A Hellenistic Noah

The overall meaning of the story of Noah in the book of Genesis is clear. It is that of a wrathful God determined to punish sinful humankind, cleanse a corrupted world by flood, and make a fresh start through Noah, the only righteous man on earth. ‘I have determined,’ God said to Noah, ‘to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence because of them; now I am going to destroy them along with the earth’ (Genesis 6.13). Only Noah, his sons, and their wives, along with the creatures that he took into the ark, were to survive. If it were only that simple.

There are many meanings to the story of Noah, only to be found within the history of the attempts to interpret it. The history of the story of Noah since the beginning of the common era, as noted earlier, has been the history of the many attempts to create a coherent narrative from the Biblical story by adding to or subtracting from it, by ironing out its contradictions and incoherencies, and by making its story historically credible, scientifically verifiable, culturally relevant, and theologically acceptable. Learning, piety, and imagination have all been brought to the Biblical text to inform or persuade its readers from an array of religions, societies, and cultures over the past twenty centuries of its truth, its value, and its possible relevance to their lives.

Take the Jewish historian Josephus. He read the story of Noah in accord with the overall theme of his The Antiquities of the Jews in the decade after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 ce. According to Josephus, ‘men who conform to the will of God, and do not venture to transgress laws that have been excellently laid down, prosper in all things beyond belief, and for their reward are offered by God felicity; whereas, in proportion as they depart from the strict observance of these laws, things (else) practicable become impracticable, and whatever imaginary good thing they strive to do ends in irretrievable disasters’.Footnote ¹ Josephus was in no doubt that God punished those who did not obey his laws – both the natural laws at the time of creation and the revealed laws later delivered to Moses. According to Josephus, for seven generations after Adam, people remained faithful to God and took virtue for their guide. But eventually, they abandoned the customs of their fathers for a life of depravity: ‘They no longer rendered to God His due honours, nor took account of justice towards men, but displayed by their actions a zeal for vice twofold greater than they had formerly shown for virtue, and thereby drew upon themselves the enmity of God.’Footnote ² In addition, the sons of the angels and the women ‘were overbearing [ὑβριστὰς] and disdainful of every virtue’.Footnote ³ Those readers familiar with Greek tragedy would not have missed Josephus’ use of the word ‘hubris’ [ὑβρις]. For the overbearing ways of the progeny of the angels were soon to be brought down by a divine nemesis.Footnote ⁴

Josephus was clearly worried that God appeared to have lost control of his creation. Thus, he has Adam foreshadow the inevitability of the flood. This occurs in the context of an addition to the Genesis story by Josephus about Adam’s third son after Cain and Abel, Seth. His descendants, we are informed, discovered the science of the heavenly bodies and their orderly array. Knowing of Adam’s prediction that there would be a destruction of the universe, at one time by fire and at another by flood, they erected two pillars, one of brick and the other of stone, inscribing their discoveries on both. Should the pillar of brick disappear in the deluge, ‘that of stone would remain to teach men what was graven thereon … It exists to this day in the land of Seiris.’Footnote ⁵ Josephus was also concerned that God’s virtue should appear questionable for his not giving due warning to the wicked of their impending doom. So, Josephus has Noah urging the wicked to come to repentance. As for Noah’s leaving them to it, Josephus invents the idea that Noah, with his family, left the country for fear that he would be murdered.Footnote ⁶

Josephus’ intention in his The Antiquities of the Jews was, above all, a teacherly one. As Steve Mason notes, his aim was ‘to provide a handbook of Judean law, history and culture for a Gentile audience in Rome that is keenly interested in Jewish matters’.Footnote ⁷ To wade through sixty thousand lines in twenty volumes, you’d want to be. Be that as it may, Josephus was committed to demonstrating to his readers that the story of Noah and the flood was an historical one. Thus, for example, he was particularly exercised to justify the chronology of the book of Genesis and that of the flood. In particular, he addressed the probable scepticism of his audience on the longevity of the Biblical heroes. That they lived so long, he suggested, was because God loved them, their vegetarian diet was conducive to it, and they needed that long for their scientific work in astronomy and geometry. Moreover, he declared, ‘my words [about patriarchal longevity] are attested by all historians of antiquity’.Footnote ⁸

As the above passage suggests, the key for Josephus in justifying the historicity of the book of Genesis was aligning it with the accepted histories of the Hellenistic world. Thus, for example, of the deluge, he declared,

In the book of Genesis, having smelled Noah’s burnt offerings on the altar, a gratified God made a covenant with Noah never again to destroy every living creature. But Josephus is writing after the fall of Jerusalem, the destruction of the temple, and the slaughter of those sheltering within by the Romans. The sacrificial rituals of the Jewish religion focused on the temple in Jerusalem had been, of necessity, since the fall of Jerusalem, replaced by the prayers of a dispersed Jewish population. Thus, Josephus underplayed Noah’s sacrifice of a clean animal and a clean bird and replaced it with a prayer. And it was in answer to Noah’s prayer, and not his sacrifice, that God agreed never to destroy the earth by flood:

Within the book of Genesis, there are two accounts of the populating of the world after the flood. In the first of these, the whole earth is populated by the sons of Noah – Shem, Ham, and Japheth (Genesis 9.18-19, 10.32). In the second, the whole earth is populated as a punishment from God for human arrogance in attempting to build a tower in Babel (Babylon) that would reach to the heavens. So, Josephus invented a story to harmonise these two accounts. According to Josephus, on account of the growing population on the plain of Senaar (Shinar) to which the sons of Noah had descended from the ark, God told them to send out colonies to ensure peace, cultivate the earth, and enjoy its fruits. They refused to obey. They were incited to disobedience by Nebrodes (Nimrod), a grandson of Noah. Although there is no suggestion to this effect in Genesis, Josephus has Nebrodes as the instigator of the idea to build a tower ‘to have his revenge on God if he wished to inundate the earth again; for he would build a tower higher than the water could reach and avenge the destruction of their forefathers’.Footnote ¹¹ To forestall their attempt, God created discord among them by making them speak different languages so that they could not understand each other. He then dispersed them all throughout the whole world. The dispersion occurred after Babel, but readers of Josephus knew the precise connections he was making between the descendants of Noah and the nations of the world. This was, in short, that Noah was the father of all the Gentiles.

Deucalion, we recall, was lauded by Plato for having survived a great flood, along with his wife Pyrrha. Deucalion was mentioned by the Jewish Biblical exegete Philo (c.10 bce–50 ce), perhaps for the first time, as the Greek Noah. Interestingly, this is the only occasion where Philo identified a Biblical character with a non-Biblical one.Footnote ¹² Now, Philo was writing for a Greek-educated Jewish readership, so he was, no doubt, assuring his audience of the factual nature of events in the Bible. That said, unlike Josephus, his interests were philosophical rather than historical.

The Septuagint, the Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures, had been translated in Alexandria, Philo’s hometown, in the first half of the third century bce. It was Philo’s particular aim to interpret the Septuagint by reference to the philosophies of Platonism and Stoicism. In order to do so, he treated the text literally as well as allegorically on the assumption that, whatever its literal meaning might be, it also contained a hidden meaning. The text had, as it were, both body and soul. In the broadest terms, according to Philo, the hidden meaning of the historical parts of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) was a ‘tale of the human soul and its vicissitudes and ascent’.Footnote ¹³ On the one hand, following the Stoics, it was a portrayal of the ethical progress of the individual through the cultivation of the virtues. On the other, following the Platonists, it was a progress towards the vision or contemplation of God. This distinction of the literal from the allegorical (or, in Philo’s case more generally, the philosophical) was later to become a bedrock of Christian Biblical interpretation. And it was to flow through the history of Christian reading of the Bible until the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century and beyond.

