The Gospel of Noah
“There once was a righteous man, and Noah was his name. He was cursed with the undying love of God, and suffered greatly at the hands of divine lunacy…”
No, let’s start this from the beginning…
Chapter 1
I am Noah. I was a righteous man, but only in the sense that I was loved by a God who chose me to pawn for Him in His Ultimate Plan of Destruction.
See, God created man and woman. He created all the flowers, birds, animals and everything else you see under the sun. He created you and He created me. All would be pretty good if it wasn’t for the fact that God is a fickle bastard. He got bored with His creation, frustrated with the free will He had infused humans with and constantly visited me in the late hours to rave and rant about the ingrates he had populated Earth with.
“Why don’t they listen to me?” He would whine, buzzing around my main room like a humongous firefly. Standing close to God can give you quite the hit on the funny bone if you’re not careful. I always kept my distance, making sure to avert my eyes, as He always demanded. “Why are they out there, whoring around with each other, when they should be singing my praise, building me temples of gold, and sacrificing me mighty beasts of great importance! Am I not God? The One and Only? Did I not create this wretched place as a safe haven for my own genius, to revel in the glories I had breathed life into? Is it not their God-given duty to breathe their life back into me? Is that too much to ask?” After a few more divine profanities about the disrespect He always had to endure by us foul humans, He would sit down with a loud thump and bury His shining face in His hands, sobbing hysterically. God is not exactly the kind of chap you go over to and pat on the back, while telling Him everything is going to be all right. You either cower or run for your life. I mostly cowered. I think that is why He loved me so much to begin with. That, and the fact that I am a yes-man. Put the two together and you have a “righteous man”, at least in the eyes of God.
Most of these nocturnal visits would end with God shaking Himself free from His blackness and just shooting off into the night sky like a comet, without a word. I would be free to go about my life for a while, tending to my garden and my livestock, while keeping track of my three fool sons and their matching wives. Sometimes as much as four to five moths would pass until I would come home to find my house lit up by a blue inner glow again, and find my family huddling together in the front yard – all ashen white and scared to death. God did not like them much and usually sent them running for their lives, dodging angry bolts.
I knew something was up on that fateful night more than a year ago. God had been missing in action for quite some time, and I was almost thinking (hoping, praying) that He would never come back. Our last conversation had been particularly heated, with Him doing most of the heating and me doing all of the cowering and nodding, and it had ended with Him breaking out in to one of His famous blood-curdling howls, asking that eternal question that always seemed to lurk around in the forefront of His mind: “Whhyyyyyyyyyyyyy???!!!”
I did something then that I had never done before. Something I wish I hadn’t, and something I will live to regret for the rest of my life – since nobody else is around to regret it with me. I answered Him. I looked up from the crate of dates I was hiding behind, and whispered (more to myself, I think): “You are the Lord Almighty. Surely there is something you can do to make this world a better place?” I don’t know if I was tired of His whining, or just telling Him what he wanted to hear, but it took some serious effect with our Lord Creator.
He snapped out of His sobs like you break a twig for the fire, and He looked at me with eyes shining with a disturbing frenzy. “Noah! My Noah! You surely are the only righteous man in this world. The only righteous man on Earth!” And with that He raced out like He was on fire, and soared into the heavens for the last time in many many moons.
So, on this particular night, when I had finally counted my blessings about the fact that our Lord God had probably found some new righteous man to share His problems with, I found my house alight with the furnace of Him again. And, like I said, I just knew something was seriously amiss. I drew in a last breath of useless consolation before entering my humble abode, and let it out with a deep sigh. “Here we go,” I thought.
Exactly how amiss things were was evident by the razor grin on God’s face as I entered the main room. I didn’t even have time to avert my eyes in awe (or fear) before He scooped me up in a hearty embrace. “Noah! My righteous beautiful Noah!” I felt the little hairs all over my body catching fire by the close proximity to His Powerful Presence. After a few endless moments of being burned alive by my loving Lord and Master, I was put out by a mighty and icy breath. The severe frostbites I suffered in my face almost shut out the searing pain from the little burns all over my body. This was not going to be a great night, I thought sadly to myself.
God paced the room with abundant energy, trampling my furniture to splinters and starting little fires here and there. As I chased after Him, beating at sparks with an old blanket, I tried to follow His divine reasoning.
“Noah, my dear sweet righteous Noah. You have shown yourself worthy of my Love and now, my righteous little lamb, it is time to show the others how very un-worthy and how very un-righteous they indeed are!” In between words His head would jerk a little to the left, and if I didn’t know any better I would say He was spitting as he was speaking.
