The Bible Says What

Episode 1: Noah's Ark

20-minute listen

Is the biblical account of Noah's ark fact, myth, or legend? Join Jessica Bodiford and Brother Henri Ward as they unpack this story.

Transcript

Welcome to Atlanta Fringe Audio 2022. Brought to you by Atlanta Fringe Festival. To learn more about Fringe Audio and the festival, visit atlantafringe.org. This skate is for general audiences. It may contain mild language, but has no overt violence or sexual content.

Jessica (narration): I'm Jessica Bodiford. I've been a Christian pretty much my entire life. And I still read the Bible and ask myself, "The Bible says what?" One story that tripped me up on a regular basis when I was a kid was Noah's Ark.

(Song: Who Built the Ark by Raffi)

I can remember Sunday school teachers telling me that Noah was called by God to build a huge ark. God was going to flood the entire world because humans were sinning beyond repair. Noah, his family, and two of every animal on earth would be safe in the ark. Then the flood happened and everyone and everything not on the boat don't make it. When God marked Noah and his family safe after the flood, God created the first rainbow, God's promise that a flood would never destroy all living things again.

And I almost believed it until I started thinking about the logistics of a kangaroo. How did it get from Australia to the ark? It couldn't have hopped all the way there. And the way the kangaroo's body is set up, I think it would have drowned if it tried to swim. And there were other kids who had even more pressing questions like, "Where was the drinking water stored on the ark?" "Did the saltwater and freshwater fish live in the same water during the flood?" "How did the animals get back to their countries of origin?" "What happened to all the poop on the boat?" Ooh, that's a good question.

As expected, my childhood Sunday school teachers were not ready. Their answer was basically, "God can do all things!" But I just couldn't suspend my disbelief. Because seriously, how did the kangaroos get to the ark and what did happen to all that poop?

Br. Henri: I love it.

Jessica: That's Brother Henri Ward.

Jessica (interview): Is your title Brother Henri Ward or do people just call you brother?

Br. Henri: It is.

Jessica: Okay...because we're in the deep south, I don't know (laughter)

Jessica: Brother Henri is an Exhorter in the African Methodist Episcopal or AME Zion Church. Normally Exhorter is a title given to people on their way to becoming ordained pastors, but that was not Brother Henri's plan.

Br. Henri: I went to my pastor at the time. And I told my pastor, "I do not believe God has called me to preach, but I do believe that God has called me to teach."

Jessica: Since there is no ministerial title in the AME Zion Church for teachers, a pastor recommended that Brother Henri become an Exhorter.

Br. Henri: So what he said was to give you basically some structure inside of the AME Zion Church, something that would be recognized regardless where you are, I would recommend that you become an Exhorter. Take in mind, you're only supposed to stay at an Exhorter for a year or two max. And I think I'm working on year 21, 22. (laughter)

Jessica: For his undergraduate studies Brother Henri went to Xavier, not the one in New Orleans, but the Jesuit school in Cincinnati. There, he learned how to apply critical thinking to the Bible. He is currently a Sunday school teacher at Shaw Temple AME Zion Church in Atlanta. In today's show, Brother Henri unpacks, the biblical story, the legend, the myth of Noah's Ark.

Jessica: What did you feel about the ark story as a child?

Br. Henri: I think like everybody else, I kind of took it at face value. As I grew older, I started having some of these more critical analysis type of questions. But when you are in church and you're going to Sunday school and they teach you about Noah's Ark and the flood, it's like, okay, God's doing some wonderful things. (laughter)

I think there's a difference between what you believe when you're taught something at five or six years old versus what you now tend to believe when you begin asking questions as a teenager, as a preteen, and as an adult. Many times, we're taught to look at the Bible as a history book. The Bible actually has many forms of literature in it. The Bible has myth. The Bible has legend. The Bible has allegory. The Bible has poetry and it also has history. But even in the history component, it's really what I would call a pseudo history because it's history told from the perspective of the writer. The writer is bringing all of his biases to the table in the writing and all of his cultural and ethnic viewpoints. And so, what theologians like to say is the Bible is inspired. Not inerrant. And what that means is that the Bible is the inspired word of God, simply because even through all of the biases, even through all of the issues, God still speaks versus taking it at complete face value and taking it literally. It's when you begin taking things literally that's when you begin getting into trouble. Like "Where did all the poop go?"

