Noach

I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth. And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud. And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. – Gen 9:12-15

In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed”? Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” - Carl Sagan

An argument is as strong as its weakest point. I propose we look at the “little God” idea in the context of Parashat Noach, just when God is going about his business of flooding the whole planet. An undertaking of such grand scale has not been seen since a week ago in Bereishit, and, as long as God’s sky-mnemonic suffices, shall not be seen again.

It seems that the Bible can be read in one of two main ways; either it is the eternal word of Almighty God, or it is a hodge-podge collection of Bronze Age mythology (other fascinating possibilities will be covered in later posts). If one wishes to pick one of these options with any reasonable degree of certainty, I’d recommend some solid reading on theology and theodicy and comparative religion first. But to take a far less intellectually rigorous and more fun approach: which does it seem like?

A couple of things seem instantly apparent from the above verse. The first is that God’s grasp of prismatic physics is woefully poor. Further; the God of the Hebrews fights with human weapons, like bows (I believe there is a Midrash which points out that the bow is depicted facing away from the Earth to symbolise God’s restraint of His vicious intent).

As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease. – Gen 8:22

God’s apparent interest in the particulars of agriculture is a little off-putting. Did He really build this entire universe and all its dizzying mechanics just so the amazingly primitive, ape-descended life forms on one little blue-green planet orbiting a small unregarded yellow sun, far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy (Adams 1979), should be able to plant and harvest their crops?

And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female. Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive. – Gen 6:19-20

Why is it that the God of the Hebrews never seems to know any more than the average, reasonably well-informed tribesman of archaic Judea? One might forgive such a tribesman for being ignorant of asexual reproduction. But surely the Almighty Himself would have mentioned it:

Don’t bother taking two of those lizards in; just take one – the species is parthenogenetic. Never mind what that means, your race will figure it out in a couple of thousand years. Just do what I say, or I’ll smite you. - Not in the Bible

Once again, none of this is very good evidence against the divinity of the Bible. There are other places for that. I merely find it interesting to swap spectacles around whilst I read, and marvel at how profoundly different the text looks from a slightly different angle.