THE MOVIE NOAH VS. THE BIBLE STORY-74

This is about the movie NOAH vis-à-vis the Bible from which the movie was ostensibly and loosely based, as are many movies that are made from stories in books. The director of the movie, Darren Aronofsky, is an atheist so the name God was never mentioned explicitly in the movie and he said that Noah was a drunk. I was curious about that so I consulted the ultimate source, the Holy Bible. In the King James Version of the Bible in Genesis chapters 6 – 9, the word “God” is mentioned 19 times and the word “Lord” 11 times (If I have counted correctly). In the Bible story, God is punishing mankind because, except for Noah and his family, there are too many iniquitous and sinful people. The movie has a different take. The people are transgressing against Gaia; in other words Mother Earth. They were despoiling the planet. Naturally with their polluting automobiles, coal-fired electricity generating plants, nuclear power plants, and aeroplanes fouling the skies what is there not to object to in bringing down the wraith of God on the people in the form of drowning them. There is something not exactly correct about that postulation that I can’t quite seem to grasp. Perhaps the answer is that I am confusing their times with modern times. Do you think so? Understand that I love sarcasm, when deserved. Compared to now and even the conditions on the planet before dispositive rapscallion man populated the earth, those people in Genesis husbanded a practically pristine environment. What were those idiotic movie people going on about? The movie NOAH is a $132,000,000 extravaganza that tells a rollickingly good yarn, but it is not to be confused with what is presented in the Bible. Even given there are 138 minutes of movie time to fill that could hardly be done using only the four chapters of Genesis where the adventures and misadventures of Noah are told, the departures and outright contradictions in the movie compared to the Bible story make the movie a secular presentation of the story of Noah. I would guess that most truly religious people, including Jews and Muslims, but especially Christians, would find the movie somewhat objectionable. What I also discovered in the Bible is that Noah fathered three sons at age 500 years. He was 600 years, one month, and 17 days old when he entered the ark. Everyone, except the students at American University in Washington D.C. where a number of them were recently interviewed and only one could name even one US Senator, although nearly all knew that the hit song “Let It Go” was from the movie “Frozen”, has heard that Noah sent out a dove to check the water level three times (the last time the dove did not return to the ark), but did you know, according to the Good Book, Noah first sent out a raven? After the flood was over and the occupants of the ark had resettled on the land, Noah planted a vineyard and made wine from the grapes. He then proceeded to drink the wine and got drunk. It does not say that he did this more than once. Noah lived another 350 years after the flood, dying at the age of 950 years. And why not? He was the grandson of Methuselah, who, according to the Bible, lived to the ripe old age of 969 years. Some scholars have postulated that months were counted as years, but that is negated because these same units were used to count the age of Noah's father who would by that reckoning have been 5 years old when he fathered his first son. Consider that these Biblical people lived to great ages unheard of in these modern times. And they did so without modern medicine. No hospitals, antibiotics, myriad other drugs, current surgery techniques, or treatments for cancer and other ailments, inter alia. Those people must have been hardy indeed. Of course there is another explanation that is not as paralogistically challenged. They did not live nearly as long as was written in the Bible. To be rational and believe that is then to cast doubt on the literal interpretation of all the stories in the Bible. One cannot reasonably pick and chose which stories in the Bible to believe and which to cast aside. Much better in my opinion is to treat them all the same as allegories that strive to make moral points rather than being historically accurate. Flood stories predate the version in the Bible. Several ancient cultures in the West and in the East have recounted similar events where all of the known world or at least much of it was inundated with water. It strains credulity and violates logic and reason to ascribe these floods to the entire globe. Widespread localized floods perhaps, with the one in the Bible no exception. Does everyone who fancy themselves to be rationally and logically thinking beings really believe that the Biblical Flood actually put the entire earth under water? I would hope not. Interesting book, the Bible, especially the story of Noah, which is one of the very first in the Old Testament. Considering what I have recounted here perhaps is it not only such a so-called religion as Scientology that is a bit out of kilter in some aspects.