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The Nephilim
The term \"Nephilim\" occurs just twice in the Hebrew Bible, both in the Torah. The first is Genesis 6:1–4 NAS, immediately before the story of Noah\'s ark:
Now it came about, when men began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose. Then the LORD said, \"My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; nevertheless his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.\" The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.
The second is Numbers 13:32–33 NAS, where the Twelve Spies report that they have seen fearsome giants in Canaan:
So they gave out to the sons of Israel a bad report of the land which they had spied out, saying, \"The land through which we had gone, in spying it out, is a land that devours its inhabitants; and all the people whom we saw in it are men of great size. There also we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak are part of the Nephilim); and we became like grasshoppers in our own sight, and so we were in their sight.
The nature of the nephilim is complicated by the ambiguity of Genesis 6:4, which leaves it unclear whether they are the \"sons of God\" or their offspring who are the \"mighty men of old, men of renown\". Richard Hess in The Anchor Bible Dictionary takes it to mean that the nephilim are the offspring,[11] as does P. W. Coxon in Dictionary of deities and demons in the Bible.[12]
Fallen Angels
The New American Bible commentary draws a parallel to the Epistle of Jude and the statements set forth in Genesis, suggesting that the Epistle refers implicitly to the paternity of nephilim as heavenly beings who came to earth and had sexual intercourse with women.[17] The footnotes of the Jerusalem Bible suggest that the Biblical author intended the nephilim to be an \"anecdote of a superhuman race\".[18]
Some Christian commentators have argued against this view,[19][20] citing Jesus\'s statement that angels do not marry.[21] Others believe that Jesus was only referring to angels in heaven.[22]
Evidence cited in favor of the \"fallen angels\" interpretation includes the fact that the phrase \"the sons of God\" (Hebrew, בְּנֵי הָֽאֱלֹהִים; literally \"sons of the gods\") is used twice outside of Genesis chapter 6, in the Book of Job (1:6 and 2:1) where the phrase explicitly references angels. The Septuagint\'s translation of Genesis 6:2 renders this phrase as \"the angels of God.\"[23]
Main article: Noah in rabbinic literature
See also: Rabbinic Judaism
Talmudic tractates Sanhedrin, Avodah Zarah and Zevahim relate that, while Noah was building the ark, he attempted to warn his neighbors of the coming deluge, but was ignored or mocked. In order to protect Noah and his family, God placed lions and other ferocious animals to guard them from the wicked who tried to stop them from entering the ark. According to one Midrash, it was God, or the angels, who gathered the animals to the ark, together with their food. As there had been no need to distinguish between clean and unclean animals before this time, the clean animals made themselves known by kneeling before Noah as they entered the ark. A differing opinion said that the ark itself distinguished clean animals from unclean, admitting seven pairs each of the former and one pair each of the latter.
According to Sanhedrin 108B, Noah was engaged both day and night in feeding and caring for the animals, and did not sleep for the entire year aboard the ark.[26] The animals were the best of their species, and so behaved with utmost goodness. They abstained from procreation, so that the number of creatures that disembarked was exactly equal to the number that embarked. The raven created problems, refusing to leave the ark when Noah sent it forth and accusing the patriarch of wishing to destroy its race, but as the commentators pointed out, God wished to save the raven, for its descendants were destined to feed the prophet Elijah.
