Time to talk about Noah and the Ark.
Anyway, after the Cain and Abel story, there’s a whole lot of begattery going on and people living even longer than Yoda. Noticeably absent for Chapter 5 is Cain and how long he lived; apparently he doesn’t pop up again until the computer game Command & Conquer. The longest living, of course, is Methuselah (did his friends call him “Meth”?) at 969 years. SarahK says if you follow the chapters and do the math, he dies the year of the flood. I’ll take her word for it because I didn’t expect there to be word problems in the Bible and didn’t have my calculator on me.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
So God suddenly declares man’s “days shall be one hundred and twenty years,” and giants are walking the earth and I’ve just given up on expecting the author, Moses, to give me anymore details of all this wackiness.
Now God gets angry (He’s like angry throughout the Old Testament) at man’s wickedness and declares, “I’m gonna kill the bastards!” (not an actual Bible quote). Then he realized that Noah is ‘aight so he spares him, his wife, his sons – Ham, Shem, and Japheth (where do they get these names?) – and their families.
Now comes the most detail yet in the Bible as God explains step by step how to build an ark. Yeah, people popping out of nowhere and giants wandering around doesn’t need any explanation, but we learn how the ark was built down to about where each nail goes.
At least now we know where Jesus got his interest in carpentry from.
Noah is commanded to take onto the ark all the animals there are – seven each of the clean animals and two each of the unclean (I’m not sure exactly about the clean/unclean distinction, but I know it was discussed in the movie Pulp Fiction). Now, I admit I don’t know how big a cubit is, but you aren’t going to fit every specie of animal on that boat – I don’t even care if it has four decks.
Supposedly, though, Noah shoves them all in there (luckily there being no Humane Society to stop him) and somehow gets the thing afloat when it rains for forty days and forty nights (almost as bad as Seattle). So the water goes up fifteen cubits (I really should look up how long a cubit is) and covers the mountains and kills everything on the land. Think of all those drowning puppies.
Of course, I’m going, “Bull.” There is not enough water on earth to cover all the land and mountains, even if you melt all the ice. Are we supposed to believe that God just made water out of nowhere? And where did it all go when it receded?
Look at this verse (Gen 8:1):

Then God remembered Noah, and every living thing, and all the animals that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters subsided.

First off, God just forgot about them? What in the world was He up to? It makes me wonder if God has other universes to play with and we’re just a side interest.
And the water was blown away by wind? Evidently, Noah, Moses, and/or God do not understand the water cycle (and I’m not thinking it’s God).
Whatever. Let’s just take it at face value. Now, instead of everyone descending from Adam and Eve, Noah the new origin as only he and his kin weren’t voted off the island. And God then displays the symbol of gay pride as his covenant that He’ll never fly off the handle and kill everyone again. So every time you see a rainbow, remember that God has given up His mass-murdering ways… at least by flood.
Now here is where things get weird.
No, really, this is where I’m completely lost. Noah makes wine and then gets completely wasted, passing out drunk and naked – nothing unusual yet. Now lookee here (Gen 9:22-23 for those playing along at home):

And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers outside. But Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it on both their shoulders, and went backward and covered the nakedness of their father. Their faces were turned away, and they did not see their father’s nakedness.

Now Noah gets all mad at Ham after this, when it seemed like Ham was the one wronged by seeing his father naked when he probably didn’t even mean to. Now SarahK told me that “saw the nakedness of his father” is a euphemism for… uh… nastier things, but the next part about Shem and Japheth being careful not to look at their naked six-hundred something year-old father (and who wouldn’t be careful once warned by your scarred for life brother) seems to me to imply that all Ham did was see Noah naked (probably then exclaiming, “Gah!” and shielding his eyes ala Hank Hill).
Whatever really happened, the crazy thing is Noah doesn’t curse Ham (probably figuring having the name “Ham” being a big enough curse) and instead curses Ham’s son Canaan to be a servant of the others and such. What the hell did he do?
Some used the curse as evidence why slavery of Africans was okay, but the whole part seems more like evidence that God was a little hasty in picking Noah as the righteous one. I really think Ham, Shem, and Japheth should have gotten together and given their father an intervention.
In toto, I take the lesson of the flood is that everyone deserves a mulligan… even the Lord.