They’re making a Noah film. It’s got Russel Crowe, Emma Watson and Anthony Hopkins. From the trailer, I anticipate that this film will be an immense source of unfortunate implications and horrifying subtext. “You must trust that He will speak in a language you can understand”?! You know, after reading some resources that pattern-match God’s behaviour with that of an abusive partner, I just can’t unsee it...
Also, amusingly enough, it features a spherical Earth.
And I have to wonder how they’ll fit “one couple of every species of the Earth” in that ship, huge though it is, without involving Gallifreyan technology.
And about all the water on Earth not being sufficient to actually flood everything; will they have God miraculously, spontaneously and temporarily generate water for that specific purpose, and then later remove it?
You know, I’d love to be chill about this stuff, to say it’s “just a good story”, that I should invoke the MST3K mantra and just relax, but I can’t, because the story doesn’t seem to be all that good in the first place. Jor El’s story has a similar motif and looks better than this.
Standard young-Earther responses, taken from when I was a young-Earth creationist.
Round Earth: Yes. You sort of have to stretch to interpret the Bible as saying the Earth is round or flat, so it’s not exactly a contradiction. Things like “the four corners of the Earth” are obvious metaphor.
Animals on the boat: The “kinds” of animals (Hebrew “baramin”) don’t correspond exactly to what we call species. There are fewer animals in the ark than 2*(number of modern species); this is considered to be a sufficient answer even though it probably isn’t. I don’t know exactly what level of generality the baramin are supposed to be; I guess it depends on how much evolution the particular creationist is willing to accept. They’ll typically use the example of dogs and wolves being the same “kind,” but if that’s the level of similarity we’re talking about then there’ll still be an awful lot of kinds.
Amount of water: The Earth used to be a lot smoother. Shallower oceans, lower mountains, etc. So it could be covered with a more reasonable amount of water. We know this because in the genealogies some guy named his son after the fact that “in his day the Earth was divided.” (The word for divided, Peleg, means earthquake or cataclysm or something. This verse also doubles as tectonic plates being moved around.)
I don’t agree with these, but thought that to avoid strawmanning I should post the l responses that I would have used. Not that they’re much better than the straw version, but this is the kind of thing that would have been said by at least one YEC.
Also, amusingly enough, it features a spherical Earth. And I have to wonder how they’ll fit “one couple of every species of the Earth” in that ship, huge though it is, without involving Gallifreyan technology.
Biblically speaking, it’s seven breeding couples of every “clean” species, one of every unclean.
What’s much more nonsensical than fitting all those animals onto the ark in the first place though, is the idea that it would actually save them. You’ve got predators reduced to equal numbers with their prey species; memory check, what do they live on?
Given how God is Amighty, one wonders why he didn’t have all the bad people just drop dead where they stood, Kira-style. He did something similar with Egypt’s firsborn, yes?
Bizarre… it seems just like if a nomadic Bronze Age tribe had picked up scraps of tales from, say, Babylon and Egypt, embellished other collective memories, and created some out of whole cloth for political purposes!
This actually looks better than I expected. I anticipate it to have good visuals and to possibly be worth watching. And there are some redeeming aspects to the storyline; isn’t it fundamentally about taking heroic responsibility and doing what is necessary in the face of an existential threat? Now there’s also all sorts of other luggage it’s pulling around (wait, isn’t the existential threat being caused by the one who’s asking him to alleviate it?).
Daren Aaronofsky has done some good and rather intense films in the past (Pi, Black Swan, The Wrestler, Requiem for a Dream). He’ll likely make it at least powerful if not meaningful.
pattern-match God’s behaviour with that of an abusive partner
There’s an interpretation of the Bible, or at least the Old Testament, that depicts its god and people as coevolving a workable set of ethics as successive attempts at top-down imposition fail.
This isn’t going to fly with the omni(potent|scient|benevolent) God that’s standard in modern Christianity, of course, but from my admittedly atheistic standpoint it tallies a lot better with the story as depicted.
You know I’ve always wondered how the world would react to Modern-Day-Noah if someone demonstrated a miracle or two. Ze has marching orders from on High, power to protect zir autonomy/safety but not compel obedience. Justification is “God Says So” and task is onerous and of no obvious benefit. (Build a big temple/ark/pyramid/whatever). Seems like that could be a pretty cool movie.
I didin’t feel like it was worth mentioning because of the pointlessness of it, but still, those are some absurdly large measurements for a ship, to be built in the Bronze Age, by one family.