According to one tradition, refuse was stored on the lowest of the ark\'s three decks, humans and clean beasts on the second, and the unclean animals and birds on the top; a differing interpretation described the refuse as being stored on the utmost deck, from where it was shoveled into the sea through a trapdoor. Precious stones, said to be as bright as the noon sun, provided light, and God ensured that food remained fresh.[27][28][29] Some more unorthodox interpretations of the ark narrative also surfaced: the 12th-century Jewish commentator Abraham ibn Ezra interpreted the ark as being a vessel that remained underwater for 40 days, after which it floated to the surface.[30]
Christianity
An artist\'s depiction of the construction of the Ark, from the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493)
Interpretations of the ark narrative played an important role in early Christian doctrine. St. Hippolytus of Rome (d. 235) sought to demonstrate that \"the Ark was a symbol of the Christ who was expected\", stating that the vessel had its door on the east side – the direction from which Christ would appear at the Second Coming – and that the bones of Adam were brought aboard, together with gold, frankincense, and myrrh (the symbols of the Nativity of Christ). Hippolytus furthermore stated that the ark floated to and fro in the four directions on the waters, making the sign of the cross, before eventually landing on Mount Kardu \"in the east, in the land of the sons of Raban, and the Orientals call it Mount Godash; the Armenians call it Ararat\".[31] On a more practical plane, Hippolytus explained that the lowest of the three decks was for wild beasts, the middle for birds and domestic animals, and the top level for humans. He says that male animals were separated from the females by sharp stakes so that there would be no breeding on board.[31]
The early Church Father and theologian Origen (c. 182–251) produced a learned argument about cubits, in response to a critic who doubted that the ark could contain all the animals in the world. Origen held that Moses, the traditional author of the book of Genesis, had been brought up in Egypt and would therefore have used the larger Egyptian cubit. He also fixed the shape of the ark as a truncated pyramid, square at its base, and tapering to a square peak one cubit on a side; it was not until the 12th century that it came to be thought of as a rectangular box with a sloping roof.[32]
Early Christian artists depicted Noah standing in a small box on the waves, symbolizing God saving the Christian Church in its turbulent early years. St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430), in his work City of God, demonstrated that the dimensions of the ark corresponded to the dimensions of the human body, which according to Christian doctrine is the body of Christ and in turn the body of the Church.[33] St. Jerome (c. 347–420) identified the raven, which was sent forth and did not return, as the \"foul bird of wickedness\" expelled by baptism;[34] more enduringly, the dove and olive branch came to symbolize the Holy Spirit and the hope of salvation and eventually, peace.[32] The olive branch remains a secular and religious symbol of peace today.
Ussher\'s chronology, one of the most prominent attempts to date events according to the Bible, calculated that Noah would have lived from 2948 until 1998 BCE, with the deluge occurring in 2349 BCE. Calculations based on figures in the Hebrew Bible place the flood in 1656 AM (Anno Mundi); those based on the Greek LXX Bible in 2262 AM; and those based on the Samaritan Pentateuch, in 1308 AM. The Book of Jubilees, by a different calculation, also yields the date 1308 AM for the flood.
Islam
Main article: Noah in Islam
Miniature from Hafiz-i Abru’s Majma al-tawarikh. “Noah’s Ark” Iran (Afghanistan), Herat; Timur’s son Shah Rukh (1405-1447) ordered the historian Hafiz-i Abru to write a continuation of Rashid al-Din’s famous history of the world, Jami al-tawarikh. Like the Il-Khanids, the Timurids were concerned with legitimizing their right to rule, and Hafiz-i Abru’s “A Collection of Histories” covers a period that included the time of Shah Rukh himself.
Noah\'s ark and the deluge from Zubdat-al Tawarikh
In contrast to the Jewish tradition, which uses a term which can be translated as a \"box\" or \"chest\" to describe the Ark, surah 29:15 of the Quran refers to it as a safina, an ordinary ship, and surah 54:13 describes the ark as \"a thing of boards and nails\". `Abd Allah ibn `Abbas, a contemporary of Muhammad, wrote that Noah was in doubt as to what shape to make the ark, and that Allah revealed to him that it was to be shaped like a bird\'s belly and fashioned of teak wood.[35]
Abdallah ibn \'Umar al-Baidawi, writing in the 13th century, explains that in the first of its three levels wild and domesticated animals were lodged, in the second the human beings, and in the third the birds. On every plank was the name of a prophet. Three missing planks, symbolizing three prophets, were brought from Egypt by Og, son of Anak, the only one of the giants permitted to survive the Flood. The body of Adam was carried in the middle to divide the men from the women. Surah 11:41 says: \"And he said, \'Ride ye in it; in the Name of Allah it moves and stays!\'\"; this was taken to mean that Noah said, \"In the Name of Allah!\" when he wished the ark to move, and the same when he wished it to stand still.
