Evan Almighty 2: Evan Mightier
This is a boring post about a theory I’ve had for quite some time now. Don’t read it. Go make yourself a sandwich. Seriously. I suggest turkey on rye with some Swiss cheese,
When it comes to arguments against religion one of the first things people come to is the story of Noah. It seems preposterous to believe that the entire world was flooded and that a single man managed to get two of every animal on a boat. Apparently this sort of logic didn’t stop Steve Carell from making Evan Almighty, but I digress.
We all know the basic story as it pops up in the Torah, the Bible and the Koran - Noah is the last good man left in the world and so God sends a flood to destroy the Petri dish, save for Noah who is instructed to build a boat. Here’s the thing, the story of Noah predates all three of those sources. Hell, it potentially predates the concept of Yahweh, the Abrahamic God.
Have you ever read the Epic of Gilgamesh? Gilgamesh was this Babylonian King who was celebrated in a song thousands of years ago. His story is actually considered one of if not the oldest extant written story. The funny thing about it is that it actually ends with the story of the flood. Towards the end of the poem, Gilgamesh’s best friend/ male "companion" dies and so Gilgamesh begins to fear death and seeks out immortality. He finds the world’s oldest man, Utnapishtim, who tells him his life story. The funny thing is that it’s the Noah story verbatim. Sure, some details are different, like the fact that the Utnapishtim story involves a pantheon of Gods deciding the world was wicked. One of them, Ea, took pity on old Ut and told him about the flood. From there it’s pretty much exactly the same story, though. And I don’t mean same in the way that all stories involving Jungian archetypes are the same, I mean the same down to story details involving birds being sent out after specific days.
Of the three religious books I mentioned, the Torah is the original purveyor of the Noah version of the story. The Torah was written somewhere between 600 and 400 BC. The Gilgamesh poem dates back to around 2100 BC, and the version we use now was written between 1300 and 1000 BC. The story of Utnapishtim predates the Noah version by hundreds if not thousands of years. It also tells us that the story would have taken place in and around ancient Babylon. By virtue of its age alone, the Utnapishtim version is the one we'll work from.
One of the problems with the Utnapishtim flood myth is that it’s full of hyperbole. I think we can strip back some of that and get to the root of the story. Now the thing to remember about Babylon is that it had two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. If you remember sixth grade history class, they flooded annually. It’s not completely out there to believe that the flood was particularly vicious one year and destroyed an entire village or city. Considering the time period and the relative size of the human population back then, a flood that destroyed your village and kin would have felt like it a deluge that covered the entire world.
Now for the big one, the mother of all problems with this story: the animals on the boat. If we believe River Tam then this is nothing more than early quantum state phenomenon.
I am going to take a simpler approach, though. We’ve all played telephone and we all know how stories get exaggerated over time. What if instead of two of every animal, Utnapishtim took two of every domesticated animal? It’s not completely irrational to believe that he crammed his wife, kids, two ancient sheep and two ancient fowls on a boat for a few days. I have no academia to back this up, but I don’t think it’s an illogical leap.
So when you get down to it, you have the story of a man who survived a Babylonian flood on a boat with his family and some livestock. It’s an incredible story, not an impossible one. It even leaves a little room for heavenly intervention if you’re so inclined. Of course all things considered, it seems to support the existence of a Babylonian pantheon more than anything else. But the Ten Commandments and the term Elohim do suggest the Abrahamic God is not alone…you know what, we’ll leave that for another day.
When it comes to arguments against religion one of the first things people come to is the story of Noah. It seems preposterous to believe that the entire world was flooded and that a single man managed to get two of every animal on a boat. Apparently this sort of logic didn’t stop Steve Carell from making Evan Almighty, but I digress.
We all know the basic story as it pops up in the Torah, the Bible and the Koran - Noah is the last good man left in the world and so God sends a flood to destroy the Petri dish, save for Noah who is instructed to build a boat. Here’s the thing, the story of Noah predates all three of those sources. Hell, it potentially predates the concept of Yahweh, the Abrahamic God.
Have you ever read the Epic of Gilgamesh? Gilgamesh was this Babylonian King who was celebrated in a song thousands of years ago. His story is actually considered one of if not the oldest extant written story. The funny thing about it is that it actually ends with the story of the flood. Towards the end of the poem, Gilgamesh’s best friend/ male "companion" dies and so Gilgamesh begins to fear death and seeks out immortality. He finds the world’s oldest man, Utnapishtim, who tells him his life story. The funny thing is that it’s the Noah story verbatim. Sure, some details are different, like the fact that the Utnapishtim story involves a pantheon of Gods deciding the world was wicked. One of them, Ea, took pity on old Ut and told him about the flood. From there it’s pretty much exactly the same story, though. And I don’t mean same in the way that all stories involving Jungian archetypes are the same, I mean the same down to story details involving birds being sent out after specific days.
Of the three religious books I mentioned, the Torah is the original purveyor of the Noah version of the story. The Torah was written somewhere between 600 and 400 BC. The Gilgamesh poem dates back to around 2100 BC, and the version we use now was written between 1300 and 1000 BC. The story of Utnapishtim predates the Noah version by hundreds if not thousands of years. It also tells us that the story would have taken place in and around ancient Babylon. By virtue of its age alone, the Utnapishtim version is the one we'll work from.
One of the problems with the Utnapishtim flood myth is that it’s full of hyperbole. I think we can strip back some of that and get to the root of the story. Now the thing to remember about Babylon is that it had two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. If you remember sixth grade history class, they flooded annually. It’s not completely out there to believe that the flood was particularly vicious one year and destroyed an entire village or city. Considering the time period and the relative size of the human population back then, a flood that destroyed your village and kin would have felt like it a deluge that covered the entire world.
Now for the big one, the mother of all problems with this story: the animals on the boat. If we believe River Tam then this is nothing more than early quantum state phenomenon.
I am going to take a simpler approach, though. We’ve all played telephone and we all know how stories get exaggerated over time. What if instead of two of every animal, Utnapishtim took two of every domesticated animal? It’s not completely irrational to believe that he crammed his wife, kids, two ancient sheep and two ancient fowls on a boat for a few days. I have no academia to back this up, but I don’t think it’s an illogical leap.
So when you get down to it, you have the story of a man who survived a Babylonian flood on a boat with his family and some livestock. It’s an incredible story, not an impossible one. It even leaves a little room for heavenly intervention if you’re so inclined. Of course all things considered, it seems to support the existence of a Babylonian pantheon more than anything else. But the Ten Commandments and the term Elohim do suggest the Abrahamic God is not alone…you know what, we’ll leave that for another day.