On Philo’s allegorical understanding, Biblical characters became exempla of the ethical life, indicative of the ‘dispositions of the soul’.Footnote ¹⁴ Thus, Philo’s first trio of Biblical heroes – Enosh, Enoch, and Noah – represented hope, repentance and improvement, and justice and restfulness, respectively. ‘Just’ and ‘rest’ were particularly apt titles for Noah. For Philo, Noah was a Stoic sage, more excellent than Enosh and Enoch: ‘“Just” was obviously so, for nothing was better than justice, the chief among the virtues … But “rest” was appropriate also, since its opposite, unnatural movement, proved to be the cause of turmoil and confusion and factions and wars.’Footnote ¹⁵ Noah, his soul at rest, had overcome the passions. He was not only just or righteous (δίκαιος) but perfect (τέλειος) in God’s eyes. Noah became perfect, we read, ‘thereby shewing that he acquired not one virtue but all, and having acquired them continued to exercise each as opportunities allowed’.Footnote ¹⁶ Moreover, unlike other Biblical characters, Noah had no list of forebears in the male and female line. Only his virtues were listed: ‘these are the descendants of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation’ (Genesis 6.9). This was ‘little less,’ wrote Philo, ‘than a direct assertion that a sage has no house or kinsfolk or country save virtues and virtuous actions’.Footnote ¹⁷

Perfect Noah might have been. But his perfection was only relative to his generation. There were other sages – Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, for example – whose virtue was ‘by nature’. Thus, in the virtue race, considering the times in which he lived, Noah came in only second. Still, the times considered, this was no mean feat: ‘That time bore its harvest of iniquities, and every country and nation and city and household and every private individual was filled with evil practices; one and all, as though in a race, engaged in rivalry pre-willed and premeditated for the first places in sinfulness.’Footnote ¹⁸

Noah’s virtue and his following of right reason were also demonstrated by his having three sons, unlike other men of his generation. Their wickedness was so great that their only children were daughters: ‘For since just Noah who follows the right, the perfect and truly masculine reason, begets males, the injustice of the multitude appears as the parent of females only.’Footnote ¹⁹ It made the daughters easy prey for the evil angels. Allegorically, they were wicked men who rejected reason for the passions: ‘But when the light of the understanding is dimmed and clouded, they who are of the fellowship of darkness win the day, and mating with the nerveless and emasculated passions, which he [Moses] has called the daughters of men, beget offspring for themselves and not for God. For the offspring of God’s parentage are the perfect virtues, but the family of evil are the vices, whose note is discord.’Footnote ²⁰ Literally, the family of evil were the giants. Allegorically, they were earth-born men: ‘The earth-born are those who take the pleasures of the body for their quarry, who make it their practice to indulge in them and enjoy them and provide the means by which each of them may be promoted.’Footnote ²¹

On Philo’s Platonic presuppositions, God was unchangeable and above all passions. So, Philo struggled to explain how God could be angry that he had made men. His most persuasive answer was that the wickedness of men was so great that, had God been capable of anger (which he wasn’t), he would have been provoked and incited to it by men. Philo was worried too by God’s having destroyed all the animals, since, lacking freedom of choice, they could not have sinned. He had an answer, if not a particularly persuasive one. In the first place, he argued, just as a king is killed in battle, his military forces are also destroyed, so too, when the human race is killed like a king, other beasts should be destroyed along with it. Second, when the head is cut off, the rest of the body dies, so too when man who is like a ruling head is destroyed, the rest of the living things should perish with him. Third, since the beasts were made to service the needs of men, it was right that, when men were destroyed, the animals were too. Finally, allegorically speaking, when the soul (man) is deluged by such passions that it is metaphorically dead, it is right that the earthly parts of the body (the animals) die with it.Footnote ²²

Philo also wanted to explain why, if Noah was the only righteous man, his household were allowed to embark on the ark with him. It was a matter of virtue acquired from Noah. Simply put, just as many soldiers are saved by a good commander, so the righteous man ‘acquires virtue not only for himself but also for his household’.Footnote ²³ Allegorically, as fares the mind, so fares the body. That said, Philo made no mention of Noah’s wife. Women in general, like the ‘daughters of men’, did not rate highly on his list of the virtuous. No Essene Jewish sectary takes a wife, he declared, ‘because a wife is a selfish creature, excessively jealous and an adept at beguiling the morals of her husband and seducing him by her continued impostures’.Footnote ²⁴ And, he went on to say, their fawning talk is like that of an actress on a stage. They ensnare the sight and hearing and cajole the sovereign mind, sufficiently so for the man to pass from freedom to slavery.

The animals too embarked with Noah, two of every kind according to Philo’s Life of Moses.Footnote ²⁵ This was to preserve seed in expectation of better times to come. The ark was, as a result, ‘a miniature of earth in its entirety, comprising the races of living creatures, of which the world had carried before innumerable specimens, and perhaps would carry them again’.Footnote ²⁶

Unlike Josephus, who has Noah urging the wicked to come to repentance, Philo has Noah and his household entering the ark without any warning of impending doom to the wicked. However, noting that the book of Genesis has a seven-day gap between their entry and the beginning of the rain (Genesis 7.10), Philo reads this time period as one of warning: ‘The benevolent Saviour grants repentance of sins in order that when they see the ark over against them … they may have faith in the announcing of the flood; (and that) fearing destruction, they may first of all turn back (from sin), breaking down and destroying all impiety and evil.’Footnote ²⁷ The seven days was a reminder that, as the earth was created in seven days, it was now to be destroyed at the end of seven days. God decided, we read, ‘to fix a time for their destruction equal to that which He had determined for the creation of nature and the first production of living beings’.Footnote ²⁸

The flood represented the passions and desires to which body and soul are prone: ‘[T]his is truly a great flood when the streams of the mind are opened by folly, madness, insatiable desire, wrongdoing, senselessness, recklessness and impiety; and when the fountains of the body are opened by sensual pleasure, desire drunkenness, gourmandism and licentiousness with kin and sisters and by incurable vices.’Footnote ²⁹ Thus, the ark into which Noah and the household entered was a symbol of the body. Philo’s allegory of the ark is both exhaustive and exhausting. No detail about the literal ark escaped his allegorising imagination.Footnote ³⁰ Thus, for example, the ark was constructed of quadrangular beams, and most parts of the body are like that. Like the ark tarred with bitumen inside and out, the body was united inside and out. The dimensions of the ark were proportionate to those of the human body. The window in the side of the ark symbolised the anus. The three decks in the ark represented the different levels of bodily digestion. Thus, in the skilled constructing of the ark, Noah and his household ‘learned more clearly the principle and proportions of the human body. For nothing so enslaved man as the bodily elements of his being, and those things through which passions [or vices] come, and especially wicked passions of pleasure and appetites.’Footnote ³¹

Ever the righteous one, as Noah had entered the ark at the command of God, so he only left it on the divine command. According to the Septuagint, Noah entered the ark with his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives (Genesis 7.7) but left it with his wife and then his sons, and his sons’ wives (Genesis 8.18). From this change of word order Philo concluded that there was no sex on the ark. Thus, the Biblical text was indicating ‘that those who went in should abstain from intercourse with their wives and that when they went out, they should sow seed in accordance with nature’.Footnote ³² The time after the flood was to be a new start for humanity. And, we can presume, Philo did not wish to have any pregnancies before the new creation to come. Noah and his household were to become ‘leaders of the regeneration, inaugurators of a second cycle, spared as embers to rekindle mankind, that highest form of life, which has received dominion over everything whatsoever upon earth, born to be the likeness of God’s power and image of His nature, the visible of the Invisible, the created of the Eternal’.Footnote ³³ Noah was now, as far as possible, similar ‘to the first earthborn man’.Footnote ³⁴ He was almost perfect, although not quite as much so as his predecessor, Adam, or his successors, Abraham and Moses.

