An Ark of Biblical Proportions

Within the Judaism of the eleventh century, it was the rabbinic commentator Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac, known as Rashi, who set the pattern of a greater emphasis on the literal meaning of the text, as opposed to its moral, legal, or ritual meaning. And this rabbinic emphasis was to influence the Christian interpreters of the later medieval period. The literal readings of Noah and the flood by the Franciscan teacher Nicholas of Lyra (c.1270–1349) and the Spanish theologian Alfonso Tostado (c.1400–1455) were to set the pattern for the literal exegetes of the late medieval and early modern periods.Footnote ¹

Nicholas of Lyra developed a primarily literal reading of the Biblical text that was reliant both on the Hebrew text of the Old Testament and on the rabbinic commentaries, especially Rashi’s. It was Nicholas who brought to the attention of the Christian West the Jewish legend of Og of Bashan’s escape from the flood, the story of the raven’s fear that Noah was having an affair with its mate, and the tradition that Noah had to take fish on the ark because the flood waters were boiling hot. In turn, Alfonso Tostado absorbed the literal reading of Nicholas and added an imaginative flair to his story of Noah and the flood. And when we read his account of life on the ark, the rabbinical influence on his writing can be clearly discerned:

The emphasis on the literal meaning of the story of Noah and the ark in Nicholas and Tostado was not all that innovative. As Peter Harrison has pointed out, from the twelfth century onwards, there had been warnings given against the overuse of allegorical readings to the exclusion of the literal.Footnote ³ That said, the long tradition of allegorical readings within Catholic Christianity nonetheless ensured their continuation. Even the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), author of a three-volume account of the Noah story, primarily focused on a literal reading. His Arca Noë (1675) allegorised the ark as a vessel carrying the human soul and as the church outside of which there was no salvation. And he looked on Noah as a prototype of Christ. Nevertheless, there was an increasingly clear sense within the Catholic tradition that, at the least, the literal meaning had to be discerned before any other meaning could be built upon it. On the other hand, Protestant readings from the sixteenth century onwards, in accord with the Protestant commitment to ‘scripture alone’, were decisively literal and historical in their orientation.

Most importantly, the production of new ‘knowledges’ in the secular arts and sciences during the late medieval and early modern periods could not but generate critical reflection on the most important ‘knowledge’ of all, namely that contained within the Bible. In so doing, the importance of the literal and historical meaning of the Bible, now read through knowledges created outside of it, not only reinforced the importance of the literal meaning but also created radically new literal and historical readings. Eventually, as we will see, the use of the secular arts and sciences to clarify, illuminate, and support the literal and historical reading of the Bible was to create as many problems for the Biblical story as it purported to solve.

Catholic or Protestant, there were two principal issues that drove the medieval and early modern accounts of Noah and the ark. The first of these was that of the size and shape of the ark. The second was how the ark could accommodate and feed the variety of animals that it had to. As we saw in Chapter 2, by reference to contemporary shipbuilding practices, Hugh of Saint Victor had imagined the ark as a ship with a roof or a roofed house on top – pretty much as we would imagine it to have been. But the question of the size and the shape was not settled by Hugh in the twelfth century. It was to continue as one of the most disputed and debated questions into the late medieval and early modern periods.

The most influential account of the size and shape of the ark was provided by the Catholic mathematician Johannes Buteo (c.1485–c.1560) in a work entitled De Arca Noë (1554) within a larger work, Opera Geometrica. Buteo focused solely on the literal meaning of the story of Noah and the ark. For Buteo, the question of the ark was one of conflicting designs, to be settled by geometry. Thus, Buteo followed the Biblical dimensions of the ark, with a cubit equalling eighteen inches. He rejected the view that a Biblical cubit would be nine feet long on the grounds that were it so, Goliath the giant, whose height was six cubits and one hand, would have been over fifty-four feet and his head about nine feet high. This was impossible, ‘for how could David have stood before Saul, as it is written [1 Samuel 17.57], holding the head cut off from Goliath in his hand?’Footnote ⁴ Thus Buteo’s ark was 450,000 cubic cubits (300 × 50 × 30 cubits), with a further 7,500 cubic cubits in the roof.

Along with these dimensions, Buteo also provided five pictorial designs of the ark ranging from that of Origen, Hugo of St. Victor, ‘some teachers’,Footnote ⁵ and Cardinal Cajetan to his own – a rectangle with a pitched roof to the height of one cubit running along its length (see Plate 11). He argued for this primarily on the grounds that ‘arca’ simply meant ‘chest’ – ‘called a parallelepiped rectangle by geometricians’.Footnote ⁶ Thus, he was having nothing to do with Origen’s pyramid and he was scathing about Hugh of St. Victor’s ark design as ‘incompetent’.Footnote ⁷ Placing a large window in the side of the ark near the top made of glass with shutters, sufficient to light the top deck, Buteo rejected the rabbinic tradition of a gemstone in the roof that would light up the whole ark as a ‘shameless lie.’Footnote ⁸ In fact, he left the animals without light for the whole time that they were in the ark because, he claimed, they happily lived in darkness.

11 Five designs of the ark by Johannes Buteo: Origen, Hugo of St. Victor, ‘some teachers’, Cardinal Cajetan, Buteo.

Following the Biblical text (Genesis 6.16), Buteo’s ark had three decks, although he had a bilge four cubits high beneath the bottom deck for animal waste. The quadrupeds and reptiles were housed in stalls on the lowest deck with a door for the animals to enter and exit. Birds and humans lived on the top deck. On this deck, there were separate quarters for the men and women. Buteo remarked rather coyly (following the rabbinic tradition) that ‘it is the accepted opinion that the men on the ark always slept separately from the women’.Footnote ⁹ There were sufficient supplies on the top deck for humans and birds. The middle deck was reserved for food for the animals below – hay, chaff, leafy branches, acorns, nuts, walnuts, and chestnuts. Carnivores were catered for with the addition of 3,650 sheep housed in the middle deck.

Buteo followed the Genesis account that had Noah taking two of each kind, including seven pairs of all clean animals, seven pairs of birds, and one pair of unclean animals (Genesis 7.2-3). But he divided the animals into three groups – larger herbivores, smaller herbivores, and carnivores – and worked generally from the largest down to the smallest. Among the first there were elephants, wild oxen, one-horned oxen, four kinds of camels, rhinoceroses, bison, buffalo, European bison, oryxes, reindeers, one-horned Indian oxen, ostriches, common cows, deer, antelope, red deer, common horses, wild horses, spotted horses, hippopotamuses, domesticated donkeys, wild donkeys, one-horned Indian donkeys, bears, pigs, and boars.