I wanted to ask who these others were so that maybe I could tell them to lay low for a while, but I thought better of it and just nodded and cowered.
God had now decided to wander into my kitchen and was shouting into pots and pans as He was destroying my food stores, and it was sometimes hard to hear the divine instructions as they came pouring out in an endless stream of fervor and blue sparks. “I have designed a Plan! A most definite and Ultimate Plan. A plan to set things right in the world again! A plan that will teach all these ingrates who is the true Lord and Creator around here! I shall sweep them away! I shall – “ and here He interrupted himself to throw His head back and laugh in a most unsettling way. His head snapped back and He fixed me with a crazy stare. “And you, my righteous Noah, shall be the instrument of my success! You shall be the foundation on which the new nations shall be built! Righteous nations! Free from the filth of Man and the filth of Woman.”
I was afraid to ask, but since this “plan” seemed to have rather profound effects on my continuous well-being I once again side-stepped my instinctive boundaries, and put it to the question: “Forgive me, dearest Lord, but what it is you, in all your greatness, have decided to do?”
He just looked at me for what I am sure must have been an eternity or two - I know, because I had aged at least 20 years after He answered me… “But, of course, my Noah! My dear precious righteous Noah! We are going to wash away the filth with a mighty flood! We are going to teach the Human Scum that they can’t set their own rules in this world. This world belongs to me! I made it! They shall all perish in the flood I shall unleash!”
I felt all the blood in my being drain away. “And, dear Father Lord and Creator, when you say ‘flood’, what you really mean is…?”
Again He threw His head back and cackled to the ceiling. “A flood, I say! A monumental body of water to sweep across the lands and drown every living thing so it is no more. Thus shall my creation be purified! I have already set the plan in motion!”
Drown the world? Everybody? Already in motion? I felt my manhood shrivel up, and I experienced a sinking feeling in my stomach. “Surely, dear Father of Man,” I interjected, trying to put things back in their proper context, “surely that is a bit… I don’t know… final?”
I braced myself for some aggressive outburst flung at me for my insolence, but instead I was blessed with a divine assignment. “Final? Not at all, my silly little worshipper. You are to survive the flood! You and the goats you call your wife and sons and daughter-in-laws! You shall build a boat, Noah. A massive boat to carry the seed of a New World. An ark! You shall be the captain of my promise and the founding father of nations, sprung from your righteous seed – and your seed alone!” He started pacing again.
“My seed? My Lord. I have heard that even when cousins mate between themselves, their offspring comes out a bit funny in the head, and my sons aren’t that smart to begin with, and surely–“
“Enough! It is written! It shall be done!” He made a dramatic gesture with his hand and the roof of my house flew off with a crashing boom and landed in the lake a few miles away. “Do not cross me, my filthy little pathetic maggot! I can crush you like the insect you are, but instead I am giving you everything. Is this gratitude?”
The look He gave me froze my blood to ice, literally, and it was only when He realized that I was suspended in cold death that He let me back to life again. I decided to tread extremely lightly from now on and humor His divine plan. Well, it was either that or sudden Noahcide. “My Lord! Oh, no! I would never… I mean… I am… not worthy! That is what I meant to say but that my inadequate worthiness couldn’t properly convey! I am but a humble and lowly man. Surely I can’t aspire to fill a function in my Lord and Master’s, oh, so very clever Plan!” I bowed my head in that fashion higher powers seem to enjoy being bowed to in. It’s something about the human fontanel that sends them on power trips every time, but now wasn’t the time to ponder subtleties or ethics. It was all or nothing, life or death, with me hanging in a rather uncertain role in the balance. “I am just in such awe of my Lord’s Divine Plan that I spoke in haste! Please forgive me, Lord! What is that my Only God requires of me? I understand there was talk of constructing some sort of sea worthy vessel?”
Back to pacing and crashing my house again. “Yes! A boat! A ship! An ark! And in it you shall travel the Oceans of Death with the new Hope of Life! You shall find one pair of each and every animal on Earth and make room for them on my Ark! They shall be the seed of a new Kingdom of Animals!”
“Animals, my revered Lord? I don’t understand. I thought it was the humans who had so offended you. Surely the animals-“
“Of course the animals have to go too! I can’t just flood here and there! What kind of flood would that be? That would be a mere… surge. Those other Gods you could never have before me would laugh at me. No. I am going to kill… every… living… thing… on… Earth.”