Josephus did not deal with the issue of Noah’s drunkenness. For Josephus it mattered little, since Noah was not perfect anyway. Bur for Philo, Noah was perfect (or close to it), so his drunkenness was a problem. Following Genesis 9.21 literally, Philo informs us that Noah did not drink all of the wine but only a portion of it, as wise men do: ‘For there is a twofold and double way of becoming drunken: one is to drink wine to excess. which is a sin peculiar to the vicious and evil man; the other is to partake of wine, which always happens to the wise man.’Footnote ³⁵ Elsewhere, Philo seemed willing to give Noah more leeway when dealing at some length with the question, ‘Will the wise man get drunk?’ Wise readers of this work, fond of a glass or two (or so), will perhaps be comforted by his answer: ‘[F]or the wise man becomes a more genial person after indulging in wine than when he is sober, and accordingly we should not be wrong in asserting on this ground as well as on those others that he will get drunk.’Footnote ³⁶

Noah’s nakedness, while drunk, was another problem for Philo. To excuse it, he read Genesis 9.21 literally. Noah’s nakedness was not for all the world to see, having occurred inside his house. But Philo also read it allegorically. Noah’s nakedness when drunk meant complete insensibility, foolish talking and raving, insatiable greediness, and cheerfulness and gladness. It was bereft of virtue. But at least Noah did not spread his sin, containing it within himself. All things considered, the soberness of soul and body was to be much preferred: ‘In fact, every evil which has drunkenness for its author has its counterpart in some good which is produced by soberness.’Footnote ³⁷

The Genesis text tells us that Ham, having seen Noah’s nakedness, told his two brothers outside (Genesis 9.22). According to Philo, he not only reported his father’s naked drunkenness to his brothers and to all those standing around outside, but he did so derisively and jokingly. Thus did Philo begin the long tradition of Ham’s mocking Noah. But why was it that Ham’s son Canaan was cursed even though he had done nothing wrong (Genesis 9.25)? Allegorically, Philo suggested, ‘Ham’ is the name for vice in principle, but ‘Canaan’ is the name for vice in practice. There is nothing in Genesis to suggest any of this. So, Philo improvised. In cursing Canaan, Philo declared, ‘virtually he does curse his son Ham …, since when Ham has been moved to sin, he himself becomes Canaan, for it is a single subject, wickedness, which is presented in two different aspects, rest and motion’.Footnote ³⁸ Similarly, Philo wrote, ‘both father and son practised the same wickedness, both being mingled without distinction, as if using one body and one soul’.Footnote ³⁹ More prosaically, Philo suggested that Canaan was to blame for having spread the story around while Shem and Japheth kept it quiet.Footnote ⁴⁰

Philo was writing for his fellow Jews in Alexandria. But he was hopeful that, eventually, all would convert to follow the Mosaic law. Philo was aware that his religious tradition was not faring well. But he remained hopeful for the future. If a fresh start could be made, he wrote, how great a change for the better would be seen: ‘I believe that each nation would abandon its peculiar ways, and, throwing overboard their ancestral customs, turn to honouring our laws alone.’Footnote ⁴¹ This was, as we know, a forlorn hope.

The Gnostic Noah

Josephus and Philo were both committed to the truth of the Biblical texts, whether as literal history in the case of Josephus or allegorical philosophy in that of Philo. But there was another group of interpreters in the second to fourth centuries ce, whom we generally gather under the broad title of ‘Gnostics’, for whom the story of Noah and the flood was a decisive one. Originating within both Jewish and Christian late first-century sects, the Gnostics demonstrate, as Sergey Minov neatly puts it, ‘the considerable exegetical efforts exerted by those ancient readers who tried to find a way out of the conundrum constituted by their alienation from the Biblical tradition and, at the same time, their inability or unwillingness to reject it’.Footnote ⁴²

The solution of the Gnostic writers to this conundrum was to reverse the meaning of the story of Noah and the flood, thus turning a Biblical story into a Gnostic one. They did so as a consequence and by means of their commitment to three key foundational tenets within the Gnostic traditions. The first of these was their belief that, as enlightened persons of ‘knowledge’ (‘gnosis’), they had access to the complete truth about God, the world, and humankind. Second, they viewed the early history of humankind as that of a struggle between the powers of light – the sphere of the fully transcendent God – and the powers of darkness – the domain of the evil, arrogant, and envious creator God (the Platonic demiurge) of the Biblical story. Third, they held that the existence of those who were not Gnostics was the result of the influence of the evil powers upon their forebears, while they themselves were nothing less than the ‘seed’, ‘race’, or ‘generation’ of the highest God and, as a consequence, essentially divine.

Without putting too fine a point on it, we can picture the ‘spiritual’ universe of the Gnostics in the following way. There is an ultimate, transcendent deity, ‘the invisible spirit’, out of whom everything, visible and invisible, has emanated. The first emanation of God is a divine Mother whose intelligence extends into a multitude of spiritual entities called aeons, rather like the angels in Judaism and Christianity. These culminate in the lowest aeon – the female figure of wisdom, Sophia. She is considered to have fallen away from the divine, thus giving rise to the material world via the malevolent creator God named Ialdabaoth (or Sakla[s] or Samael). He is the demiurge and boss of the archons or spiritual rulers of the world. The archons, rather like the Devil and his demons within the Christian tradition, are ultimately responsible for the evil thoughts and actions of humankind. The Gnostics considered the archons to be the rulers of this present darkness, the spiritual forces of evil in the highest places against whom Saint Paul railed (Ephesians 6.12).

On the basis of these tenets, and this worldview, the story of Noah and the flood in Gnosticism can be found in five key sources. These are: two texts against the Gnostics written by Christian theologians – Against Heresies by Irenaeus (c.130–c.202 ce) and the Panarion by Epiphanius (c.310–403 ce); and three Gnostic texts from among the Nag Hammadi texts discovered in Egypt in 1945 – The Apocryphon (Secret Book) of John, The Apocalypse (Revelation) of Adam, and The Reality of the Rulers (The Hypostasis of the Archons). The Gnostics on Noah is complicated, not least for three reasons: first, because Gnosticism is a broad and somewhat artificial category, under the umbrella of which an array of texts shelter; second, because the texts themselves are complex and occasionally obtuse; and third, because Noah is portrayed as both hero and villain, and on occasion somewhere in between, within them. So, let’s begin with Irenaeus and Epiphanius, transition to the three Gnostic texts above, and then circle back to Epiphanius on the Gnostic ‘Borborites’.

In his work Against Heresies, the Christian bishop Irenaeus informs us of the Gnostic ‘Ophites’ (or ‘Serpentites’). According to them, the flood was caused by the demiurge, the evil creator God, Ialdabaoth. His reason for bringing on the flood was humanity’s failure appropriately to worship him. Thus, Ialdabaoth ‘sent forth a deluge upon them, that he might at once destroy them all’.Footnote ⁴³ The demiurge was, however, opposed by Sophia (the feminine figure of Wisdom) who, as the spirit of the transcendent God, brought light into the creation and was responsible for the element of light that was in humankind. Ialdabaoth was committed to destroying all humankind. But it was Sophia who saved Noah and his household: ‘Noah and his family were saved in the ark,’ we read, ‘by means of the besprinkling of that light which proceeded from her, and through it the world was again filled with mankind.’Footnote ⁴⁴ The earth was covered in darkness, but Noah and his household, like his Gnostic descendants, were saved by light.