Jessica: Exactly, exactly. So, where did the flood story come from? Is it a myth? Is it a pseudo history? What is it?

Br. Henri: What you have going on in the Noah story is actually two separate stories written at two separate times by two separate people. And those stories were actually combined together by an editor and theologians called that editor the redactor. The redactor takes, what's called the J version of the Noah story. And it's called J because it is from the time in which the Israelites were in the Kingdom of Judah. And then he takes the P version, which is the priestly version, which was written much later. And these were actually two very different stories of the Noah account.

When Israel comes back out of Babylonian captivity, they come back to Jerusalem. And what you have is two different canons, a canon being let's call it an Old Testament Bible. One version being used in the Northern Kingdom of Israel and another being used in the Southern Kingdom of Judah. What the editor does is he takes these two different versions of the story and he puts them together into one story. And that's the story that we read right now called the Noah story in our Bible. Now to your question in terms of, is it myth? Is it legend? Yes and yes.

I'll start with the legend part first. So, Israel, when they're taken into Babylonian captivity, they learn of many different stories from different cultures. One being the Babylonian story called the Epic of Gilgamesh. Now about 3000 BC, there was a flood, but it wasn't a global flood. It was a major flood of the Tigris River, which flows through at that time, what was called Babylon. The people who were inhabitants of that land viewed it as a global flood. Since that was the only part of the world they knew, they figured it must've been happening all over the world. As Israel is in captivity in Babylon, they hear of these stories. They learn of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Jessica: The Epic of Gilgamesh is an ancient poem that predates the Noah's Ark adventure. This poem contains a tale that is similar to the flood story in the Bible. Mike from Crash Course does a great job of telling the Gilgamesh flood myth. So, I'm just going to let him do it.

Mike: At the beginning of this particular story, the hero Utnapishtim is talking to Gilgamesh about living in the city of Shurupakk on the banks of the Euphrates. He explains that a group of gods Anu, Enlil, Ninurta, Ennugi and Ea put their divine heads together and decided to flood the place. Luckily for Utnapishtim, Ea has second thoughts and sneaks over to spill the beans. Ea secretly tells Utnapishtim what's going down and orders him to leave his home, all his possessions, and to build a boat which will carry the seed of all living things.

Utnapishtim's boat is massive, an acre in circumference with six enormous decks. Utnapishtim and his family loaded up with everything there was. All the silver, golden seeds of every living thing, his kith and his kin, and the wild beasts, and all kinds of crafts. When the hour of destruction arrives, the gods send down a terrifying storm. The storm rages for seven days before eventually blowing itself out. And Utnapishtim, sends out birds to search for dry land. First a dove comes back because there was no place to perch. Then the swallow returns. Finally, he sends out a raven and when it doesn't return, he knows dry land is out there somewhere.

Br. Henri: This sounds familiar right? What the Israelites did was they took the Epic of Gilgamesh and basically customized it for a Hebrew culture. So Utnapishtim of Gilgamesh now becomes Noah of the Hebrew scriptures. The gods in Gilgamesh now become the God of the Hebrew scriptures. And that's how we get the legend becoming mythology.

Jessica: Okay. That is definitely a point of view. And the reason why I say it's a point of view because we know that there are people, flood geologists, scientists who are looking for Noah's Ark currently. And they say it's in Turkey somewhere in the mountains. They are not the majority. They are a small, but very, very convinced group of people. Why are they so persistent?

Br. Henri: I think their persistence comes from the fact of trying to prove that which is unprovable. Noah is a person in the Bible who is meant to tell a story about God's relationship with humanity. It was never created for a scientific proof that the world was flooded and the two by twos. The writers of Genesis, they were not trying to give a scientific anthropological explanation for the beginning of humanity. What they were trying to show is God's relationship with humanity. They had no construct nor concept of the science behind evolution, nor do they care about that. As the years and centuries and millenniums have passed, the church has tried to take theology and make it anthropology. It's tried to take that which was meant to teach about humanity's relationship with God and try to make that into some scientific proof that it was never meant to be.

Jessica: When did the church start teaching Noah's Ark as a historical fact?

Br. Henri: So during the time of Jesus, the Noah story was interpreted as Jewish history and that just gets passed down as a part of Christianity as well.

Jessica: Considering that we've inherited this way of interpreting the Bible and the church is on track, like this is historical fact. That's what I learned as a kid. Do not, do not argue with the Sunday school teacher. God could do all things!