There is also a TV adaptation from 1999), where the chronology is a bit mixed-up because it presents the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as some sort of “prelude” to the Flood, whereas in the Bible the Sodom story is several hundred years after Noah. The reason why I’m bringing this up is that in that film, the destruction of Sodom is presented with fireballs/meteorites, which also feature in this linked trailer, so I’m lead to think this film will also distill the two stories together in some way (there is no fire-related destruction in the Bible anywhere near the Flood story).
Also, I’m wondering if they will be incorporating popular/deuterocanonical traditions a la The Passion of the Christ—for example, Methuselah dying seven days before the Flood.
Hopkins probably plays Methuselah. And I had always thought the Sodom story was antediluvian… How many times must the LORD cleans the world He so incompetently made? Clearly He has very sucky people-modeling skills.
God claimed he would never destroy people with water again
Well that makes him quite the bloody liar, then, doesn’t it? What with all them Tsunamis and Typhoons and Hurricanes and plain big old Floods that’ve taken place since then, to this very day.
Also, amusingly enough, it features a spherical Earth. And I have to wonder how they’ll fit “one couple of every species of the Earth” in that ship, huge though it is, without involving Gallifreyan technology.
I’d strongly caution against fighting a false version of your opponent. Even among biblical literalists, very nearly none believe in a -spherical- (EDIT: flat, thank you for catching the typo) Earth (often citing parts of the bible that call the world a sphere!), and that’s been the case for over a millennium. And while the movie probably will have impossible space CGI shenanigans, even the Creationist idiots tend to think of things in terms of “kind” rather than “species” (and often don’t understand the later’s definition), and try to create some artificial dividing line between macroevolution and animal husbandry.
And about all the water on Earth not being sufficient to actually flood everything; will they have God miraculously, spontaneously and temporarily generate water for that specific purpose, and then later remove it?
The original Jewish version would probably go that way, since it was closer to a cataclysm/Ragnarok event in that belief structure. Modern Christian translations generally just turn it into rain. Given that the actions of a literal magic sky being are part of the premise...
That’s not to say Biblical Literalism or Creationism is particularly coherent, nor that it’s likely to be a good movie, of course.
Even among biblical literalists, very nearly none believe in a spherical Earth (often citing parts of the bible that call the world a sphere!), and that’s been the case for over a millennium.
Is this a typo for “very nearly none believe in a flat Earth”?
This failure mode of saying the reverse of what was meant is
called
misnegation.
Often it’s accompanied by readers or listeners taking the
intended meaning without noticing the mistake.
They’re making a Noah film. It’s got Russel Crowe, Emma Watson and Anthony Hopkins. From the trailer, I anticipate that this film will be an immense source of unfortunate implications and horrifying subtext. “You must trust that He will speak in a language you can understand”?! You know, after reading some resources that pattern-match God’s behaviour with that of an abusive partner, I just can’t unsee it...
Also, amusingly enough, it features a spherical Earth. And I have to wonder how they’ll fit “one couple of every species of the Earth” in that ship, huge though it is, without involving Gallifreyan technology. And about all the water on Earth not being sufficient to actually flood everything; will they have God miraculously, spontaneously and temporarily generate water for that specific purpose, and then later remove it?
You know, I’d love to be chill about this stuff, to say it’s “just a good story”, that I should invoke the MST3K mantra and just relax, but I can’t, because the story doesn’t seem to be all that good in the first place. Jor El’s story has a similar motif and looks better than this.
Standard young-Earther responses, taken from when I was a young-Earth creationist.
Round Earth: Yes. You sort of have to stretch to interpret the Bible as saying the Earth is round or flat, so it’s not exactly a contradiction. Things like “the four corners of the Earth” are obvious metaphor.
Animals on the boat: The “kinds” of animals (Hebrew “baramin”) don’t correspond exactly to what we call species. There are fewer animals in the ark than 2*(number of modern species); this is considered to be a sufficient answer even though it probably isn’t. I don’t know exactly what level of generality the baramin are supposed to be; I guess it depends on how much evolution the particular creationist is willing to accept. They’ll typically use the example of dogs and wolves being the same “kind,” but if that’s the level of similarity we’re talking about then there’ll still be an awful lot of kinds.
Amount of water: The Earth used to be a lot smoother. Shallower oceans, lower mountains, etc. So it could be covered with a more reasonable amount of water. We know this because in the genealogies some guy named his son after the fact that “in his day the Earth was divided.” (The word for divided, Peleg, means earthquake or cataclysm or something. This verse also doubles as tectonic plates being moved around.)
I don’t agree with these, but thought that to avoid strawmanning I should post the l responses that I would have used. Not that they’re much better than the straw version, but this is the kind of thing that would have been said by at least one YEC.