The so-called Sethian branch of Gnosticism placed exceptional importance on its followers being, materially or spiritually, the descendants of Seth.Footnote ⁴⁵ As such, they were a special segment of humanity called variously ‘the great generation’, ‘the living and immoveable race’, ‘the children of Seth’, ‘the seed of Seth’, and so on. Now, Seth, we recall, was Adam’s third son after Cain and Abel. He was so named by Eve because, she said (in the Septuagint), ‘God has raised up for me another seed (σπέρμα ἕτερον) instead of Abel, whom Cain slew’ (Genesis 4.25). For the Sethians, to be truly human was to be identified as of the lineage of Seth. And the transmission of the lineage of Seth was through Noah and his household (as we will now see – well, almost!)

One account of the Sethians was provided by their most trenchant Christian critic, Bishop Epiphanius of Salamis, in his Panarion, a refutation of an array of Christian heretics. According to Epiphanius, the Sethians believed that, with the death of Abel, the divine Mother caused the generation of Seth, planting in him a divine spark or seed as a result of which there would be a new humanity, distinct from the stock of Cain and Abel. However, ‘a great deal of intercourse and unruly appetition on the part of evil angels and men since the two breeds had come together for intercourse’Footnote ⁴⁶ led the divine Mother to return, bring the flood, and destroy the entire human race with the exception of Noah and seven of his household who were ‘of the pure stock that derived from Seth’.Footnote ⁴⁷ However, without the divine Mother’s knowledge, the angels slipped Ham, who was of the evil angels’ seed, into the ark ‘to preserve the wicked stock they had created’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Thus, in spite of the divine Mother’s attempt to create a new humanity through Noah, as a consequence of Ham’s survival, ‘the world reverted to its ancient state of disorder, and was as filled with evils as it had been at the beginning, before the flood’.Footnote ⁴⁹ So, despite what the Gnostics saw as Noah’s apparent devotion to the false God Ialdabaoth, Noah and his family, as the seed of Seth, were nevertheless saved. The continuation of human wickedness after the flood was explained by Ham not being of the seed of Seth but descended from Cain and Abel (although with whom Ham might have mated remains unsaid). And it also explained the existence of Gnostics and non-Gnostics in the present world. They were the descendants of the sons of Noah on the one hand (the Jews) and those of Ham on the other (the Gentiles).

In another Gnostic text that has come from the Sethian branch of Gnosticism, namely The Apocryphon (Secret Book) of John, Noah is again one of the primeval Gnostics. But here we get a quite different account of Noah and the flood. According to this text, Ialdabaoth, the creator of the world, along with his rulers, created Fate to bind humanity in ignorance. Disappointed that he could not prevail over spiritual humanity, he planned to bring a flood upon all humanity to destroy them. However, a female figure, ‘the greatness of providence’ (Pronoia, πρόνοια), warned Noah about the coming flood. Although he, in turn, warned people of what was to come, they ignored him. Here, the Gnostic text departs from the book of Genesis. For, not only Noah but many other people from the ‘immoveable generation’ were saved. And they were saved not by being hidden in an ark but by being ‘hidden in a luminous cloud’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Illuminated by Pronoia who was with them, they were saved from the flood – that is, from the darkness of ignorance that Ialdebaoth had brought upon the whole earth. Noah knew that he was not under the power of Ialdabaoth. When all humanity was drowned in the darkness of ignorance, Noah and his fellow Gnostics were saved by the light of knowledge. This was the allegorical truth behind the literal story of Noah and the flood.

Granting the destruction of all humanity, except for Noah and his enlightened companions, how did wickedness and other races reemerge in the world? Epiphanius’ Sethians above had answered the question through the presence of Ham on the ark and his wicked descendants. But The Apocryphon of John answered it by moving the mating of the sons of God with the daughters of men to a time after, rather than before, the flood, so that Ialdabaoth and his rulers might create a new humanity: ‘And the angels changed their own likenesses into the likeness of each one’s mate, filling them with the spirit of darkness, which they mixed with them and with wickedness.’Footnote ⁵¹ Out of this darkness, non-Gnostic children were born, making possible the birth of children of ignorance and evil.

Yet another variation on these themes is to be found in The Apocalypse of Adam. Here, Adam informed his son Seth about events that would happen in the future, one of which was the flood. In this text, it was the ruler of the powers, named Sakla, who caused the flood because of those who continually strove after ‘the life of the knowledge which came from me [Adam] and Eve, your mother. For they were strangers to him [Sakla].’Footnote ⁵² Noah, who is here identified with Deucalion, is a non-Gnostic ally of Sakla who, along with his sons, their wives, and the animals and birds, is protected in the ark from destruction, on the condition that Noah and his household will not procreate with the Gnostics. The primeval Gnostics, who are the seed of Seth, however, are saved from the flood by angels of the highest God in a special, spiritual place: ‘Afterwards, great angels will come on high clouds, who will bring those men into the place where the spirit of life dwells.’Footnote ⁵³ When the seed of Seth reappears after the flood, Noah is accused by Sakla of having reneged on their deal and having created a generation that scorns him. But Noah denies it saying, ‘the generation of these men did not come from me nor from my sons’.Footnote ⁵⁴ The primeval Gnostics then go into a land of their own, where they live for six hundred years, together with the ‘angels of the great Light’, and Noah divides the earth among his sons.Footnote ⁵⁵

Now, in this text, The Apocalypse of Adam, Noah is an ally of the wicked creator God. But we get a different take on heroes and villains in The Reality of the Rulers (or The Hypostasis of the Archons). Here, Noah was aligned with the ruler of the forces and the Biblical God Sabaoth, who was on the margin between good and evil. In this text, the rulers of the world (the archons) decided to obliterate all flesh by a deluge. When Sabaoth heard of the decision of the rulers, he told Noah to build an ark and hide in it, ‘you and your children and the beasts and birds of heaven from small to large – and set it upon Mount Sir’.Footnote ⁵⁶ The feminine figure Norea comes to Noah wanting to board the ark. Now, Norea was the daughter of Eve, and her descendants were the Gnostics, while the descendants of Seth through Noah were the Jews. When Noah refused her entry to the ark, she destroyed it by fire and Noah had to build it for a second time.

Although Norea was refused entry to the ark, she was nevertheless mysteriously preserved. The rulers of the world intervened and tried to seduce her, telling her that she was the offspring of Eve and the rulers. But Norea turned to them and said, ‘It is you who are the rulers of the darkness; you are accursed. You did not know my mother. Instead it was your own female that you knew. For I am not your descendant. Rather, it is from the world above that I am come.’Footnote ⁵⁷ Unlike the Genesis story in which the sons of God did mate with the daughters of men, here there is a failed attempt by the cosmic rulers to seduce the female ancestor of the Gnostics, a failure that guaranteed that the latter would continue to possess the light.

Norea was then informed by Eleleth, one of the luminaries (angels) of the divine Mother, that ‘You, together with your offspring, are from the primeval father. Their souls come from above, out of the incorruptible light. Therefore, the authorities cannot approach them, since the spirit of truth resides in them, and all who have known this way exist deathless in the midst of dying people.’Footnote ⁵⁸ In short, the way to salvation was not by means of the God of Israel but through the knowledge of a divine source beyond him, out of whom all reality has ultimately emanated. Norea’s triumph was the triumph of all Gnostics over the forces that opposed them. Thus, there were two groups of people descended from the flood – the Jewish descendants of the misguided Noah and his household, and the Gnostic descendants of Norea who was preserved outside of the ark.

