The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood Kindle Edition

Reading "The Ark Before Noah" makes you feel like you're in a comfortable armchair in a book-lined study. There's a brandy snifter in your hand, and you're listening to one of the most charming raconteurs you can imagine. He's spinning a yarn so compellingly and amusingly that, almost against your will, you're becoming interested in a topic about which you'd never before cared. The vast majority of humankind has no clue what cuneiform writing is. But the man in the comfy chair opposite yours, Dr. Irving Finkel, Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian Scripts at the British Museum, would like to change that.

Ostensibly, this book is about a millennia-old slab of clay with some wedge-shaped writing on it and what it reveals: a Primordial Flood story unlike any other. As Finkel informs us, there are plenty of other Babylonian cuneiform tablets in the British Museum and elsewhere with bits and pieces of Flood narratives (twelve, if memory serves). But this one was unique. Not only does it give precise instructions and dimensions for building a giant round boat (surprising enough in and of itself), it also contained the phrase "the animals entered the ark two by two"--a phrasing not found in any other Babylonian Flood narratives, but one which DOES occur in the Hebrew Bible.

Now, were this book only about this tablet, it would be fascinating enough. But "The Ark Before Noah" is much more than that. "The Ark Before Noah" is a love story, an account of the lifelong romance between Dr. Finkel and cuneiform writing.

Not only is it the oldest form of human writing known of, it's also, as Dr. Finkel informs us, far and away the most fun--a cryptographical challenge for the nimblest of brains. Woven through the story of the Ark Tablet is a chatty, witty, humane, and at times very funny memoir of a life spent deciphering these baffling indentations in once-wet mud. It's also a marvelous introductory history to the discipline of Assyriology itself.

But it goes beyond that. One of Dr. Finkel's many gifts is to be able to see behind the inscriptions, and recognize the very human people who made them. The millennia between us and them notwithstanding, they were, he points out, people precisely like us. They struggled with the same dilemmas, had the same worries and concerns, and felt the same emotions. And, using our shared humanity across the millennia as a point of departure, he asks some much larger questions about the Bible: who wrote it? When? Why? And why would its anonymous writers or compilers, forcibly exiled in Babylon, have included stories cribbed from their pagan oppressors in their own holy book?

Dr. Finkel has pulled off a rare feat: a lucidly scholarly, readable, personal, and personable book about a subject which, in the hands of the wrong writer, would be as boring as watching paint dry--but which, in his telling, becomes mesmerizing.

For anyone whose Judeo-Christian faith depends on the stories told in Old Testament to be unique, this is a book to be avoided at all costs. On the other hand, for those whose faith is not dependent on Biblical literalism and others who are interested in discovering the influences of Mesopotamian cultures on the development of various strands of Biblical stories, this book is fascinating. Written by Irving Finkel, an expert on cuneiform at the British Museum, he uses his translations of various cuneiform tablets (including a newly translated one he calls “the ark tablet”) to present a compelling argument about how the flood story grew from Babylonian roots into the Noah story we find in the Bible.

The flood story from the Epic of Gilgamesh and its similarities to the Noah story has been around for a while but Finkel looks even further back to find another strand that influenced the Noah story. He shows the importance of the measurements that are described for the ark and makes an absolutely excellent argument that the original ark would have been a circular coracle made of reeds.

Beyond the flood story, Finkel also shows the importance of the Babylonian captivity on the development of the Bible. He points out the influence Babylonian education would have had on the Jews trained there. In addition, he draws parallels between other Babylonian legends and the development of the Bible. He not only makes connections to the flood story but he also draws excellent lines to other stories like the Tower of Babel and the finding of Moses as a baby in the small reed boat.

Finkel really makes an effort to produce a well-reasoned, well-backed argument. There is a bit much about interpreting cuneiform, especially if you bother to work through the appendices; however, it is worthwhile to stick through it. It is often difficult for modern people to understand how ancient cultures influenced each other but a number of recent books have really opened up these avenues of study. This book is an important contribution to that.

This may be the best book on the origins of the ancient middle eastern Flood myth that you will ever read. This is not to say that someone may not, one day, supplant it with a more comprehensive and detailed work but I doubt that it will be as readable. For a book that frequently dips into personal accounts, it is startlingly full of information. I also have to agree with Dr. Finkel that his little tablet combined with his own wide-ranging knowledge of the other Flood texts really starts to fill in the gaps in how the story evolved. Best of all, Dr. Finkel provides an interlinear translation of the text of his Flood tablet. In my experience, translations of ancient texts without easy reference to the original language are often pretty but next to useless. Being able to review the original language and his notes on it enabled me to uncover more about the text than Dr. Finkel presented including a little bit about mesopotamian food fermentation.

Some reviewers found it a little dry and I have to agree that, to my tastes, he went a little too deep into coracle construction details. Overall, however, it is quite readable and entertaining. Other reviewers have objected that it doesn't cover much new territory. It doesn't. His Flood tablet is tiny and covers only a small part of the myth but the power of the book is how Dr. Finkel used that small bit of extra information to really tie the other Flood myths together. After you have read this book, you will have a much better idea of how the myth evolved. Strangely, he has an appendix on some aspects of ancient middle eastern ghosts. Believe it or not, it really does tie into the rest of the book.