Among the smaller herbivores he counted varieties of sheep and goats, varieties of apes, hares, and rabbits, badgers, squirrels, dormice, and varieties of mice, hedgehogs, and porcupines. The carnivores included lions, leopards, calae, boas, bulls that live by hunting, panthers, tigers, wolves, dog wolves, deer wolves, cephae, lynxes, hyenas, wild asses, sea otters, beavers, giant otters, common otters, hyenas, African hunting dogs, foxes, cats, Egyptian and common weasels, and sea calves.Footnote ¹⁰ And he included a large number of ‘fabulous’ beasts – unicorns, pegasi, leucrocotas, dragons, manticores, hellhounds, sphinxes, satyrs, hydras, and basilisks. He was having nothing to do with Hugo’s idea of amphibians nesting on the sides of the ark. Were it necessary for fish to be housed, a fish tank could have easily been built and ‘easily filled using a Ctesibian machine or some other sort of water pump’.Footnote ¹¹ Additional supplies of fish (beyond the requisite pairs) from this aquarium would meet the needs of any amphibians (like seals) that required a fish diet.

Although Augustine had all the animals on the ark eating a vegetarian diet, Buteo saw that there was no Biblical reason why Noah should not have taken more animals than ordered to by God.Footnote ¹² So, he included extra animals to feed the carnivores. He calculated that the carnivores amounted to the equivalent of forty pairs of wolves. Ten sheep would have been eaten each day by the equivalent of forty wolves, thus requiring 3,650 sheep on the ark to feed the carnivores. A more complicated calculation was made for the herbivores. According to this, the number of herbivores amounted to the equivalent of 400 cows on the ark. Experimentation had demonstrated that one cubic cubit bale of hay would be more than sufficient per day for each cow. A total of 146,000 bales would be required for the year. Further calculations demonstrated that there was more than sufficient space on the ark to store both the feed and the extra animals. Curiously, he declared, dogs would be able to scavenge for food in the kitchen on the third floor, even though their pernicious rabies was a nuisance to themselves and others. Therefore, ‘it seems,’ Buteo concluded, ‘that dogs in the ark were a prototype of heretics’ – read Protestants! The Reformation could resonate, even in a work on Noah’s ark.

The Floating Zoo

In the accounts of Noah and his ark that followed that of Buteo, it became increasingly fashionable, although perhaps more tiresome for readers, to name all the animals that had entered it.Footnote ¹³ Thus, for example, in 1592, the Jesuit theologian Benedict Pereira (1536–1610) gave an encyclopaedic list of inhabitants that, by my calculation, ran to some 131 different creatures consisting of reptiles (25), carnivorous animals (35), non-carnivorous larger animals (34), non-carnivorous smaller animals (37). All up, some 260 creatures. Despite these four categories, it was an unsystematic collection generated from Classical (especially Pliny the Elder) and contemporary sources. Thus, for example, amongst the last category were an ‘animal in the Japanese islands’ and the ‘Aiotochelli’ that the conquistador Pedro de Alvarada saw in ‘New Spain’. Pereira excluded the phoenix due to doubts about its existence. And fish were absent from his ark, as were those animals that were the product of different species (like mules), and those that spontaneously arose ‘from rotting matter’ (‘ex putrescens materia’). None of these required an ark to survive. Fish would happily survive in the waters of the flood that, unlike that of the rabbis, were not boiling. Animals produced by the mating of different species would appear after the flood again, as would the rotting matter necessary for those creatures that were generated from it.Footnote ¹⁴

The calculations of Buteo on the size of the ark were to become the standard way in the early modern period of ensuring that the ark was of sufficient size to house all the animals, or at least a limited number of them. Sir Walter Raleigh (c.1552–1618), for example, had absorbed the work of Buteo. In his The Historie of the World, ‘this second Parent of Mankind’, as Raleigh called Noah, built his ark in the Caucasus to distance himself from the giants who ‘rebelled against God and Nature’ to ensure an uninterrupted period of construction.Footnote ¹⁵ Like Buteo, Raleigh was much exercised by the size of the cubit. Rejecting the Egyptian ‘geometricall cubit’ of Origen that measured six times that of the common cubit, he followed Buteo and settled on eighteen inches – the distance ‘from the sharpe of the elbow to the point of the middle finger’.Footnote ¹⁶ Thus, following the Biblical measurements, Noah had some 450,000 cubic cubits, including the 7,500 cubits for the one cubit height of the roof (to make up for space taken up by posts, walls, and other partitions), with which to house the animals. That said, Raleigh held that, because men were larger then than in his day, the cubit too was longer, by some six inches. All of which led Raleigh to an ark of ‘600. foot in length, and 100. foot in bredth, and 60. foot deepe.’Footnote ¹⁷ As for ‘the foolerie of the Hebrewes, who suppose that the Arke was lightened [illuminated] by a Carbuncle [precious stone], or had Windows of Crystal to receive in Light, and keepe out Water,’ this was ‘but to revive the buried vanities of former times’.Footnote ¹⁸

Raleigh also thought that the question of amphibians on the ark ‘a needlesse curiositie’.Footnote ¹⁹ But he did exclude fish, along with those of mixed species (such as mules and hyenas). And, regardless of the apparently vast numbers of different animals around the world, he limited the numbers by taking account, not of how they were in his time, but how they were in the time of Noah: ‘of all Creatures, as they were by God created, or out of the earth by his Ordinance produced’. The ark, he went on to say, on the dimensions provided by the common cubit, ‘was sufficiently capacious to contayne of all, according to the number by God appointed’.Footnote ²⁰ And he settled, following Buteo, on 280 animals on one deck, their food on a second, and the birds and their feed, along with Noah and his family, on a third.

As part of his quest for a universal language in his An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668), the Anglican bishop John Wilkins (1614–1672) attempted to name and describe all the things to which names were to be assigned, dividing them into genuses, ‘peculiar differences’ within the genuses, and species belonging to each of the genuses listed. Among the forty genuses, four concerned the animal world: exanguious (bloodless), fish, birds, and beasts. He was convinced that the orderly classification of animals would contribute to the clearing of some differences in religious opinion and put to rest the belief, among otherwise knowing and learned men, that there were so many sorts of birds and beasts as to be incalculable. According to Wilkins, some ancient heretics and modern atheistical scoffers had used this to raise objections against the truth and authority of Scriptures, particularly concerning the ark of Noah ‘where the dimensions of it are set down to be three hundred cubits in length, fifty in breadth, and thirty in height, which being compared with the things it was to contein, it seemed to them upon a general view, (and they confidently affirmed accordingly) that it was utterly impossible for this Ark to hold so vast a multitude of Animals, with a whole years provision of food for each of them’.Footnote ²¹

Following Buteo, he rejected the argument that the great number of animals could be accommodated by arguing (à la Origen) for a larger ark based on the Egyptian cubit. He argued that the capacity of the ark using the common (or ‘civil’) cubit was sufficient to house the animals, which his own classification had reduced to less than ‘a hundred sorts of Beasts’ and not ‘two hundred of birds.’Footnote ²² Moreover, Wilkins’s ark was not, like that of Hugo, a ship, but ‘intended only for a kind of Float to swim above water, the flatness of its bottom, did render it much more capacious for the reception of those many living Creatures, which were to be conteined in it’.Footnote ²³ And, like Buteo’s ark, Wilkins’s ark consisted of three stories, each ten cubits high, with a roof along its breadth and length reaching one cubit high: the lower deck containing all the animals, the middle deck for their food, the upper deck for the birds in one part and Noah and his family in the other.