All that said, we can now circle back to Epiphanius and his account of the Gnostic Borborites (Filthy Ones). Now, in the Gnostic text, The Reality of the Rulers, Norea is the daughter of Eve. But in Epiphanius’ account of the Borborites, she is Noah’s wife. Nevertheless, it is Norea who is the Gnostic heroine and Noah the Creator archon’s villain. Thus, according to Epiphanius, the archon who created the world wanted to destroy Norea in the flood along with everything else. When Noah, in obedience to this archon, would not allow her to enter the ark, she burned it – a first, a second, and then a third time: ‘And this is why the building of Noah’s own ark took many years – it was burned many times by Noria [Norea].’Footnote ⁵⁹ The archons wished to destroy Norea because of her knowledge of the truth. She ‘revealed the powers on high and Barbelo [the divine Mother], the scion of the powers, who was the archon’s opponent, as the other powers are. And she let it be known that what has been stolen from the Mother on high by the archon who made the world, and by the other gods, demons and angels with him must be gathered from the power in bodies, through the male and female [sexual] emissions.’Footnote ⁶⁰

The collecting of physical seed by this means enabled Epiphanius imaginatively to ‘report’ on the Borborites’ related ritual practices – naked worship, offering to God male semen in their hands and eating it, the consuming of female menstrual blood, and of food made from aborted infants. Despite Epiphanius’ fertile imagination, it is clear that, regardless of the archons’ attempt to seduce her, Norea remained virginally pure, and thus an exemplar for Gnostic resistance to the archonic wickedness of the world – in modern terms, an icon of feminist resistance to male domination.Footnote ⁶¹

It was perhaps a thousand years later that medieval Judaic magic was to absorb the Norea tradition. This was in a short manuscript of Jewish magic from the Cairo Genizah, a collection of some 400,000 manuscript fragments in the storeroom of a synagogue in old Cairo. But here, we might say, the patriarchy pushed back, and Norea becomes the villain in the piece. Here, Niriyah (Norea) appears in one of three spells as the bride of Noah who invented magic, brought sin into the world, and, more particularly, caused male impotence. Fortunately, God and six angels were able to undo the evil spells originating with Norea. The composer of the spell probably knew of the Norea tradition among the Gnostics and reframed it as a Jewish revenge on the Gnostics. As Reimund Leicht notes, its composer may have been aware of ‘the Gnostic method of inverting Biblical myth and he therefore re-inverted their inversion, thus turning the Rulers into helpful angels and the heroine Norea into a wicked witch’.Footnote ⁶²

Allegories and Prototypes in Early Christian Thought

In contrast to the Gnostics who inverted or subverted the literal or historical meaning of the Biblical text, the early Christians were committed to it, despite their recognition of its often inconsistencies and incoherencies. Thus, for example, even though the Christian Platonist Origen (185–254 ce) was inclined to seek interpretations of a ‘spiritual’ meaning beyond the literal, he was not averse to spilling much exegetical ink over the literal. Against the argument that the dimensions of the ark were insufficient to house all the animals, he noted that Moses was learned in the wisdom of the Egyptians for whom the dimensions of the ark would have been squared, thereby allowing more than adequate space to house the animals. ‘Let these things be said,’ he declared, ‘against those who endeavour to impugn the Scriptures of the Old Testament as containing certain things which are impossible and irrational.’Footnote ⁶³ On this, he was quoted approvingly by Augustine.Footnote ⁶⁴

That said, early Christian theologians were, nonetheless, committed to appropriating the Jewish Scriptures as Old Testament, now superceded by their own Scriptures in the New. They did so by seeking the ‘spirit’ behind the ‘letter’, the deeper spiritual meaning beneath the literal. And although within the Christian tradition itself there is a more nuanced terminology, it is useful for us to distinguish two modes of interpretation of this spiritual meaning – the ‘allegorical’ and the ‘prototypical’ or ‘prefigural’.Footnote ⁶⁵ The ‘allegorical’ privileges the ‘vertical’ relation between the earthly texts and the heavenly realities. The ‘prototypical’, grounded in a ‘horizontal’ view of Biblical history, rakes through the Jewish Scriptures for prototypes or prefigures of the work of Christ and the church in persons, events, things, and ideas that are mentioned in the Old Testament text.Footnote ⁶⁶

We recall that Philo allegorically interpreted the ark of Noah in terms of the structure of the human body. Augustine accepted the allegory between the ark and the human body given by Philo. But he found Philo’s account of the door in the side of the ark as symbolizing the lower parts of the human body through which effluents passed as unworthy of Scripture. Thus, he reinterpreted Philo’s allegory of the opening in the ark, in prototypical terms, as the sacraments of the church flowing from the wound in the side of Christ. According to Augustine, Philo, ‘for the sake of saying something, makes this door represent the lower apertures of the body. He has the hardihood to put this in words and on paper … Had he turned to Christ the veil would have been taken away, and he would have found the sacraments of the Church flowing from the side of Christ’s human body.’Footnote ⁶⁷

Augustine nonetheless recognised the value of Philo for Biblical interpretation. He described him as a ‘Jew of great learning, whom the Greeks speak of as rivalling Plato in eloquence’.Footnote ⁶⁸ While Philo’s Jewish successors ignored him, from around 200 ce, his Christian successors embraced him, mined his writings for clues to interpreting the Old Testament, and, crucially, preserved his works. As David Runia notes, ‘The allegorical method of interpreting Scripture in terms of an underlying physical, moral, and spiritual sense was introduced to Christianity through Hellenistic Judaism, and particularly Philo.’Footnote ⁶⁹ In comparison, the prototypical method was distinctively Christian and, as we noted in Chapter 1, it began in the New Testament.

The idea that Noah was an exemplar of righteousness, present in both the Old and New Testaments, was common in the early Christian tradition.Footnote ⁷⁰ For the apologist Justin Martyr (c.100–c.165), it was a key theme in his polemic against Judaism. In particular, Noah provided an argument that, as a righteous man before Moses, observance of the Jewish Law was unnecessary. Thus, it was not necessary for Christians to practice circumcision, adhere to the food laws, or keep the Sabbath, not least because the Law was given to the Jews as a consequence of their inclination to unrighteousness. As Justin informed the Jew Trypho, ‘You perceive that God by Moses laid all such ordinances upon you on account of the hardness of your people’s hearts, in order that, by the large number of them, you might keep to God continually, and in every action, before your eyes, and never begin to act unjustly or impiously.’Footnote ⁷¹

Praise of Noah was common in the early Christian tradition. Justin viewed him and his sons as pleasing to God, despite not being circumcised and not keeping the Sabbath.Footnote ⁷² Ambrose of Milan (c.339–397 ce) was lavish in his praise: ‘How wise also was Noah, who built the whole of the ark! … How brave he was to overcome the flood! How temperate to endure it! When he had entered the ark, with what moderation he passed the time!’Footnote ⁷³ Bishop Cyril of Alexandria (c.375–444 ce) began his discussion of Noah with the words, ‘Noah was a good man and a genuine lover of God in the highest degree, putting his own virtuous conduct before all else. Since he was eminent and famous, of very good reputation, highly acclaimed, and much adorned with glorious achievements, he was suitably admired’ – the very model of a modern Christian fifth-century bishop, one might say.Footnote ⁷⁴ Augustine was more reserved. Noah’s being ‘perfect in his generation’ (Genesis 6.9), he wrote, meant that, although Noah could not be as perfect as Christians would be when they were immortal like angels, he was as perfect as any could be ‘in their sojourn in this world.’Footnote ⁷⁵