Noah spent five or six months aboard the ark, at the end of which he sent out a raven. But the raven stopped to feast on carrion, and so Noah cursed it and sent out the dove, which has been known ever since as the friend of humanity. The medieval scholar Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn al-Husayn Masudi (d. 956) wrote that Allah commanded the Earth to absorb the water, and certain portions which were slow in obeying received salt water in punishment and so became dry and arid. The water which was not absorbed formed the seas, so that the waters of the flood still exist. Masudi says that the ark began its voyage at Kufa in central Iraq and sailed to Mecca, circling the Kaaba before finally traveling to Mount Judi, which surah 11:44 states was its final resting place. This mountain is identified by tradition with a hill near the town of Jazirat ibn Umar on the east bank of the Tigris in the province of Mosul in northern Iraq, and Masudi says that the spot could be seen in his time.[27] [28]
Other traditions
The Subsiding of the Waters of the Deluge (1829), a painting by the American painter Thomas Cole
The Mandaeans of the southern Iraqi marshes regard Noah as a prophet, while rejecting both Abraham and Jesus as false prophets. In the Mandaean scriptures, the ark was built of sandalwood from Jebel Harun and was cubic in shape, with a length, width and height of 30 amma (the length of an arm); its final resting place is said to be Egypt.[citation needed]
The Bahá\'í Faith regards the Ark and the Flood as symbolic.[36] In Bahá\'í belief, only Noah\'s followers were spiritually alive, preserved in the \"ark\" of his teachings, as others were spiritually dead.[37][38] The Bahá\'í scripture Kitáb-i-Íqán endorses the Islamic belief that Noah had a large number of companions on the ark, either 40 or 72, as well as his family, and that he taught for 950 (symbolic) years before the flood.[39]
Historicity
Various editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica reflect the collapse of belief in the historicity of the ark in the face of advancing scientific knowledge. Its 1771 edition offered the following as scientific evidence for the ark\'s size and capacity: \"...Buteo and Kircher have proved geometrically, that, taking the common cubit as a foot and a half, the ark was abundantly sufficient for all the animals supposed to be lodged in it...the number of species of animals will be found much less than is generally imagined, not amounting to a hundred species of quadrupeds\". By the eighth edition (1853–1860), the encyclopedia said of the Noah story, \"The insuperable difficulties connected with the belief that all other existing species of animals were provided for in the ark are obviated by adopting the suggestion of Bishop Stillingfleet, approved by Matthew Poole...and others, that the Deluge did not extend beyond the region of the Earth then inhabited\". By the ninth edition, in 1875, no attempt was made to reconcile the Noah story with scientific fact, and it was presented without comment. In the 1960 edition, the article on the ark stated that \"Before the days of \'higher criticism\' and the rise of the modern scientific views as to the origin of the species, there was much discussion among the learned, and many ingenious and curious theories were advanced, as to the number of animals on the ark\".[40]
Ark\'s geometrics
This engraving, made from carved sardonyx and gold, features a line of animals on the gangway to Noah\'s ark. It is based on a woodcut by the French illustrator Bernard Salomon.[41] The Walters Art Museum.
In Europe, the Renaissance saw much speculation on the nature of the ark that might have seemed familiar to early theologians such as Origen and Augustine. At the same time, however, a new class of scholarship arose, one which, while never questioning the literal truth of the Ark story, began to speculate on the practical workings of Noah\'s vessel from within a purely naturalistic framework. In the 15th century, Alfonso Tostada gave a detailed account of the logistics of the ark, down to arrangements for the disposal of dung and the circulation of fresh air. The 16th-century geometrician Johannes Buteo calculated the ship\'s internal dimensions, allowing room for Noah\'s grinding mills and smokeless ovens, a model widely adopted by other commentators.[32]
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