That said, Wilkins did take exception to Buteo’s enumeration of species of animals ‘several of which are fabulous, some not distinct species, others that are true species being left out.’Footnote ²⁴ Although much reliant on Buteo, the importance of Wilkins’s account lies in his systematic allocating of animals to the ark in accord with his overall system of animal classification. According to the table that he constructed, there would be ample room on an ark built on Biblical proportions for the 201 animals that he identified.Footnote ²⁵ And, having determined the number of animals, he made reasonably precise calculations of how they would be housed according to their size in stalls sufficiently large for them to stand, lie, or turn around in. Assuming that some animals were carnivorous before the flood and thus needed meat on the ark, Wilkins adopted a Buteo-style calculation to estimate that, granting there were the equivalent of thirty wolves on the ark and that six wolves would eat a sheep a day, 1,825 sheep would be needed to be housed in stalls in the middle deck to feed the carnivorous beasts.

As for the hay to feed the sheep and other hay-eating animals for the year that the flood lasted, he calculated that there needed to be sufficient hay to feed the equivalent of three hundred cattle and sufficient space to house it on the second deck. Finally, he estimated that there would be no shortage of space on the third level for the birds, their feed, Noah and his family, and their utensils. All of which led Wilkins, bishop and natural historian, to conclude, ‘From what hath been said it may appear, that the measure and capacity of the Ark, which some Atheistical irreligious men make use of, as an argument against the Scripture, ought rather to be esteemed a most rational confirmation of the truth and divine authority of it.’Footnote ²⁶

Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) had been really looking forward to the publication of Wilkins’s An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language. Having read it, Pepys tells us that he enjoyed the book mightily, but he made no other mention of it except for its section on the ark: ‘[M]ade the boy to read to me out of Dr. Wilkins’ his “Real Character” and particularly about Noah’s arke, where he do give a very good account thereof, shewing how few the number of the several species of beasts and fowls were that were to be in the arke, and that there was room enough for them and their food and dung, which do please me mightily and is much beyond what ever I heard of the subject, and so to bed.’Footnote ²⁷

As Secretary to the Admiralty, Pepys had more than a merely antiquarian interest in the ark of Noah. Aware of the tradition that the ark was a century in the making, he remarked in his Naval Minutes, ‘Noah’s Ark must needs be made of some extraordinary timber and plank that could remain good after having been an hundred years in building, whereas our thirty new ships are some of them rotten within less than five.’Footnote ²⁸ That said, Pepys declared that his friend and naval engineer Henry Shere, who had made his own notes on the ark, determined that six months would have sufficed to have built it. And Pepys wondered, if this were the first ship ever, where Noah found carpenters and caulkers to build it.

That said, he thought it disgraceful that contemporary shipbuilders had not caulked naval ships properly, ‘the Ark itself being said to be pitcht within and without’.Footnote ²⁹ More importantly, Pepys and Shere wondered how, if the ark were the model for all later ships, a uniformity of design in later ships might have been expected. Rather, ship designs were all quite distinct and variously adapted to local conditions. The design of Noah’s ark could hardly have provided a model for others because even the most ignorant and barbarous societies had the best long and narrow shapes to pass through the water, quite different from ‘the form described by Moses of the Ark’.Footnote ³⁰ Pepys’s was an early sceptical note on the generally accepted assumption that all culture, including shipbuilding, had derived from the diffusion of the Noachic family after the flood.

As we know, in thinking about the relationship between the ark and contemporary shipbuilding practices, Pepys was following in the tradition established by Hugh of St. Victor. He was not alone. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the number of books on shipbuilding increased, a discussion of the most important Biblical ship became common.Footnote ³¹ Thus, for example, Pepys had in his library fragments of a manuscript by Tudor shipwright Mathew Baker (c.1530–1613). Baker was a key player in the building or rebuilding of some thirteen ships that tackled the Spanish Armada. And his was the earliest English treatise on ship design. It began with a sketch of Noah’s ark, depicted as a three-storey stepped box with a door on the bottom storey and Noah depicted as a draftsman and builder. Below the sketch of the ark was a paraphrase of the Biblical instructions by God to Noah on its dimensions (Genesis 6.14-16)Footnote ³² (see Plate 12).

12 Mathew Baker, an Elizabethan shipwright, imagines the ark.

Pepys also had a copy of the carpenter-builder Cornelis van Yk’s 1697 treatise on Dutch shipbuilding that began with a discussion of the ark of Noah. van Yk conceded that Noah’s ark was not the first ship, but he did view it as the largest. Although he nowhere mentioned Kircher, van Yk had more than likely read his Arca Noë. For he provided a sketch of five arks, clearly based on those in Kircher – those of Origen, Hugh of St. Victor, Cardinal Cajetan, and Nicholas of Lyra, along with Kircher’s preferred option (that van Yk attributed to a Wilhelm Goree). They were the same five versions that Kircher adapted from Buteo. To these, van Yk added sketches of two more: one that looked like a large punt with a flat-bottomed hull; the other, his preferred option, a seventeenth-century ship with a curved bow and stern and a large house on the open deck.Footnote ³³

It is somewhat surprising that, with all the attention given to Noah among shipbuilders, there were apparently few attempts to build an ark. We know of only one. In 1604, a rich merchant from the Dutch town of Hoorn by the name of Peter Janszoon had an ark built. It was of Biblical proportions but smaller. Janszoon noted that, while it was not suitable for long or rapid journeys, it was very useful for cargo. It was calculated that it could carry a third more goods than other vessels without requiring a greater number of hands to manage it.Footnote ³⁴

The Arca Noë of Athanasius Kircher

The Arca Noë (1675) of the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher was the most elaborate of the seventeenth-century accounts of the ark.Footnote ³⁵ The founder of the Museum Kircherianum in Rome, Kircher imagined the ark of Noah as the world’s first museum of natural history. And Kircher’s Arca Noë, with its rich illustrations and elaborate descriptions of the animals and birds on the ark, was little short of an encyclopaedia of natural history. This was science in the service of theology – and vice versa. For Noah was, according to Kircher, the chief builder of an ark designed by God who infused Noah with the knowledge and skills necessary, with the help of others, to construct it.Footnote ³⁶ ‘I shall assist you in everything,’ God tells Noah, ‘I shall instruct you about the ways and methods of proceeding. I shall send my tutelar and ministering angels to you and they will direct you and protect you from the malign efforts of demons who are plotting against you.’Footnote ³⁷ As Olaf Breidbach and Michael Ghiselin neatly put it, this was ‘baroque “Intelligent Design” theory’.Footnote ³⁸ As such, the ark merited comparison with the seven wonders of the ancient world.Footnote ³⁹

