Genesis 5 to 6- Noah business like noah business...

Jesus Christ- or rather, "Yahweh": The Old Testament is notorious for it, but I didn't think there'd be so much begatting already. The eyelids do weigh heavy, gentle reader....

As begats... I mean befits an oral history written down, there is some redundancy- ya get the same information repeated. You get the same information repeated.

Methusaleh does his cameo so early (but sticks around for so long). On grotesque longevity, I am reminded of an anecdote (possibly apocraphyl- how begat... befitting) that gerontology researchers were running all over the Caucasus, esp. Georgia, interviewing people who were apparently 90 years old and yet healthy and working in fields. Was it diet? Genes? The semi-starvation during their youth? Or, er, was it that they had "borrowed" their parents birth certificates to avoid the draft. Though the wikipedia link above has a more interesting take.

Anyway, here comes Noah's ark, all ship shape and bristol fashion. And I'll repeat yesterday's observation- this God chap seems to be a pretty cack-handed SimCity player. He's already ctrl alt deleting and we're only on day two of this book...

The idea that a hard rain is gonna fall and clear the streets of grime/crime has stuck around of course. Thomas Pynchon has written well of violent redeeming and badasses, for example.

So anyway, this is an extinction event. And I'll repeat yesterday's link to the sixth extinction, caused by us, homo sapiens killthemallandletgodsortthemoutiens. A Pending Ecological Debacle indeed.

Did I read somewhere that this whole Big Flood story may have been inspired by the creation of the Black Sea when the Med spilled through?

And aren't there are a few obvious questions- like why didn't smaller vessels, not laden down with two of everything do OK? You'd expect an arc of survival, if you look at it in -gasp- selection pressure terms. And what about the Founder Effect?

I suppose tomorrow I'll get to write about the Sons of Ham and the egregious defences of slavery that the Church put about. But all wicked things in time, eh?

PS One of my favourite (OK, the only one I can think of just now) fictional representations (well, other fictional representations) of the flood is the woodworm narrator in Julian Barnes' “A History of the World in 10 and a half chapters.”