[To follow the True History from the beginning, click on "First Entry"]
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"And Noah accomplished all that the LORD commanded him" (Gen. 7:5).
In the end, only eight humans were allowed onto the Ark: Noah and his three sons, and the four wives. The Lord shut the Ark's door, then shooed away those who were clamoring to get inside, which was not as many people as you might expect. Actually, just one: it was Methuselah, Noah's 969-year-old paternal grandfather (Gen. 5:21-27, 7:16). Noah was not keen to let him on board, perhaps because Grandpa Methuselah had reached that point in his life where all he could talk about was his aches and pains, and bladder control, and bowel movements. "Can't we just let him drown?" asked Noah. "Hasn't he lived long enough already?" So the Lord said okay.
The storm began 48 days after Noah's 600th birthday. First came the asteroid, which killed the dinosaurs ("shock and awe," Yahveh called it), followed that same afternoon by a double whammy of old-fashioned H20: "On that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened" (Gen. 7:11). Jesus said later, and he wasn't joking, that he intends to do something quite similar at the Rapture and Second Coming. Humans will be eating dinner, or attending a wedding, or nursery school, or whatever – and the unsaved people won't even know what hit them! (Matt. 24:37-39).
The water rose at a rate of seven inches per minute, 34 feet per hour, all the world over, nonstop, for forty days and forty nights. When it stopped, the very peak of Everest was fifteen cubits under water. "And all flesh died that had fornicated upon the Earth" (Gen. 7:11-21).
I'll never forget the sight of old Methuselah, doing a doggie-paddle after the Ark, shouting, "Noah! please! I'm your grandfather! Take me with you! I promise I won't fornicate!" Those were his last words (Gen. 5:1-32, 6:9-10).
Life aboard the Ark, below decks, was difficult. The elephants alone produced, daily, each of them, more than 200 pounds of wet excrement. Now imagine every species on earth, pooping all over everything, and on one another, for months on end. That was Noah's toughest assignment: to get rid of the excrement! The "peresh" (excrement) piled up out of nowhere – well, not "out of nowhere," exactly, but the animals did pump it out faster than those four obedient housewives could dispose of it! Noah had built just the one window, 18 inches wide, through which the four women were obliged to discard an estimated 40 tons of excrement, per day (Gen. 6:16).
The other day I was reading a book by Harry Rimmer, called The Harmony of Science and Scripture. Of that one little window, Dr. Rimmer writes: "Do not think that the modern sanitary engineer could add to the structure of the ark; for while the builder was Noah, the Architect and Designer was God!" (p. 211).
Dr. Rimmer may be right about that. He is a well-known authority in the Intelligent Design theory. I'm not going to argue with his expertise. But I think, if I were Mrs. Noah, or one of the three daughters-in-law, that I would have jumped overboard before I'd have put up with all that shit.
For five months, Noah's Ark floated aimlessly around the world until every living thing outside, including the maggots that fed and fornicated upon floating corpses, had drowned.
Mission accomplished. "Now watch this!" said the Lord. Noah watched as God unplugged a hole in the deep. With a giant hissing sound, the surplus water was sucked deep into the earth, which helped thereafter to put an end to active volcanoes and to establish the seven continents as we now know them (Gen. 8:1-3).
Noah's Ark ran aground on Mount Ararat, in northwest Turkey, where it remains to this day (Gen. 8:4).
It was on Noah's 601st birthday that God finally invited everyone to disembark. He didn't need to ask twice: by this time, everyone had been cooped up inside for 317 days. Japheth's wife and Shem's wife were no longer speaking to one another. Relations were strained between Noah and his middle son, Cham. And many of the animals had grown restless (Gen. 8:5-13.
When God finally opened the door of the Ark, there was great joy. There was also a scary stampede as the animals and birds of the air and creeping things hurried out of the Ark into the fresh air, in order to find a mate, and fornicate (Gen. 8:15-19).
– L.
(Tomorrow: Somewhere over the rainbow...)