Like his predecessors, Kircher rejected the ‘pyramidal cubit’ for the common cubit of eighteen inches, allowing for a total capacity of 450,000 in³. For Kircher, the Biblical dimensions of the ark – three hundred by fifty by thirty cubits – had theological significance. For the proportions of the height of a man to his width, as created by God, were reflected in those of the ark. ‘Proportio humani corporis ad Arcam comparata’Footnote ⁴⁰ was the heading of a diagram illustrating this. Following Buteo, Kircher provided illustrations of (and rejected) the designs of Origen, Hugo of St. Victor, Cardinal Cajetan, and Nicholas of Lyra (Buteo’s ‘some teachers’).Footnote ⁴¹ He fixed on a design that was essentially that of Buteo – a rectangular box, consisting of three levels, covered by a roof with a peak along the middle.Footnote ⁴² Below the bottom deck were bilges for excrement. Like Buteo, he placed the window of the ark, made of crystal or selenite, in the middle of the third floor. A door was placed on the lowest level to allow the animals to enter.Footnote ⁴³ Kircher’s ark housed the birds in cages, along with separate cabins for Noah and his family, on the top deck. Supplies and equipment were stored on the middle level, along with sufficient birds and animals to feed the carnivores. Noah and his family, too saddened by the flood to even think of having sex, refrained from it while on the ark. However, goats, chickens, deer, and doves continued to reproduce. Problems of overcrowding were avoided by Noah feeding their progeny to the carnivores. These were gathered, along with the non-carnivores, on the lowest deck in three hundred stalls.Footnote ⁴⁴ All in all, there was ample room to house the 130 species of animals, the 150 kinds of birds, and the 30 kinds of snakes.

Unlike Wilkins, Kircher has no systematic classification of the animals. His list of the terrestrial animals on the ark begins, like Buteo’s, from the largest, the elephant (following Pliny the Elder’s first-century Natural History), and proceeds to the smallest. From the portraits and descriptions of animals provided in the text we can include the following: elephant, camel, bull, rhinoceros, buffalo, elk, horse, tiger, bear, lion, deer, ass, onager, bonasus, wolf, pard, goat, sheep, pig, dog, fox, cat, hare, rabbit, squirrel, weasel, badger, dormouse, hedgehog, porcupine, ape, and monkey. All in all, he had some 130 animal species (or 260 animals) to house.

Among the birds pictured in Arca Noë we can name the eagle, vulture, ostrich, falcon, crane, stork, heron, hawk, pelican, goose, peacock, turkey, chicken, duck, raven, crow, dove, pheasant, buzzard, woodcock, godwit, partridge, quail, sparrow, parrot, owl, magpie, hornbill, penguin, woodpecker, mynah, thrush, hoopoe, blackbird, swallow, halcyon, nightingale, lark, flycatcher, robin, finch, hobby, wagtail, and wren. Doubtful of their existence, Kircher did not take the griffon or the phoenix. And he excluded the unicorn on the grounds that the rhinoceros had been mistaken for it. But the siren transformed into a half human female/half fish (or mermaid) in the Liber Monstorum in the eighth century made it onto the ark. Kircher’s museum, he informed his readers, ‘exhibits the tail and bones of the creature; the bones have a wondrous power of staunching bleeding’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Among the snakes we can include the viper, asp, cerastes, dipsas, ptyas, seps, amphisbaena (‘a serpent with two heads on each end of its body’, or a two-headed snake), scytale, and boa.Footnote ⁴⁶ As a mythical creature, the serpent-like basilisk was rejected. Along with the snakes went some ‘amphibians’, the hippopotamus, crocodile, tortoise, otter, beaver, and the seal among them.

Since fish would survive in the waters of the flood (no rabbinic boiling waters here), there was no need to have them on the ark. And Kircher was able to keep the numbers of animals on board to a minimum by also excluding the vast number of hybrids that he thought were especially present in the New World. In short, he took onto the ark only the ‘pure’ and ‘perfect’ species created by God (in the moderate climate of Paradise in the Old World) and not those that had come into existence later. But he did explicitly name the following hybrids: the mule (horse and ass), camelopard (pard and camel), tragelaph (deer and goat), hippelaph (horse and deer), the leopard (lion and pard), allopecopithicum (wolf and ape), armadillo (hedgehog and tortoise), marmota (badger and squirrel), and leocrocuto (lion and hyena). The American bison was excluded on the assumption it was, like many other New World animals, a degraded version of a European original, the result of a different climate and environment. This was a Creation–Evolution debate in an early modern register. For Kircher was arguing for a kind of proto-Darwinism. He was suggesting the adaptation of species to their environmental circumstances. That said, it was more a degeneration from God’s original handiwork than Darwinian survival of the fittest and strongest.Footnote ⁴⁷

There remained the issue, for Kircher, of how the animals got to the New World, granting the existence of oceans between their exit from the ark on Mount Ararat and the South and North America (Australia not being on his horizon). The Jesuit theologian Juan Eusebio Nieremberg (1595–1658), author of Historiae Naturae (1634/1635), argued that God’s angels had brought a number of regional species to the ark before the flood and had flown them back to South America, Africa, and other distant regions afterwards. There, they changed into new variations and new species.Footnote ⁴⁸ Perhaps reliant on Nieremberg, the same argument was made by the Jesuit missionary Bernabé Cobo (1582–1657) in c.1653 in his argument against post-diluvial migration. The miracle by which God had the angels bring the animals to the ark before the flood, he declared, continued when the angels returned them whence they came after the flood.Footnote ⁴⁹ Since there was a general agreement that God had brought the animals to the ark, this explanation of how they returned whence they came had, at least, the virtue of consistency. That said, Kircher’s ‘natural’ explanation was perhaps, if not to Nieremberg and Cobo, at least to us, a more feasible one. The animals, he suggested, had reached their post-diluvian locations by swimming from one continent to another, by traversing land bridges or isthmuses, or by hitchhiking on ships.Footnote ⁵⁰

But what about the insect world? There were those who thought that insects were bred by copulation. Thus, a pair of each kind would have needed to have been on the ark to reproduce after the flood (not that they would have taken up much space). But Kircher was heir to a tradition of spontaneous generation that went back to Aristotle, according to which some creatures, the lowest links in the Great Chain of Being, were not produced by sexual reproduction. That they were, declared Kircher ‘is sheer hallucination, because everyone knows that insects arise either from putrefaction or spontaneous generation’.Footnote ⁵¹ So, there was no need for Noah to take the likes of wasps, ants, worms, bedbugs, beetles, fleas, flies, and all kinds of other assorted creatures. They could reproduce spontaneously after the flood just as they had before it. Their absence, no doubt, made life on the ark more comfortable all around.