The early Christian interpreters were also heir to the tradition that Noah gave his contemporaries a chance to repent. Thus, for example, the first-century Bishop Clement of Rome (c.35–99 ce) urged his readers to repent to ensure their salvation, declaring that ‘Noah preached repentance, and as many as listened to him were saved’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Theophilus of Antioch (d. 180 ce) informs us that Noah, ‘when he announced to the men then alive that there was a flood coming prophesied to them saying, Come thither, God calls you to repentance’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Hippolytus of Rome (c.170–c.235 ce) has, intriguingly, Noah placing the body of Adam in the ark and then has God instructing Noah to make a rattle and a hammer of boxwood which he was to strike to attract the attention of the wicked. As soon as he did so, the people came to him, ‘and he warned and alarmed them by telling of the immediate approach of the flood, and of the destruction already hasting on and impending. Thus, moreover, was the pity of God toward them displayed … But the sons of Cain did not comply with what Noah proclaimed to them.’Footnote ⁷⁸

This story of Noah’s rattle and hammer is, to the best of my knowledge, unique to Hippolytus. Perhaps also as original is his story of the wife of Ham. To date, in the history of the Noah tradition, we know that the wife of Noah has been given one hundred and three different names, of whom Norea above was one. All of which rather gives the lie to the Mother Goose nursery rhyme, ‘Noah of old, and Noah’s dame, / I think I never heard her name, / But she went in tho’ all the same.’ As to the wife of Ham, we know that she has been given some twenty-nine names, Shem’s wife thirty, and Japheth’s thirty-five.Footnote ⁷⁹ Hippolytus gives us one more for Ham – Zedkat Nabu, another for Shem – Nahalath Mahnuk, and for Japheth – Arathka. And along with that, he gives us a new story. According to this, God had told Noah that whoever first announced the approaching deluge, ‘him you shall destroy that very moment.’ Zedkat was about to put some bread into the oven when water gushed out, penetrating and ruining the bread. She went to Noah and told him, ‘Oh, sir, the word of God is come good.’ Noah asked her, ‘Is then the flood already come?’ to which she replied, ‘Thou hast said it.’ Noah was about to kill her when God intervened: ‘Destroy not the wife of Cham; for from thy mouth is the beginning of destruction – “thou didst first say, ‘The flood is come’” At the voice of Noah, the flood came.’Footnote ⁸⁰

As the beginning of a new humanity, Noah was also a prototype of Christ. ‘For Christ,’ declared Justin Martyr, ‘being the first-born of every creature became again the chief of another race regenerated by Himself through water, and faith, and wood, containing the mystery of the cross, even as Noah was saved by wood when he rode over the waters with his household.’Footnote ⁸¹ The Platonist Origen noted that, although the birth of Noah promised rest (Genesis 5.29), this had not happened to those of the generation of the flood. Christ, on the other hand, was the ‘spiritual Noah who has given rest to men and has taken away the sins of the world’.Footnote ⁸² For Cyril of Jerusalem, Christ was ‘the true Noah,’Footnote ⁸³ while for Augustine, ‘Christ was represented also in Noah’.Footnote ⁸⁴

The North African theologian Tertullian (c.155–c.220 ce) was the first to develop the idea of the ark as a prototype of the church. Thus, for example, he argued in his On Idolatry that there was no place in the church for worship of idols. In the ark, he declared, there was no animal fashioned to represent an idolater. He concluded this book with the words, ‘Let not that be in the Church which was not in the Ark.’Footnote ⁸⁵ And his argument in favour of monogamy in the church looked to that practiced in the ark of Noah. Not only were Noah and his three sons exemplars of monogamy, but so were the animals which, after all, went in two by two, a male and a female.Footnote ⁸⁶

But it is Origen who sets the pattern of particularly elaborate readings of the ark literally, prototypically, and allegorically.Footnote ⁸⁷ Thus, for example, the decks and rooms in the ark, literally interpreted, enabled the separation of the less active and tame animals from the wild beasts. There were surplus animals to provide food for the carnivores but other provisions stored up for the herbivores.Footnote ⁸⁸ Spiritually, there were no features of the ark that could not be applied to the church or the individuals within it. Thus, for example, those who are saved in the ark, whether men or animals, are those saved in the church: ‘[T]here are two lower decks and three upper decks and compartments are separated in it to show that also in the Church, although all are contained within the one faith and are washed in the one baptism, progress, however, is not one and the same for all.’Footnote ⁸⁹ The squared planks of the ark that bear all its weight are the teachers and leaders in the church, along with the writings of the prophets and apostles. The clean animals represent memory, learning, and discernment of what we read, the unclean animals the anger and inclination to sin that is in every soul. The pitch over the inside and outside of the ark symbolizes the need for Christians to be ‘both holy in body without and pure in heart within, on guard on all sides and protected by the power of purity and innocence’.Footnote ⁹⁰ He who hears the Word of God ‘is building an ark of salvation within his own heart and is dedicating a library, so to speak, of the divine word within himself. He is erecting faith, hope, and love as its length, breadth, and height.’Footnote ⁹¹

Under the influence of Philo, there was also an array of allegorizing of the dimensions (three hundred by fifty by thirty cubits) of the ark. By the time of the Christian philosopher Clement of Alexandria (c.150–c.215), it had become already something of a commonplace. ‘Now there are some,’ he declared, ‘who say that three hundred cubits are the symbol of the Lord’s sign [the cross], and fifty, of hope and of the remission given at Pentecost; and thirty, or as in some twelve, they say points out the preaching [of the gospel] because the Lord preached in His thirtieth year; and the apostles were twelve.’Footnote ⁹² Augustine’s imaginings were many. The fifty cubits represented the fifty days from Christ’s resurrection to the coming of the Holy Spirit. The length of three hundred cubits that make up six times fifty symbolised the six periods in the history of the world during which Christ had never ceased to be preached. The three hundred cubits also made up ten times thirty, representing the ten commandments at the heart of the Jewish law, while Noah himself was the tenth from Adam. The overall proportions of the ark were like those of the human body ‘to show that Christ appeared in a human body’.Footnote ⁹³ The wood of which the ark was made became a prototype of the wood of the cross. As Ambrose summed it up, ‘The wood is that on which the Lord Jesus was fastened when he suffered for us.’Footnote ⁹⁴

For Augustine, that all kinds of animals were enclosed in the ark pointed to the church containing all nations. But it is clear that the early church was worried about the bad ‘animals’ within it. Augustine pointed out that there being both clean and unclean animals in the ark pointed to both the good and the bad taking part in the sacraments of the church.Footnote ⁹⁵ Others, like Origen, referred the clean and unclean animals to the good and bad in individuals. The literal meaning of pure and impure animals in the ark, and the dietary laws in Judaism that seemed to go with it, also taxed the minds of early Christian theologians, uncertain whether or not to follow dietary laws and ambivalent about the reasons for so doing.Footnote ⁹⁶ Clement of Alexandria, for example, came up with a dietary reason for not eating swine or fish without scales, namely that they were fat and therefore fattening.Footnote ⁹⁷ John Chrysostom (c.347–407) wondered how Noah made the distinction given it predated the law given by Moses (Leviticus 11.1-47). He concluded that the distinction was between animals that should and should not be eaten, partly a matter of cultural preference, partly a matter of nature, instilled in us by God.Footnote ⁹⁸ The Syrian theologian Ephrem (306–373 ce) cut through: ‘He [Noah] called the [seven pairs of] gentle animals clean and the [two pairs of] vicious ones unclean, for even in the beginning, God had multiplied the clean ones.’ On the day that Noah was to enter the ark, he continued, ‘elephants came from the east, apes and peacocks approached from the south, other animals gathered from the west, and still others hastened to come from the north. Lions came from the jungles and wild beasts arrived from their lairs. Deer and wild asses came from their lands and the mountain beasts gathered from their mountains.’Footnote ⁹⁹ The wicked gathered to watch, not to repent but just to amuse themselves. As a result, Ephrem tells us, God decided there and then to destroy them all.