Biblically speaking, it’s seven breeding couples of every “clean” species, one of every unclean.
What’s much more nonsensical than fitting all those animals onto the ark in the first place though, is the idea that it would actually save them. You’ve got predators reduced to equal numbers with their prey species; memory check, what do they live on?
Didn’t Think This Through, huh?
Given how God is Amighty, one wonders why he didn’t have all the bad people just drop dead where they stood, Kira-style. He did something similar with Egypt’s firsborn, yes?
Bizarre… it seems just like if a nomadic Bronze Age tribe had picked up scraps of tales from, say, Babylon and Egypt, embellished other collective memories, and created some out of whole cloth for political purposes!
This actually looks better than I expected. I anticipate it to have good visuals and to possibly be worth watching. And there are some redeeming aspects to the storyline; isn’t it fundamentally about taking heroic responsibility and doing what is necessary in the face of an existential threat? Now there’s also all sorts of other luggage it’s pulling around (wait, isn’t the existential threat being caused by the one who’s asking him to alleviate it?).
Daren Aaronofsky has done some good and rather intense films in the past (Pi, Black Swan, The Wrestler, Requiem for a Dream). He’ll likely make it at least powerful if not meaningful.
There’s an interpretation of the Bible, or at least the Old Testament, that depicts its god and people as coevolving a workable set of ethics as successive attempts at top-down imposition fail.
This isn’t going to fly with the omni(potent|scient|benevolent) God that’s standard in modern Christianity, of course, but from my admittedly atheistic standpoint it tallies a lot better with the story as depicted.
I would like to know more about this interpretation.
You know I’ve always wondered how the world would react to Modern-Day-Noah if someone demonstrated a miracle or two. Ze has marching orders from on High, power to protect zir autonomy/safety but not compel obedience. Justification is “God Says So” and task is onerous and of no obvious benefit. (Build a big temple/ark/pyramid/whatever). Seems like that could be a pretty cool movie.
You don’t say.
It is surprising that more cash ins of the Christian demographic aren’t done given the excellent performance of previous bible movies.
It’s [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah’s_Ark]size[/url] is actually well defined:
I didin’t feel like it was worth mentioning because of the pointlessness of it, but still, those are some absurdly large measurements for a ship, to be built in the Bronze Age, by one family.
There is also a TV adaptation from 1999), where the chronology is a bit mixed-up because it presents the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as some sort of “prelude” to the Flood, whereas in the Bible the Sodom story is several hundred years after Noah. The reason why I’m bringing this up is that in that film, the destruction of Sodom is presented with fireballs/meteorites, which also feature in this linked trailer, so I’m lead to think this film will also distill the two stories together in some way (there is no fire-related destruction in the Bible anywhere near the Flood story).
Also, I’m wondering if they will be incorporating popular/deuterocanonical traditions a la The Passion of the Christ—for example, Methuselah dying seven days before the Flood.
Hopkins probably plays Methuselah. And I had always thought the Sodom story was antediluvian… How many times must the LORD cleans the world He so incompetently made? Clearly He has very sucky people-modeling skills.
Well, God only claimed he would never destroy people with water again… everything else was fair game.
Well that makes him quite the bloody liar, then, doesn’t it? What with all them Tsunamis and Typhoons and Hurricanes and plain big old Floods that’ve taken place since then, to this very day.
I’d strongly caution against fighting a false version of your opponent. Even among biblical literalists, very nearly none believe in a -spherical- (EDIT: flat, thank you for catching the typo) Earth (often citing parts of the bible that call the world a sphere!), and that’s been the case for over a millennium. And while the movie probably will have impossible space CGI shenanigans, even the Creationist idiots tend to think of things in terms of “kind” rather than “species” (and often don’t understand the later’s definition), and try to create some artificial dividing line between macroevolution and animal husbandry.
The original Jewish version would probably go that way, since it was closer to a cataclysm/Ragnarok event in that belief structure. Modern Christian translations generally just turn it into rain. Given that the actions of a literal magic sky being are part of the premise...
That’s not to say Biblical Literalism or Creationism is particularly coherent, nor that it’s likely to be a good movie, of course.
Is this a typo for “very nearly none believe in a flat Earth”?
Gah, yes. Thank you for catching that.
I’m a little surprised no one caught it sooner.
This failure mode of saying the reverse of what was meant is called misnegation. Often it’s accompanied by readers or listeners taking the intended meaning without noticing the mistake.
I saw it sooner, but posting a correction seemed nitpicky.
Still, if they could pull it off in a way that makes internal sense, that’d be kind of an awesome feat.
The Old Testament does not describe Earth as a 3D sphere but as a flat circle.