The Waters Above and Below: Revisiting the Story of Noah’s Ark and the Great Flood
The story of Noah’s Ark and the Great Flood has long cast a spell on the public imagination.
The Biblical account of Noah’s Ark has inspired multiple archeological attempts to “recover” the wreckage of the ark across various mountaintops in the Middle East and a $100 million “biblically-accurate replica” that serves as a tourist attraction in Williamstown, Kentucky.
And in 2014, filmmaker Darren Aronofsky (of Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream fame) drew the Evangelical community’s ire with his bombastic and Jewish mythology-heavy take on the Noah story starring Russell Crowe and Emma Watson.
It may also be one of the most misrepresented stories in the entire Bible, curiously repackaged as a children’s tale about a “faithful servant of God” rescuing smiling animals in his big boat from the big rain instead of the more textually-accurate (and terrifying) account of a wrathful deity instigating a planet-wide genocide by submerging the Earth underwater for more than a year.