Abandon Ark!

The determination of Biblical interpreters from Hugo of St. Victor to Kircher to hold firm to the Biblical dimensions of the ark entailed that the number of animals that entered it had to be kept to a reasonable number. Pereira, Buteo, Raleigh, Wilkins, and Kircher had all tried to limit the numbers down to several hundreds. But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there had been an explosive increase in the knowledge of animals. Information about new animals poured in from North and South America, the Malay Islands, Australia, Africa, India, South-East Asia, and even from Europe. Early mentions of new discoveries in letters, journals, and travel books gradually worked their way into more publicly accessible accounts of the geography, fauna, and flora of the New World.Footnote ⁵²

The sheer volume of animals that was being discovered was making highly problematic the traditional view that all the animals on earth had been gathered into the ark and dispersed thence after the flood. Robert Burton realised that there was a problem:

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the number of animal species had grown far too large for them to be accommodated in an ark of Biblical dimensions, however configured. Noah’s ark could no longer serve as a lifeboat. It was impossible for the floating zoo to house two of ‘every living thing’ (Genesis 6.19). Thus, for example, the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), the founder of the modern conventions for classifying living organisms, named around 7,700 species of plants and around 4,400 species of animals in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae (1758–1759). Linnaeus could not really ignore the problem of the ark and the number of its passengers. But he did. He rejected the idea that God would have created all the animal species at the time of creation and then destroyed them in a universal flood. ‘Is it credible,’ he asked, ‘that the Deity should have replenished the whole earth with animals to destroy them all in a little time by a flood, except a pair of each species preserved in the ark?’Footnote ⁵⁴

Linnaeus’s solution to the problem was radically (for his time) to rewrite the early chapters of the book of Genesis. Linnaeus claimed that dry land was still appearing as waters receded. That, and the evidence of an infinite number of the shells of sea fish to be found on mountains far removed from the sea, justified the conclusion that, at the time of creation, there was a single, small island raised above the primeval waters ‘in which, as in a compendium, all things were collected together which our gracious Creator had destined to the use of man’.Footnote ⁵⁵

Upon this island, there was one individual of each species of plant, one sexual pair of every species of animals created at the beginning, and one pair of humans: ‘Thus the garden of Paradise is rendered the most beautiful imagination can conceive, and the infinite glory of the Creator exalted, not depressed.’Footnote ⁵⁶ All of these species, Linnaeus declared, are still present on the earth, descended from these original pairs.Footnote ⁵⁷

Moreover, the survival of all the original pairs of animals necessitated that they were not all created upon the same ‘natural day’ as the Biblical text suggested. Rather, the Biblical term ‘day’ signified ‘some determinate space of time, not what we now limit it to’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Thus, herbivorous animals were created first and multiplied considerably before the carnivores were created else ‘the carnivorous animals … must have destroyed their proper prey (the future founders of specific family) one day, and starved the next’.Footnote ⁵⁹

It was an island, Linnaeus suggested, that was situated under the equator. There was a high mountain upon it, with snow on its summit (not coincidentally perhaps, like that of the ‘mountain of Ararat in Armenia’).Footnote ⁶⁰ It was upon this island that Adam dwelt and, rather like Linnaeus himself, named all the animals (Genesis 2.20).Footnote ⁶¹ The limited size of the island made it possible for Adam to have discovered all the animals so as to give them their names. To suppose that the land originally created was of the same size as it is at present, Linnaeus declared, ‘equally full of herbs and trees, equally inhabited by animals, and only two of the human species placed in a single corner of it’ is absurd.Footnote ⁶² This was a complete world in miniature, with suitable soil for every plant, suitable plants for every insect, and suitable food and climate for every animal. Animals were thus created, from the sea level to the mountain top, in different environments particularly suited to them.

When the habitable earth was gradually revealed as the primeval ocean receded, the animals were ready-made to disperse from their Edenic island to environments identical to those on the idyllic island upon which they had been originally created. It was a solution that had its problems, as Thomas Browne (1605–1682) pointed out in his Religio Medici,

That said, Linnaeus’s story had many features in common with the Biblical account. He had an earth immersed in water (except for a small island), he had a mountain (like that of Ararat), and he had animal pairs dispersing from a single location, as the waters of the primeval ocean receded. However, in this revised version of the origin of species upon the earth, Noah and his ark were no longer necessary. It was an early sign that the new ‘natural history’ was in the process of relegating the story of Noah from history to myth.

Linnaeus’s new reading of the book of Genesis had one great asset. He had shown how, at the time of creation, every animal had been created suitable for the various environments of the Edenic island. This avoided the need to explain how animals adapted to the new environments in which they arrived after they had dispersed from the island. It was also its great weakness. For, granting the fit between animals and environments, the simpler hypothesis was that the animals had originated, not on an environmentally various Edenic isle from which they had slowly dispersed, but rather in the location where they could now be found.

This was the argument for origins endorsed by the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1768). Buffon found no need to square his natural history with a theology derived from the book of Genesis. Simply put, species arose in those places that they currently occupied. Buffon, however, went a step further. Linnaeus’s account entailed that the species were fixed at the time of their creation. But Buffon argued in 1766 that when, by force of circumstances, animals moved from their native environment, they adapted to their new environments, undergoing alterations ‘so large and so profound, that it is not recognizable at first glance’.Footnote ⁶⁴ In short, species were not fixed but evolved over time by force of external circumstances.

The New Adam

It was not only animals that spread out from the location where the ark landed. All humanity was the consequence of the sons of Noah – Shem, Ham, and Japheth – dispersing from the ark after the deluge: ‘These three were the sons of Noah; and from them the whole earth was peopled’ (Genesis 9.19). The book of Genesis then went on to list all the descendants of Noah’s sons, ‘and from these the nations spread abroad on the earth after the flood’ (Genesis 10.32). The book of Genesis had indicated those lands of the Middle East that had been inhabited by the immediate descendants of Noah. As we shall explore in more detail in Chapter 6, the story of the spread of humanity from the three sons of Noah affirmed the unity of all humankind. For the moment, however, we note that the problem for early modern scholars was that Genesis had failed to inform them about the forebears of the nations of Western Europe.

