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"We know that the Bible is mostly fiction, but did you ever wonder how some of the incredible stories got into the book? As a child, the story of Noah made no sense to me. Why would a supposedly loving God commit a genocidal holocaust by killing all humans on Earth except for one man and his family (a wife, three sons, and their wives)? The answer was that this perfect, all-knowing God somehow regretted that he made human beings and he grieved in his heart (Genesis 6:6) because, much to God’s surprise, there was violence on Earth. Only 600-year-old Noah found favor in God’s eyes. So God told Noah to build an ark and save only his family and pairs of animals from a life-destroying flood. Noah didn’t question God’s plan or show any compassion for his neighbors. Obedient Noah just followed orders. (By the way, how do Christian fundamentalists justify an abortion-loving god who killed all those innocent fetuses?)

When the family finally left the ark for dry land, a grateful Noah burned some of the animals that were on the ark and offered them on an altar to God. When God smelled the burning flesh, he was pleased and promised never again to destroy all life by a flood.

What did Noah then do? He made wine and became the first drunk in the Bible. He drank so much that he passed out while naked. One of Noah’s sons, Ham, saw his father naked. When Noah awakened, he got furious with Ham for seeing him naked and for some strange reason cursed Ham’s innocent son, Canaan, and said an appropriate punishment for Canaan and his descendants would be perpetual slavery. (The authors of the Bible probably focused on Canaan because in the Book of Joshua the Israelites slaughtered all inhabitants of Canaan on the way to their “promised” land.)

Though not biblical, some now claim that Ham’s descendants populated Egypt and the rest of Africa. Noah’s curse was later used by preachers and politicians in the American South to justify race-based slavery.

The Bible’s writers were not original in their flood story. They seem to have plagiarized from an older Mesopotamian tale known as the Epic of Gilgamesh, written around 1800 BCE, long before the Hebrew Bible was written. In it, the Mesopotamian gods decide to punish humanity with a catastrophic flood. One man was chosen to survive using a specially constructed boat filled with animals. After the flood, birds were released to find dry land. On dry land, animals were sacrificed to repair the relationship between humanity and the divine.

The authors of Genesis were aware of the deluge depicted in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Archaeologists have found bits of the Epic of Gilgamesh all over ancient Israel. It appears that the Epic of Gilgamesh was in broad circulation at the time Genesis was written."

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