Br. Henri: Yes! (laughter)

Jessica: What is lost if we start to teach that the story is more of a legend or myth, what is loss? Why is the church hesitant to do that?

Br. Henri: Any person who has gone through first year seminary knows all of the stuff that we just talked about. Because when people enter seminary, many times they believe that all they're going to do is get a deeper version of what they learned in Sunday school. What they find out is that there's a difference between the liturgy that you learn in Sunday school and the critical analysis at a graduate school level. At the graduate school level, what you're actually doing is looking at the text and the literature from a critical perspective, not from a belief perspective. When you come to a church, the pastor has to make a decision. Now, the pastor is on payroll (laughter). The pastor has to decide what battle he's going to fight.

Jessica: This is hard for me because I feel like especially now, even if you just go to high school literature, the critical analysis we used for that, when we read To Kill a Mockingbird or Black Boy or whatever.

Br. Henri: Right.

Jessica: If we just use those basic skills when reading the Bible, it would be a much different experience. It's almost like the pastors don't trust the congregation. And it's like, test it, test it on us. We might be able to handle it.

Br. Henri: Right. There are other people in the congregation, many of whom provide great deals of funds to the church, who like the traditional, like the literal interpretation. And so the pastor has to deal with, "Don't you go messing with my Jesus!"

Jessica: Or my Noah or my Adam. Any of them.

Br. Henri: Yeah, pick a person.

Jessica: Right.

Br. Henri: One of the reasons that church congregations are dwindling is because you have that 40 and younger population who are saying, "We want something more. We want something meatier than just what you're giving us. The emotional piece, that's great, but we want something more." What actually surprised me when I was teaching the Old Testament from a critical analysis perspective (and we dealt with all of the things that we're talking about today), and I had many older people in the class and they were very responsive.

Jessica: So, this is how I was introduced to you was through Sunday school class at Shaw Temple AME Zion. And one of the things I remember about your Sunday school classes that you would always ask, "So what?" So what? So that's the question I pose to you when it comes to Noah's Ark.

Br. Henri: I think the point of the Noah story is to teach us about disobedience and obedience to God and what we should be doing in terms of our own relationship with God. In the Noah flood story, because God sees so much disobedience in the world, God feels the world has gone so far astray that God has to basically destroy it and recreate it. The essence of the story is, again, making sure that we continue to have a strong relationship with our creator, a strong relationship with our God. The Noah story is a literary tool.

Jessica: When I was a kid, I loved cautionary tales and stories that had morals and proverbs. The Anansi spider stories and Aesop's fables were my jam. They have definitely influenced the way I write today. So, the possibility of ancient storytellers weaving the Noah's Ark tale while being influenced by even earlier versions of Mesopotamian flood stories just makes sense to me. And I no longer worry about how the kangaroos got to the boat or where the poop was stored on the boat. Instead, I focus on the moral of the story.

Jessica: For me personally, when I read Noah's Ark, it's God told you to do something. Are you going to do it even though everybody else is doing something else? And that is the now what for me.

Br. Henri: I think that's a great way of not only interpreting the story, but a great way of internalizing it. For your audience, I would ask the same question. Now that you have this different understanding of the Bible from a critical analysis perspective, So what? And now what?

Jessica: I hope you enjoyed the show. I made this scrappy Google site for The Bible Says What? podcast. You can find it at...okay, get ready. It's kind of long, sites.google.com/view/Bible-says-what. The site has this episode’s transcripts with links and Brother Henri’s recommended readings for furthering your personal studies. This show is meant to be a starting point, but I encourage you to read the Bible and explore all its epic stories for yourself. Because in the words of in LeVar Burton, from his iconic show Reading Rainbow, "You don't have to take my word for it." Y'all like how I ended this episode with a rainbow reference, just like the Noah's Ark story. It's a literary moment.

This episode of The Bible Says What? was hosted and produced by me. Jessica Bodiford. Today's guest was Brother Henri Ward. This episode featured the music Who Built the Ark by Raffi and Reading Rainbow's theme song. Audio was from the Crash Course YouTube Channel. And sound effects from mixkit.co, pixabay.com, and freesound.org.

Outro: We would like to thank our Atlanta Fringe Audio sponsor, Could Be Pretty Cool, a production company whose mission is to inspire community building through the arts. You can binge on all of our audio shows at atlantafringe.org/fringe-audio or wherever you enjoy podcasts.

The Bible Says What

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