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Stranded along the Ararat of Interstate 68 in Frostburg, Maryland, a lifesize girdered skeleton of Noah's Ark sits unfinished, abandoned when the money ran out. Other launchings have been more successful: both Seaford, Delaware and Kitty Hawk, North Carolina boast churches built to resemble popular depictions of Noah's floating zoo. These edifices have their temporal counterparts in searches for the lost ark, expeditions described by 80,000 books in 70-odd languages.
Believed to be submerged under layers of ancient glacial ice somewhere in the mountains shared by Armenia and Turkey, Noah's ark continues to elude and intrigue us. Unable to recover the remnants of the craft, we re-construct it through story, preserving its moral treasures. From the Bible to the Heifer International catalogue, from Toys R Us to nursery walls, the story of Noah's ark remains securely anchored in the sea of tradition. Even Hollywood has come onboard with its takes on the tale, the most recent rendition appearing in last year's overhyped and underappreciated Evan Almighty.
This is not to say that the movie—the most costly comedy in film history—attains any level of cinematic art. Even at the box office Evan turned out to be far less mighty than its predecessor, Bruce Almighty (2003), earning only about one third the domestic revenue of the earlier film. Secular audiences may have imagined that Evan was too explicitly religious. And churchgoers, to whom the film was heavily marketed, apparently didn't want to see a traditional Bible story refashioned as political polemic. Those who denounced the film's substitution of ecology for soteriology, however, clearly missed the boat. Evan Almighty maintains an ancient tradition of Ark midrash: an appropriation of the flood story that reflects the needs and contexts of its readers.
The Genesis account of Noah is itself a reinterpretation of ancient sources. [1] The earliest version of the flood, dating to around 2,600 BC, is Sumerian, its hero, Ziusudra, anticipating the Babylonian Utnapishtim. As recounted in the Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2,000 BC), Utnapishtim builds an ark, with room for every kind of animal, after a god warns him of the pending flood. When the rains subside, the ark lands on a mountain, where Utnapishtim sends out first a swallow, then a dove, and finally a raven. He offers a sacrifice to the gods, who savor the sweet smell, as does God in response to Noah's burnt offerings (Gen 8:21). The 1st-century Jewish historian Josephus identifies the Sumerian flood hero with Noah, quoting a Babylonian writer from the 3rd century BC who comments, "There is still some part of the ship in Armenia, … and some people carry off pieces of the bitumen" for "amulets." Over two millennia later, in 1969, a Frenchman named Ferdinand Nevarra was doing the same, displaying bits of the ark he discovered during his own Ararat expedition.
On one level, recuperations of Noah's ark are easy to explain. The ark represents salvation, its God-guided enclosure protecting believers from the profane: that which is outside sacred space, as implied by the etymology of pro-fane ("beyond the temple"). In his classic study The Sacred and Profane: The Nature of Religion, Mircea Eliade describes the profane with water-like terms, arguing that sacred space operates as a cosmic center in the midst of "the formless fluidity of profane space." This may explain why, in Muslim tradition, Noah's ark sailed seven times around the holiest place in Islam: the place of the Ka'aba in Mecca, a huge cube toward which Muslims still turn during prayer. The ark identified the sacred center to which pilgrims journey as they emulate Noah's pilgrimage, circling the Ka'aba seven times on foot. By the 7th century, all three Abrahamic faiths had reached an agreement about the site of the ark's landing: a peak in Armenia where a "Cloister of the Ark" was built by Nestorian Christians, followed by a Muslim sanctuary allegedly constructed out of wood from Noah's vessel.
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