This was a gap that the Dominican friar Annius of Viterbo (1432–1502) attempted to fill in his Commentaries on Various Authors Discussing Antiquities (1498). It was a work that contained original sources from genuine Greek authors, along with content from imaginary Greek and Roman authors written by Annius himself. These texts, along with detailed commentary by Annius, gave a comprehensive history of the world, from Adam to the flood to the foundation of Etruria, land of the Etruscans, weaving Biblical history, ancient myths, and medieval Trojan legends into a single story.Footnote ⁶⁵ As Nicholas Popper neatly sums it up, the Antiquities ‘was a vertiginous, self-supporting labyrinth of citation that was proof that Etruria had been the capital of a proto-Christian civilization that had been inherited by Christian Rome and was more glorious and ancient than the Hebrew, pagan Roman, or Greek traditions it subsumed’.Footnote ⁶⁶

Annius’s major forgery in Antiquities was the Defloratio Caldaica, putatively written by Berosus the Chaldean, the curator of the library of Babylon in the time of Alexander the Great. We met him earlier in Chapter 1. Having been quoted by Josephus, Eusebius, and other ancient worthies, he was well known to the contemporaries of Annius. According to Annius, Berosus, like Moses, had access to the records of the Biblical patriarchs from Adam onwards. Whereas Moses condensed them, Berosus provided a much fuller account of them than Moses had done. He had constructed a history from a mosaic (so to say) of ancient texts, the key one of which was Adamic in origin and, we might say, pre-Mosaic. Annius’s story was intended to restore the truths of universal history distorted by the Greeks, to provide possible illustrious pasts for European rulers, and simultaneously to demonstrate that the older pagan gods were no more than divinised versions of Noah and his family. It was one in which the story of Noah served as the key moment at the very beginning of world history.

As we know, according to Genesis 6.4, there were giants on the earth in those days. According to Annius, Noah was one of them. The only righteous person among the giants was Noah. He lived with his wife Tytea, his three sons Shem, Japheth, and Ham, and their wives Pandora, Noela, and Noegia. Noah built a ship in the form of a covered box, and when the flood came, only he and his seven family members survived. The ship came to rest on Mount Gordieus in Armenia. In addition to his three firstborn sons, Noah had many other giant children after the flood. All the kings of Europe, Chaldea, and Egypt were their descendants. Noah taught his children theology, sacred ritual, natural magic, astronomy and astrology, geography, agriculture, and, fatally, how to make wine. When Noah had passed out drunk, Ham, who hated his father for favouring his latest-born children more, took hold of his father’s penis and bewitched him, rendering him impotent.

Armenia became quickly overcrowded and it was necessary to depart from there. Noah and his children eventually weighed anchor and sailed around the Mediterranean Sea. Shem received Asia, Ham received Africa, and Japheth Europe. Noah established his capital in Italy, on the left bank of the Tiber, founding the town of Janiculum (later becoming the god Janus of the Etruscans) and the Vatican (becoming the first Pope). Thus, Noah was the founder of the papacy, long before Peter, the disciple of Jesus. The Borgia Pope Alexander VI was delighted with this genealogy reaching back to Noah that Annius had invented. He rewarded Annius by appointing him papal theologian.

According to Annius, during his time in Italy, Noah completed the business of colonisation, making his favourite grandchildren colonial leaders. Later, he returned to Armenia and reigned there. The leadership of Italy was usurped by Ham who proceeded to bring the vices of the pre-diluvian giants with him. Noah returned there and drove Ham and his followers out of Italy. Noah took over the governing of the Etruscans and moved his capital to Vetulon, now known as Viterbo, the birthplace of Annius.Footnote ⁶⁷

The authenticity of Annius’s Antiquities was much disputed from the time of its first publication. Despite that, eighteen editions appeared between 1548 and 1612. There were many defenders and imitators. The desire of early modern European rulers to claim Noah as their forebear was a strong one. After all, he was, in one sense, the original world ruler. Annius’s masterful mimicry of contemporary historical method gave intellectual credibility to those imperial desires.Footnote ⁶⁸ It was a story that early modern Europe willed to believe – a heritage that went back to the New Adam more feasibly than to the first Adam. As Don Allen remarks, ‘It was not long until almost any man of the Renaissance could tell the story of Noah’s wanderings and his plantation of Europe.’Footnote ⁶⁹

Annius had a second project. This was to show that the origin of the pagan gods could be found in Noah and his family. Noah and his wife Tytea were the new Adam and Eve, and they were to become for later generations the creator god and goddess. The Scythians were right, declared Annius, when ‘they call Noah the Father of all Gods Great and Minor, and Author of the Human People, and Chaos, and the Seed of the World; and also when they called Tytea Aretia, that is, the Earth in which Chaos placed his seed, and from whom as though from the Earth all were brought forth’.Footnote ⁷⁰

Unlike Annius’s claim that Noah ended up as ruler of Italy, this one would not have surprised his readers quite so much. For there was a long tradition of Christian mythography, derived from Classical antiquity, that we know as Euhemerism. Beginning in the second century CE, Christians read the pagan gods as nothing more than divinised versions of ancient human heroes and kings who had done great things.Footnote ⁷¹ This was a good strategic move on the part of early Christianity. For it left the Christian God as the only true God. To prove his case that the origin of pagan religion lay in the divinisation of Noah and his family, Annius took the names of various Classical gods and goddesses and retrofitted them to an expanded list of thirty more children of Noah – Macrus, Japetus Junior, Prometheus Piscus, Tuyscon Gigas, Crana, Cranus, Granaeus, Araxa Prisca, Regina, Pandora Junior, Thetis, Oceanus, Typhoeus, and the seventeen Titans.

Sir Walter Raleigh had read his Annius, and he knew that much of it was a forgery. But he was not averse to using Annius when necessary, not wanting the facts to get in the way of a good story.Footnote ⁷² He appears to have accepted Annius’s identification of Noah with the god Janus and the Seed of the World, along with a host of other divine versions of the earthly Noah. Thus, for Raleigh, Noah was also Saturn, Prometheus, Chaos, Heaven, the Sun, Triton, Dionysus, and Bacchus. These were divine names that Noah was given in recognition of, amongst other things, his being the father of nations, his knowledge of God and heavenly things, his initiating of religious rites and sacrifice, his founding of agriculture and viticulture, astronomy and astrology, and his living safely on the waters of the flood.Footnote ⁷³

Similarly, the royalist soldier Matthias Prideaux (c.1625–1646) had also read his Annius. He declared him a forger. But like Raleigh, he followed Annius in holding that the gods of Classical antiquity originated with Noah. According to Prideaux, Noah became Prometheus, Saturn, Seed or Seminarie (of the earth), Hercules, and Janus. And it was from the flood of Noah that ‘all the Heathenish great Inundations’ were derived.Footnote ⁷⁴ The Oxford alchemist Edmund Dickinson (1624–1707) aligned Noah with Janus, the sun god Sol, the sky god Caelus, and Saturn.Footnote ⁷⁵ In a like vein, the French Protestant scholar Samuel Bochart (1599–1667), in his Geographia Sacra, argued that the Greek myth of Saturn and his sons Jupiter, Neptunus, and Pluto, who divided the world between them, was a transformation of the story of Noah and his three sons who did the same.Footnote ⁷⁶ This was pretty much a standard move for early modern euhemerists and Isaac Newton was among them.