Following the Biblical story, all were agreed that the flood was, literally, a universal one: ‘[A]ll the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered … covering them fifteen cubits deep’ (Genesis 7.19-20). But the flood was also read by a large number of commentators as a prototype of baptism by immersion which, from the time of the New Testament, had become the rite of initiation into Christianity (see 1 Peter 3.18-22). Thus, as Noah and his household were physically saved in the waters of the deluge, so were Christian initiates eternally saved in the waters of baptism. As Cyprian (c.210–258 ce), the bishop of Carthage, put it, quoting the First Epistle of Peter, just as the ark kept Noah and his household safe, ‘“Thus also shall baptism make you safe.”’Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Similarly, Ambrose of Milan declared that ‘in the flood, also, a figure of baptism had preceded … And thus in that flood all corruption of the flesh perished; only the stock and the kind of the just remained. Is not this a flood, which baptism is, in which all sins are washed away, only the mind and grace of the just are raised up again?’Footnote ¹⁰¹ No longer a hostile destructive force that threatened the lives of those in the church, the flood paradoxically also symbolised the saving of the individual soul through the waters of baptism.

But the flood was also a prototype of the end of the world yet to come. God had promised that the world would never again be destroyed by water. The flood of Noah, nonetheless, became a prototype of its end by fire. Josephus, we recall, had written of the Jewish tradition of Adam’s prediction that there would be a destruction of the universe, at one time by fire and at another by flood. Early Christianity had absorbed this Jewish tradition that the world would end next time by fire. Thus, for example, Justin Martyr, opposing the Stoic belief in the natural and periodic destruction of the world by fire, declared that God would intervene to end all things once and for all, save those in the church, ‘even as formerly the flood left no one but him only with his family who is by us called Noah, and by you Deucalion’.Footnote ¹⁰² Tertullian declared that, after the flood, the world returned to sin, and thus it was destined to be destroyed by fire. As late as the fourth century, even as expectation of the end of the world was waning, Ephrem could still declare, ‘When Christ descended from heaven / Straightway an inextinguishable fire raged everywhere / Before the face of Christ and devoured everything. / And the flood in the time of Noah was the type of this inextinguishable fire. / For just as the Flood covered even the tops of the mountains / So does this fire.’Footnote ¹⁰³ The Spanish bishop Gregory of Elvira (died c.392) put it simply: ‘[M]an cannot escape the destruction of the whole globe except through the Church, just as also in the cataclysm of the world nobody remained except those whom the ark had shut in.’Footnote ¹⁰⁴

The two birds that Noah sent out from the ark – the raven and the dove – were also prototypes of the Christian life. Thus, for the Roman theologian Jerome (c.342–420 ce), for example, the raven was a prototype of baptism in which ‘that most unclean bird the Devil is expelled’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ According to Gregory of Elvira, the raven signified ‘the pleasures of the deceitful and impure soul, and the infamy of its black color showed the unrighteous vice of sinners’, while its failure to come back to the ark ‘showed that the impure pleasures of men must be expelled from the Church and are to return no further’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ For Augustine, the raven who did not return was a prototype of men ‘defiled by impure desire, and therefore eager for things outside [the church] in the world’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Of all the creatures in the ark, however, the most significant was the dove. Not only did it tell Noah of dry land, but it was a prototype of the Holy Spirit, not least because it was the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove that descended upon Jesus at the time of his baptism (Mark 1.9). Along with that went the return of the dove with an olive leaf – a prototype of peace. Tertullian seems to have begun the tradition in the second century ce: ‘to our flesh – as it emerges from the font, after its old sins, flies the dove of the Holy Spirit, bringing us the peace of God, sent out from the heavens, where is the Church, the typified ark’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Ambrose put it simply: Noah ‘sent forth a dove which is said to have returned with an olive twig … The dove is that in the form of which the Holy Spirit descended, as you have read in the New Testament, Who inspires in you peace of soul and tranquillity of mind.’Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Augustine took a different tack: The dove of the ark represented the faithful in the church who, like the dove on its first journey, found no peace in the world. The bringing of the olive leaf prefigured those who, baptised outside of the church, might come with the fruit of charity into the one communion. The dove not returning to the ark symbolised the rest of the saints at the end of the world when ‘in that unclouded contemplation of unchangeable truth, we shall no longer need natural symbols’.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Noah’s drunkenness and nakedness after he left the ark were to stretch interpretative ingenuity. By some, he was denounced. Jerome, for example, was scathing: ‘When the body is heated with drink it soon boils over with lust … he that drinks himself drunk is not only dead but buried. One hour’s debauch makes Noah uncover his nakedness which through sixty years of sobriety he had kept covered.’Footnote ¹¹¹ Elsewhere, Jerome excused him on the grounds that, living in an uncivilised age after the flood, ‘perhaps he did not know its power of intoxication’.Footnote ¹¹² That said, the drunkenness and nakedness could also be read prototypically. Thus, Augustine declared, opaquely, that ‘the planting of the vine by Noah, and his intoxication by its fruit, and his nakedness while he slept, and the other things done at that time, and recorded, are all of them pregnant with prophetic meanings, and veiled in mysteries’.Footnote ¹¹³

Nevertheless, for Augustine, the drunkenness and nakedness of Noah were a prototype of the sufferings of Christ: ‘For the mortality of Christ’s flesh was uncovered, to the Jews a stumbling block, and to the Greeks foolishness.’ Shem and Japheth ‘carrying the garment backwards are a figure of the two peoples … They do not see the nakedness of their father, because they do not consent to Christ’s death; and yet they honor it with a covering.’Footnote ¹¹⁴ Noah’s son Ham was, of course, much criticised for gazing upon his father’s nakedness. Although there is no mention of Ham’s attitude to his father’s nakedness in the Genesis story, Ambrose declared that he ‘brought disgrace upon himself; for he laughed when he saw his father naked’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ That he was believed to have mocked his father made him a prototype of those who mocked the church. As for Ham, whose name signifies heat, wrote Augustine, ‘what does he signify but the tribe of heretics, hot with the spirit, not of patience, but of impatience, with which the breasts of heretics are wont to blaze, and with which they disturb the peace of the saints?’Footnote ¹¹⁶

A Medieval Moment

The spiritual reading of the ark of Noah was to reach its high point in the twelfth century in Hugh of St. Victor’s (1096–1141) De Arca Noe Morali, divided into four books and some seventy chapters. Hugh concluded by emphasising the importance of the ark: ‘Into it is woven the story of events, in it are found the mysteries of the sacraments, and there are set out the stages of affections, thoughts, meditations, contemplations, good works, virtues, and rewards. There we are shown what we ought to believe, and do, and hope … There the sum of things is displayed, and the harmony of its elements explained. There another world is found, over against this passing transitory one.’Footnote ¹¹⁷ While Christian interpretation of the Scriptures had recognised the importance of the historical meaning of the text, the historical meaning was often neglected. In contrast to this neglect, it was Hugh’s conviction, as Grover Zinn notes, ‘that the knowledge of languages and the liberal and mechanical arts … ought to be utilized in determining the true meaning of the literal sense of Scripture in a much more vigorous manner than had been effected in the past’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ For Hugh, only with the correct understanding of the literal sense of the Bible could its spiritual meaning be truly grasped. As he put it, ‘All Scripture, if expounded according to its own proper meaning [the literal], will gain in clarity and present itself to the reader’s intelligence more easily.’Footnote ¹¹⁹

Only two chapters in Book One of the De Arca Noe Morali are devoted to the literal meaning of the ark. They deal with the shape of the ark in the one and its size in the other.Footnote ¹²⁰ These were the key issues, Hugh suggested, for those who wished to understand the ark according to the letter. On the dimensions of the ark, he followed Augustine and Origen. But on the shape of the ark, he differed not only from Origen’s pyramid and Augustine’s box but from the whole of the previously existing tradition. The Genesis view on the relative dimensions of the ark was clear – three hundred cubits in length, fifty cubits in width, thirty in height, with a roof finished ‘to a cubit above’, three decks, and a door in the side (Genesis 6.16). But the Biblical view on the shape of the ark left much to the interpretative imagination.

