The final chapter begins with consideration of the beginnings of source criticism of the first five books of the Bible and the discovery of The Epic of Gilgamesh that cast doubt, as a result, on the literal truth of the Genesis text. This chapter also takes up the development of ‘Creation Science’ as a means of shifting the debate on evolution versus the Bible to one of evolution versus ‘Creation Science’ and the role of Noah and the story of the flood in this transition. It also demonstrates how the belief in Biblical inerrancy leads to the modern conservative Christian quest to find the lost ark and, in the absence of that discovery, to recreate the ark this century in the US state of Kentucky. It shows how the ‘Ark Encounter’ in Kentucky creates a new legend of Noah that goes well beyond the Biblical story.

This chapter deals with the question of how the story of Noah begins to leave the world of history to enter the world of myth and legend. It begins with a discussion of Noah and his family within the developing field in the eighteenth century of comparative mythography. Particular attention is paid to the idea of Noah and his family as the origin of all religions in the works of Jacob Bryant. The chapter also continues the discussion started in Chapter 5 on the populating of the earth after the flood with an account of the role of Noah and his sons in the development of ‘race science’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is followed by a discussion of ‘the curse of Ham’ and its connection to the slave trade.

This chapter begins with an account of the flood story in Hellenistic Judaism with particular attention to Josephus and Philo. It continues with a discussion of the account of Noah within the group of interpreters in the second to fourth centuries CE, whom we generally gather under the broad title of ‘Gnostics’. Like the Gnostics, the early Christian interpreters gave the story of Noah a radically new meaning as they sought the ‘spiritual’ meaning of the Noah story behind the literal or historical meaning. This section of the chapter explores the many allegorical and prototypical readings that dominated Christian readings during the first millennium. The chapter ends with a discussion of Hugh of St. Victor’s (1096–1141) De Arca Noe Morali – an early sign of the increasing emphasis for the next five hundred years within the Christian tradition on the literal and historical meaning of the story of Noah.

The opening chapter sets the scene for the remainder of the work with a detailed account of the flood traditions of the ancient world. It begins with the story of Noah and the flood as it occurs in the book of Genesis. It then traces the origin of the Biblical story in the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh (thirteenth–twelfth century BCE) and the Babylonian Noah Uta-napishti. It then outlines how these flood traditions were appropriated within the early Jewish and Christian traditions. This is followed by an account of Greek and Roman Flood stories and how they were seen within the ancient world in relation to the Biblical and Mesopotamian traditions. Consideration is also given to Noah as ‘the man of righteousness’ in the New Testament, his role in the Jewish Sybilline Oracles (early first century BCE), and in the literature between the Old and New Testaments.

Taking its lead from Darren Aronofsky’s film ‘Noah’, the Epilogue shows how the legend of Noah and the flood has greater relevance in the present moment than any other legend in Western thought.

This chapter begins by exploring the interpretations of the story of Noah in Rabbinic Judaism from the third century CE onwards to the end of the first millennium. It demonstrates how the rabbinic interpretations of the story of Noah took precedence over the Biblical account, as the rabbis engaged with paganism, Christianity, Gnosticism, and Islam, adapting their reading of the Hebrew Scriptures to the cultures that surrounded them while they told and retold the Scriptures. The chapter demonstrates how the Noah story in the Qur’an, derived from the Biblical one, remains the bedrock of Islamic readings. And, like Christian and Jewish interpreters, where the Islamic commentators found gaps in the Qur’anic account, they filled them in, and where they found difficulties, they clarified them, sometimes by drawing from the details in the Genesis story and in the rabbinic tradition.

This chapter explores the turn within Western thought about the story of Noah towards its historical meaning. Crucially, the production of new ‘knowledges’ in the secular arts and sciences during the late medieval and early modern periods generated critical reflection on the ‘knowledge’ contained within the Bible. This chapter explores late medieval and early modern discussions on the size and shape of the ark, what animals were on the ark, and how the ark could feed and house them all. It details the role of the ark in the early modern classifications of animals, the relation of the shape of the ark to contemporary ship building, the problem created for the ark by the discoveries of animals in the New World, the story of the dispersal of Noah and his descendants to Europe, Africa, and Asia, and the connection of the Indians of America to Noah and his family.

The Prologue begins by emphasising the importance of the story of Noah as the founder of humanity after the flood in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. It also indicates that the story of Noah, the flood, and its aftermath had a highly important and much forgotten role, from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, in the development of secular thought in an array of modern scholarly disciplines – biology, geology, geography, anthropology, demography, zoology, mythography, religious studies, and even naval engineering. It concludes with brief summaries of the chapters within this volume.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between the story of Noah and the New Science. It begins with the contemporary discussions about the date of the flood and the calculations about the numbers of people from the time of the flood to the present. It continues with the late seventeenth-century debate about the universality of the flood. The issue of the date of the flood leads also to the problem of fossils and their relation to the flood of Noah, with particular attention to John Woodward’s An Essay Towards a Natural History of the Earth. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the shifting time scales on the age of the earth during the eighteenth century cast doubt upon the role in the formation of the earth that had traditionally been ascribed to the flood, along with attempts to harmonise the Biblical story with the new age of the earth.