Noah, Gilgamesh, and getting hammered
The building of the ark, from the Nuremberg Chronicles
We’ve already seen Captain America: The Winter Soldier thrice, and we wouldn’t mind seeing it again but one must try to get a life. So we thought of watching Darren Aronofsky’s epic Noah, only to find that it’s not showing yet, nor is it on the roster of coming attractions. Hmmm. This wouldn’t have something to do with the protests about the movie version differing from the biblical version, would it? (According to InterAksyon, the delay in the screening is due to a dispute over distribution, not religion.)
Apparently American viewers have complained about Noah’s drunkenness—an episode we remember having read about, most recently in the David Rosenberg translation of the Book of J. From the King James Bible, Genesis 9:
20 And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard:
21 And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.
22 And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.
23 And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness.
24 And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.
25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.
Which was harsh, considering Noah was the one who got so hammered, he passed out naked. (In his defence, he was about 600 years old at the time, reason enough to be cranky.) You think Ham wanted to see what he saw?
Here’s one of the likely sources of the story of The Great Flood, Tablet XI of the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
April 11th, 2014 at 10:19
What I read was that conservatives were complaining more about…
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… Noah wanting/planning to kill his grandchild (once Emma Watson gives birth to the baby). That, along with some LOTResque battles between Fallen Angels and attackers of the ark. But this is the guy who directed Black Swan, so what did people expect?
Meanwhile, in non-movie speculations, some fringe groups interpret Ham’s offense was not so much that he saw his father naked but that it was a euphemism for him molesting the drunk man. Ah, Bible stories: truly more fascinating than many modern tales.
April 11th, 2014 at 12:01
Child-killing not unprecedented in the bible, see Abraham and Isaac among others, and what about Lot offering to send his daughters out to the mob wanted to rape his angelic visitors?
Ach, now I have to see Noah.
April 12th, 2014 at 02:25
Oh, and also: Aronofsky is Jewish, and I believe he was approaching this more from a Torah / Kabbalah tradition, so really, the Christian extremists should shut up. The Muslims also ban it, but in their case, it’s generic in the sense that they’re not allowed to visually depict any prophet.
Well, if Noah doesn’t get released here, hopefully online releases will be available.
April 12th, 2014 at 03:44
Imagining the giant bilao version. :D
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/noahs-ark-round/283335/
April 13th, 2014 at 03:55
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/wwjtd/2014/04/jon-stewart-rips-christians-upset-about-the-noah-movie-it-seems-those-christians-didnt-exactly-read-the-bible/
That blond woman (Dana something; can’t believe she used to be White House press secretary! Well, since Bush chose her, it’s not that unbelievable.) saying something about her childhood memories of Noah just perfectly illustrates my point about people who claim to be Christians base their beliefs almost solely on the sanitized stories based on the Bible they were taught as kids (and that includes me before I became wiser) without actually having read the real text. Atheists/agnostics actually know more about religion and its history than their believers and that’s been proven by studies. What they believe is the fantasy of the loving, white-haired God who’s always depicted as white (with clouds, angels and rainbows surrounding him) who will always forgive them for their “sins” while totally missing the irony that the one they’re begging to forgive them is a genocidal maniac that you will see from reading the actual source. And if Dana doesn’t even know the image of drunk Noah, how much more shocking would it be for her to find out a lot of the stories and characters from both the Old and New Testaments (possibly even Jesus) were adapted or plagiarized from even more ancient myths just like Jessica illustrated with the Epic of Gilgamesh? Reading and rational thought have the general effect of making you realize “wizard” behind the curtain once you poke the bubble of ignorance.