous" in God's eyes! Ah, it sounds good in theory, but in practice, it's still about who you know - or who your parents are, or even where you were born! If you were born in Iran, chances are you weren't born into a family that accepts Jesus Christ as its (collective) saviour. Shame. Lucky for you if you were born in the USA though, because the chances are high that you will have been born into a saved family. Ah, but it's more complicated, see, just as I can read that text about Noah and decide what I think righteousness means, and decide that I'm saved if I do certain things, so it's open to any man to think he is right (which is what righteousness means after all) when it comes to his standing with God. And by standing with God, I mean beliefs about Him of course, for He is that great and final Teacher in the sky, who will mark you based on what you have believed ("You believed THAT? You got an F! You believed THE OTHER? Oooh, close...but as you know close isn't nearly good enough - F!!"). As if what sort of person you are is as important as what you believe - don't be stupid (= unrighteous)!

There are probably as many versions of Christianity as there are words of Jesus in the bible, so who knows which version God views as being right(eous)? Well, it gets easy again. It's whichever one you've been brought up in, of course. Just as in fictional times past, the fiction persists that you are chosen, you are the lucky Noah (or even luckier son of Noah) today. And it doesn't matter if you preach or not - Noah didn't - and anyway, no one is going to listen, it's a family thing - just like it's always been.

If you see yourself as a Noah, or a son of a Noah or a wife of a Noah's son, I understand - I once saw myself as a son of Noah. It's just that I now read the story of Noah and identify much more with the unfortunates, those left behinds - i.e. with the whole world. One more thing. If you can harmonize the actions of a just and loving God with the story of Noah, then I submit that you can harmonize His actions with anything He chooses to do. You can imagine that soon a (hot) Act of God will destroy many* who are not chosen, and leave you, you Noah or (more likely) son of Noah, behind. Standing in the shadow of the ark, I wish you well in that empty world.

*This could be many indeed if you are a Jehovah's Witness. The ratio of Witnesses to "Wordlies" is around 1:1000, so expect to see 99.9% of mankind (the unrighteous) perish at Armageddon. Beetles should fare OK though (phew). If you didn't realize you believed that, consider whether this could have any other meaning: “Only Jehovah’s Witnesses...have any Scriptural hope of surviving the impending end of this doomed system dominated by Satan the Devil.” Watchtower 1989 September 1 p.19.