Until the time of Hugh of St. Victor, although first suggested by Clement of Alexandria, Origen’s view on the shape of the ark had become the standard. According to Origen, we should understand the ark ‘rising with four angles from the bottom, and the same having been drawn together gradually all the way to the top, it has been brought together in the space of one cubit’.Footnote ¹²¹ In short, the ark had the form of an asymmetric, quadrangular pyramid, floating on the water (like a raft), and truncated at the top. Hugh clearly has a copy of Origen’s work (or an excerpt from it), for he gives us the passage from Origen quoted above. Hugh invited his readers to consider contemporary shipbuilding practices, in the light of which, he believed, the ark à la Origen could not have been stable. Simply put, without a hull and without a proper distribution of weight below the surface, top heavy as the ark would have been, it could not have stayed afloat in a storm.

Hugh’s ark was significantly different in shape. It was essentially that of a ship’s hull with a roof on top, tapering to a single cubit. It had five storeys. There were two below the water line, one containing the animals’ dung (four cubits high) and the other their food supplies (five cubits high). The next deck above (six cubits high) contained the wild animals. That took care of the three decks in the Genesis account. Hugh then added two more under the roof. The tame animals were in the fourth (seven cubits high), while humans and birds were in the fifth storey (eight cubits high) at the top. The door in the side of the ark was near the water level, between the second and third stories, to enable ease of entry to the ark. In addition, there was a window in the roof that Noah opened to allow the raven and the dove to search for dry land (Genesis 6.6). And another delightful innovation: on the outer surface of the ark were placed little nests, made specifically for animals that were amphibious, like ‘the otter and the seal’.Footnote ¹²²

Despite the Biblical suggestion of only three decks, there was an array of opinions, determined primarily by the need to fit into the ark the variety of animals, birds, reptiles, food, and so on. In opting for five decks, Hugh of Saint Victor was following Origen. Augustine had opted for three.Footnote ¹²³ The Christian Sophist Procopius of Gaza (c.464–528 ce) argued for four – wild beasts, reptiles, domestic animals, and Noah and his household, in ascending order. The English monk, the Venerable Bede (d. 735 ce), went for three decks, with unclean and then clean animals on the lower two. But he divided the upper deck into three with Noah and his family between tame and carnivorous birds on the third.Footnote ¹²⁴ As we will see in the next chapter, even more variations were offered within the Rabbinic tradition.

Hugh’s account of the shape of the ark is more than a matter of arcane (so to say) interest. For his ark – a ship with a roof or a roofed house on top – has become, more or less, the standard depiction of it since that time. Whether Hugh’s ark reflected more realistic depictions of the ark that were developing at that time, or whether Hugh’s description influenced the depictions, we cannot tell. But both pictures and narrative were reflecting a significant shift in perceptions of Noah and his ark that began at that time.

The pictorial life of Noah had begun around the beginning of the third century.Footnote ¹²⁵ The first representation of which we know occurs on a series of five bronze coins, sponsored by the local Jewish community, the first of which was struck in the reign of the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus (190–211 ce), in the city of Apamea in Phrygia in Asia Minor. It presents two scenes, one of a couple standing on dry land with upraised hands, the other of a couple in a chest floating on water, that is labelled ‘ωε’. Along with the couple in the chest (Noah and his wife), two birds are depicted, presumably a raven perched on the edge and a dove with a branch in its claws. Aside from the birds and Noah and his wife, no other creatures or humans appear. The coin appears to combine the Genesis story of Noah with that of Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha who, we recall, embarked in a ‘chest’ to escape a flood brought on by Zeus.Footnote ¹²⁶ The image of Noah in a chest (sometimes with chair-like legs) was to last well into the period of the Renaissance. Various thirteenth-century mosaics in St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice show Noah pictured with the ark in the form of a large rectangular box (see Plate 8). Michelangelo’s painting of the flood in the Sistine Chapel in the early sixteenth century shows the ark as a large rectangular box with a sloping roof.

8 ‘This is how you are to make the ark: the length of the ark three hundred cubits, its width fifty, and its height thirty cubits.’

(Genesis 6.15)

In keeping with the account of Clement and Origen, the ark was also imagined in a pyramidal form. Thus, for example, the sixth-century Vienna Genesis depicted Noah, his family, and the animals departing from a three-step pyramidal ark. It was an image that was to last until the fifteenth century. The pyramidal ark was to appear on Lorenzo Ghiberti’s (1378–1455) doors in the Florence Baptistry. Depictions of the ark also followed the prototype of the ark as the church, begun by Tertullian. A twelfth-century miniature from Regensburg, for example, shows the ark as the hull of a ship upon which rests a Romanesque church.Footnote ¹²⁷ Another ark with a church or cathedral superstructure appears in the twelfth-century Winchester Bible. That said, the new ark that was imagined by Hugh of Saint Victor, essentially that of a ship with a roof or a roofed house on top, also began to appear in depictions of the ark in the twelfth century. Thus, for example, a mosaic from the late twelfth to mid-thirteenth centuries in Monreale Cathedral shows Noah letting the animals out of an ark comprised of a hull surmounted by a roofed house. Similarly, the fifteenth-century Nuremberg Bible depicts Noah looking out for the returning dove from the window of a house on a ship’s hull (see Plate 9).

9 ‘Make a roof for the ark, and finish it to a cubit above; and put the door of the ark in its side.’

(Genesis 6.16)

From the minimal description of the dimensions and shape of the ark provided by the Genesis text, Hugh’s ark has perhaps no more claim to represent the ‘real’ shape of the ark intended by the text than the pyramidal or rectangular versions of it. And Hugh’s spiritual reading of the ark in De Arca Noe Morali outweighed by some sixty-eight chapters the two chapters that he devoted to the literal meaning of its shape, size, and number of decks. Although his spiritual reading of the story of Noah and the ark was the high point in such Christian interpretations, allegorical and prototypical readings of the story were to continue until the period of the Reformation in the sixteenth century and beyond. Be that as it may, all the major reformers – Martin Luther, John Calvin, Philipp Melancthon, and Martin Bucer – shared a suspicion of spiritual readings, preferring the literal sense. And Protestant readings of the story from then on were unashamedly focused on the literal sense.

Hugh of Saint Victor was nonetheless in the vanguard of those who, some four centuries before the Reformation, were committed to a religiously motivated quest for knowledge of the world around them, and who used the knowledge thus gained to focus anew on the literal sense of Scripture.Footnote ¹²⁸ Despite the deference paid to the early Christian readings of the Noah story, both literal and spiritual, the period from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries saw a renewed focus on the literal sense of the story. Biblical interpreters were not only filling in the details absent from the original story, and solving the problems that were ignored in the Genesis account, but they were also using the Biblical story to direct, fashion, and sharpen their own questions about the natural and human worlds.