Like many of his contemporaries, Isaac Newton (1642–1726) had his feet firmly planted on euhemerist ground, finding the origin of pagan ‘idolatry’ in the divinisation of Noah and his family. And he took a leaf directly out of the Geographia Sacra of Bochart. ‘Bochart,’ Newton declared, ‘has abundantly proved that Saturn is Noah. The same is to be understood of Janus, the most ancient God of the Italians … As Noah was the first Farmer, planted a vineyard and got drunk, so Saturn was the first to teach agriculture … and was the patron of drunkenness … Moreover Saturn is said to have forbidden by legislation that anyone should view Gods naked without being punished for it. This relates to the impiety of Cham, who looked upon his naked father.’Footnote ⁷⁷

We find Newton’s account of the Noachic origins of the gods of antiquity most fully developed in a manuscript entitled ‘The Original of Religions’ in the early 1690s.Footnote ⁷⁸ Newton imagined the most primitive religion to be ‘that of the Prytanea or Vestal Temples. This was spread over all nations until the first memory of things.’ And he found the worship of sacred fire in central hearths (prytanea) throughout the ancient world, from Egypt to China, from Scandinavia to Stonehenge. Prytanea were used in the cities of Canaan and Syria before the time of Moses. Wherever altars were mentioned in the Scriptures, they ‘were of the same nature with the Prytanea of other nations’.Footnote ⁷⁹

The universality of fire worship was proof of its antiquity:

This original religion was at the same time the home of a natural philosophy (science), for it was ‘one designe of the first institution of the true religion to propose to mankind by the frame of the ancient Temples, the study of the frame of the world as the true Temple of the great God they worshipped’.Footnote ⁸¹

Now this was the religion of Noah. For as soon as Noah came out of the ark, he built an altar and, with the sacred fire that he had taken with him onto the ark, made burnt offerings of every clean beast and bird to God. Thus, this religion pre-dated Noah as the religion instituted by God in the beginning. The sacrificing of clean birds and beasts by a consecrated fire in a consecrated place was, according to Newton, the original and true religion that began with Adam. From Noah, it spread to Egypt and thence into all nations as the earth was re-populated after the flood. It was also the religion of the Old Testament that Moses taught the Jews. For Moses had retained the original Egyptian religion of worship of the true God. Thus, declared Newton, ‘the old religion of the Egyptians was the true religion tho corrupted before the age of Moses by the mixture of worship of fals Gods with that of the true one: & by consequence the religion of the Iews was no other then that of Noah propagated down in Egypt till the age of Moses’.Footnote ⁸² Natural philosophy, like the original natural religion, was similarly corrupted in Egypt.

But how did the religion of Noah first reach Egypt? According to Newton, after the deluge, Noah stayed in Mesopotamia until after the destruction of the Tower of Babel, some 101 years later (see Plate 13). Then he and his family moved from Babylon to the land of Shinar where he divided the world between his three sons. Shem stayed with Noah, but Ham was sent to Egypt and Japheth to Asia Minor. There the original religion was established. But it was also in Egypt that idolatry began with the worship of the sun, moon, and stars as the visible homes of divinity. Worse was to follow. For the souls of the dead were translated into the stars and the stars ‘by virtue of the souls were endued with the qualities of the men & according to those qualities governed the world’.Footnote ⁸³ And the souls of the dead then migrated into animals, plants, unshaped rocks, and eventually into statues and graven images of all kinds. From Egypt, the corrupt form of the original religion spread into Greece and other countries through commerce and colonisation.

13 ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top on the heavens.’

(Genesis 11.4)

For his account of how idolatry spread through the nations, Newton relied upon an argument from a text entitled De Equivocis Temporum. In theory, it was penned by the Greek philosopher Xenophon, but it was really one of the forgeries of Annius in his Antiquities:

Thus, according to Newton, following Annius, every nation that deified its kings applied the name of Jupiter to him whom they held most in honour, and the name Saturn to his father. In Egypt, Noah became Saturn, Ham became Jupiter Hammon, and Chus (Ham’s son) Hercules. The Chaldeans, ‘placing the gods one age lower than the Egyptians’, gave the name of Saturn to Ham, Jupiter to Chus (Ham’s son), and Hercules to Nimrod (Ham’s grandson). Not omitting Noah, they called him the sky god Coelus or Uranus. The Assyrians, placing their gods one age lower than the Chaldeans, gave the name of Coelus to Ham, Saturn to Chus, Jupiter to Nimrod, and Hercules to the son of Nimrod. Noah they called Hypsuranius and Eliun, father of Uranus, ‘that is the most High’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Newton was more than pleased with all this:

Noachides and the New World

That the inhabitants of the Old World were the descendants of Noah was almost universally accepted. The land routes were known and the sea voyages short. But how did the descendants of Noah get to America? The English jurist Sir Matthew Hale (1609–1676) put the problem precisely in 1642:

The simplest, if most improbable, solution, accepting that the Indians of America were human, was that they were the direct descendants of Noah who, after the deluge, travelled to the New World. This was the solution of the French traveller Marc Lescarbot (c.1570–1641) in his History of New France (1611). Noah was, after all, a great workman and sailor. He could have made another ship, the ark being stuck fast on Ararat. ‘For what hinders us,’ Lescarbot asked, ‘from believing that Noah during his life of 350 years after the Flood did not himself see to it, and take pains to people, or rather to repeople, these lands? Is it believable that he remained so long a space of time without engaging upon and carrying out many great and lofty enterprises?’Footnote ⁸⁸ Noah had ‘knowledge of a thousand things which we have not’ handed down to him from Adam.Footnote ⁸⁹ Lescarbot too had read his Annius. Having been especially chosen by God to renew the earth, Noah had, by report at least, knowledge of these lands, ‘to which he would have no more difficulty in setting sail, after peopling Italy, than in coming from the end of the Mediterranean to the Tiber, to found his Janiculum, if the profane historians are correct, as a thousand reasons would lead one to believe’.Footnote ⁹⁰

Lescarbot was the first – and almost the last – to suggest that Noah had travelled to the New World. It was hinted at by the Spanish priest Fernando de Montesinos (fl. early to mid-sixteenth century) in his history of Peru (c.1644). He reinvented Ophir, the great-great-great-grandson of Noah (Genesis 10.29), as Noah’s grandson, enabling Ophir to settle in America 340 years after the flood, and thus in Noah’s lifetime. According to Fernando, by 150 years after the flood, the population of Armenia had become so great that Noah commanded his sons and grandsons to go in search of lands to settle. Fernando declared that there was no lack of authorities who had suggested that Noah himself travelled around the whole earth discovering and allotting the lands to his descendants. It would not be difficult, Montesinos concluded, ‘to believe that Noah himself had been in Peru’.Footnote ⁹¹

The question of which descendants of Noah inhabited the New World was as confused as the problem of which of them inhabited Europe. It was exemplified in 1607 in the Origen de los Indios de el Nuevo Mundo, e Indias Occidentales of the Dominican priest Gregorio Garcia (d.1627). He was convinced that Noah had given Asia to Shem, Egypt and Africa to Ham, and Europe to Japheth, and that the people of the Indies had come from one of these three parts. Within these criteria he identified the major contemporary opinions on the origins of the American Indians. We can distinguish these into particular and general theories. Among the former, he examined those accounts that had the origins of the Indians with the Carthaginians, the Spaniards, the Greeks, the Phoenicians, the East Asians (Chinese, Tatars, Scythians), migrants from Atlantis before it was swallowed by the sea, and the ten lost tribes of Israel.

