Noah's Flood: The Genesis Story in Western Thought by Norman Cohn

Abstract

Noah's Flood: The Genesis Story in Western Thought. By Norman Cohn. (New Haven:Yale University Press. 1996. Pp. xiv, 154. $25.00.) Norman Cohn, Astor-Wolfson Professor Emeritus at the University of Sussex, has written an excellent, but all too brief, survey of the Flood Story and the history of its interpretation. An added bonus are fifty-five black and white illustrations and twenty lavish colorplates.This book will serve, I hope, as a wholesome warning that while fundamentalism, on the one extreme of interpretation, has failed in its approach to the Flood Story, modern psychoanalytic eisegesis, at the opposite extreme, fares no better. After outlining the flood stories in Mesopotamian literature, none of which have serious moral overtones, Cohn explains the distinctive features of the Genesis story. He then reviews early Christian allegorical and typological interpretations.The Flood became, for some, a figure of fire that would follow at the end of time, with Noah as a symbol of faithful Christians who lived with the Last Judgment always in mind. The survival of Noah was also viewed as a type of Christ's resurrection. For Justin Martyr the wood of the Ark prefigured the cross on which Jesus saved mankind. In Augustine's thought the Ark symbolized the Church, the only means of salvation for believers. Even Jerome, the premier biblical scholar of the age, shared similar ideas. Much more hypothetical, as one would expect, were the rabbinic interpretations that supplied numerous details lacking in the original story. Since Genesis makes no mention of specific sins, the rabbis made up a few: Men mated with other men's wives and even with their own daughters as well as with animals; animals also engaged in unnatural mating with other species. Equally fantastic were the descriptions of the shape and plan of the Ark. Cohn's history demonstrates the egregious error of supporting scientific theories by appealing to Genesis. From a study of the biblical chronologies, James Ussher (1581-1656), Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, concluded that God created heaven and earth on Sunday evening, October 23, 4004 B.C., and that the Flood began on Sunday, December 7, 2349 B.C., and the Ark landed on Mount Ararat on May 6 the following year.These dates were taken at face value by most scientists between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Cohn cites examples of scientists who quoted texts from Genesis to corroborate their hypotheses regarding the formation of fossils, mountains, seas, and land masses.These authors harmonized geological and paleontological data gleaned from scientific observation with the biblical time frame regarding the age of the earth and cosmos.A Swiss geologist,Jean-Andre de Luc (1727-1817), even concluded that Genesis describes precisely what geology has provedonly divine revelation can account for that. The six days of Genesis 1 are epochs of indeterminate length; the geological strata show the characteristics of these epochs. …