More generally, first, he considered their possible arrival by sea because of their navigational skills passed on to them by Noah. Second, he thought it possible that they might have arrived by chance as the result of a storm. Third, he considered that they might have arrived by a no longer existing land route. His conclusion? He rejected all and accepted all. The Indians proceeded, he wrote, ‘neither from one Nation or people, nor went to those parts from one [part] of the Old World [Mundo Viego]. Nor did the settlers all walk or sail by the same road or voyage at the same time, nor in the same manner. But actually they proceeded from various nations, from which some came by sea, forced and driven by storms; others by art of navigation looking for those lands, of which they had heard. Some came by land.’Footnote ⁹²

The three general solutions offered by Garcia were derived from the Spanish Jesuit missionary José de Acosta’s (c.1539–1600) acclaimed Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590). His aim was to find historical arguments that linked the New World populations with those of the Old. Despite Saint Augustine’s belief that the immensity of the ocean ruled out crossing to the New World, the presence of humanity there and the Biblical teaching that all men derived from a first man meant they must have done just that. ‘Certainly,’ he humorously remarked, ‘we are not to think that there was a second Noah’s Ark in which men were brought to the Indies, nor much less that some angel brought the first inhabitants of this world holding them by the hair, as did an angel with the prophet Habakkuk.’Footnote ⁹³

So, aside from being flown through the air by an eagle or a winged horse, or using fish or mermaids to travel by sea, there were only three possibilities he was willing to entertain. The first of these was that they came deliberately by navigational and sailing skills. It was a solution he could not accept, since the technologies enabling transoceanic travel (like the compass) were too recent to have been used by ancient travellers, nor was there any mention of such technologies among the ancients. Second, he admitted that it was also possible that the original inhabitants of the Indies had been cast upon unknown shores accidentally as the result of violent storms. But this failed to explain how the varieties of animals in the New World had reached there after the flood, for the same explanation must work for animals as well as men. Acosta conceded that some animals that were useful to men may have been on board and shipwrecked along with them. But this failed to explain the presence in the New World of ‘wolves and foxes and other such vile and worthless animals’.Footnote ⁹⁴ It is unreasonable, he declared, to think that such animals might have swum the distance to the Indies.

His third and preferred solution was to postulate a land bridge between Asia and America, somewhere near the northern or the southern end of the American continent. If so, he declared,

And it was a solution that simultaneously also explained the fauna of the New World that had similarly travelled overland from Asia to America.

The Garcian tradition predominated in Spain for the remainder of the seventeenth century, while Northern Europe was dominated by the Acostan solution. But there were two more solutions in the seventeenth century that vied for public attention in Northern Europe. The first of these was the Jewish origin of the Indians. Acosta had argued that the belief that the Indians came from the Jews was a false one.Footnote ⁹⁶ But there was a resurgence of this tradition in Holland and England in the mid-seventeenth century. It was stimulated by the first Jewish contribution to the question of the origin of the American Indians – The Hope of Israel (1650) by the Portuguese Jew Menasseh ben Israel (1604–1657).

Manasseh’s account chimed in perfectly with contemporary English concerns about the re-admission of the Jews to England as a necessary prelude to the conversion of the Jews and the return of Christ. As the English Puritan Thomas Thorowgood (d. c.1669) put it in his Iewes in America (1650), ‘From the Jews our faith began, / To the Gentiles then it ran, / To the Jews return it shall, / Before the dreadful end of all.’Footnote ⁹⁷ In sum, Manasseh argued that the West Indies were anciently inhabited by a part of the ten tribes of Israel who arrived there from Tartary via the Strait of Anian in the northwest of America. To his own day, he believed, they kept the Jewish religion. Eventually, in the not-too-distant future, along with members of other lost Jewish tribes elsewhere, they would return to Jerusalem. There and then, all twelve of the tribes of Israel would be reunited under the rule of the Davidic Messiah, never to be driven from their homeland again.Footnote ⁹⁸ This was not an argument for the Jewish origin of the Indians so much as one for a separate tradition of ancient Mosaic observance in America, one that existed still alongside other non-Jewish Americans.

This was a different argument from that of Thomas Thorowgood whose Iewes in America was the first sustained argument by an English author for the Jewish origin of all Americans.Footnote ⁹⁹ For Thorowgood it was at least probable that the Americans were the descendants of the lost tribes who had degenerated into paganism. Following Acosta, he thought it likely that they had come to America from Asia at the point where the two land masses were most close – the land or strait of Anian.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ There were six ‘conjectures’ why Thorowgood thought that the Americans were Jews. First, the myths of the Indians were suggestive of a Jewish origin; second, their profane fashions, ceremonies, opinions, and sacred rites were comparable; third, their words and manners of speech were consonant; fourth, their cannibalism was prophesied in the Bible; fifth, like the Jews, they would be the last to know Christ; and finally, the calamities suffered by the Indians were predicted for the Jews in the Bible.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Thorowgood had given the English theologian Sir Hamon L’Estrange (1605–1660) a copy of his Iewes in America in 1650. L’Estrange was underwhelmed. He took aim at Thomas Thorowgood’s Iewes in America (along with Manasseh’s book) in his Americans no Iewes (1651/2), conjecture by conjecture, arguing that the similarities in beliefs, practices, and languages to which Thorowgood had drawn attention were unpersuasive and that the Indians often lived in violation of the precepts of the Mosaic law. Rather belying his title, L’Estrange offered an alternative account of the Jewish origin of American Indians. Simply put, L’Estrange argued that America was first populated only 300 years after the flood, some 1,200 years before the ten tribes of Israel became lost. It was Noah’s peaceful son Shem and his children, he declared, who, under threat from the warlike progeny of Ham or Japheth, ‘removed still more East, and soon after planted and peopled the nearest, and more parts of America’.Footnote ¹⁰² More of the dispersion of the sons of Noah anon, when, just over a century later, it was incorporated into the beginnings of the European science of race.