He glanced at me, sideways, as if seeking some sort of congratulatory words of reassurance, but I was too shocked to do anything but stutter. “But, but… two of each? Lions? Bi-birds? Those b-big things with the ex-extra arm in the m-m-m-middle of their f-face? And s-s-snakes? I mean… Oh, d-dear… H-how am I going to…” I felt myself collapsing into a state of absolute despair.
God shrugged and cracked His knuckles. “Well, you’d better get started. I am calling down the thunder in about, oh, I don’t know… just hurry up.” And with that He was gone. Only the singing smell of burning air lingered in my wrecked house.
I sat down on a cracked barrel, feeling the grain pouring out between my toes, and that was how my family found me a couple of hours later. “Daddy! What’s with all the timber outside?” Japheth wondered with eyes big as plates as he came rushing in the door.
I looked at them, with some sadness in my eyes, I am sure, and said, “We have work to do.”
Chapter 2
Three months later we were still building the wretched ship. None of us were ship builders and God had forbidden us to enlist the help on any sort of knowledgeable person, so not to reveal our Secret and Divine Mission to the defiled. This proved to be quite a challenge, as we pretty much fumbled in the dark.
Our Lord and Father popped in and out ever so often, supervising the progress of our trying chore, barking out commands and heavenly advice. He had in his Divine Wisdom, of course, seen fit to come up with a design for the ship all on his own. His philosophy was that if He could create the world and all its creatures, why shouldn’t He be able to make something as simple as a boat? Somehow there was never that right moment to interject that his creation, and all the characters, upon it was supposedly severely flawed, and that this was the very reason we were here building this infernal sea vessel in the first place. Of course I bit my tongue. Instead we were blessed enough to work endless hours to incorporate all our Lord and God Father’s new and innovative features as they lit up in His mind. “Make the ship kinda square! Like a crate! And then have all these holes on the side so the animals can look out and tremble in awe as they gaze upon the World Devouring Flood, hopefully learning their lesson. And then, put a huge tower on the stern, with a gold railing around the top. That will be my place, from which I will lounge and guide you, poor simple bastards, through the dark of night.”
One day I couldn’t hold my tongue. Maybe it was the thought of actually sharing day and night with Our Heavenly Creator for weeks on end that loosened my gums. “Eh, your Celestial Majesty, Supreme Being of Light and Hope, if all the Earth is covered with water, will we be needing your Divine Guidance? Are we actually setting sail for a particular location if it’s all ocean?”
He never answered, but rambled on about a flag He was designing to be flown from a specially crafted silver mast, mid-ship. (Silver mast? Gold railings? Where would I ever find the precious metals needed for such extravagance?) We were to sing a hymn in His honor by this flag every morning. The flag was to have the symbol of a golden god, and the hymn would go something like:
Divine Father who created us all
And delivered us from evil
Please save us from ourselves
As we are clearly not worthy
To even know thy blessed name
We, the righteous few
At least that is the song He made us sing as we worked tirelessly, for months upon months to come. We all knew what the ark was supposed to look like, but how do you go from there to making something not sink like a stone once put into the water? We were putting our faith in that there was some sort of method to His madness. Surely He would not go through all this trouble to kill us off like a bunch of ants stranded on a lily leaf in a pond?
Chapter 3
One day, God came to us as we were having a water break, and there was thunder in His eyes. “What are you just sitting here for? The Flood will come any moment now! We have to get going! Load up the ark and let’s go!”
We just gaped and stared. Then Ham, my oldest son, dared to put the question forth: “The animals, my Lord? We are almost done with the ship, but we have had no time to scour the Earth for suitable couples of beasts – known or unknown. We’ve got two goats all locked up in one of the pens, ready to go, and Shem and Japheth found two pigs that seem to be one of each, but one ran away and Shem fell in the mud, and, forgive us if-“
God cut him off with a sharp gesture. “Don’t bother. I will have the animals come to you instead. Am I not God, the Majesty Supreme of this armpit of the Universe? Do you really think that I can’t just order two of each beast to report for their Divine Duty by tomorrow morning? Bah. The request has already been delivered and the Chosen Few have responded with great excitement! Now, get this boat off this piece of land and get your food stores ready. We have a world to sail!”
Ham was bolder than the rest of us, and asked something we had wanted to know for quite some time. “Forgive me, Eternal Sunshine of my puny mind, but for how long should we pack supplies for? How long will this trip be?”
God was dancing up and down the length of the ship, caressing the silver mast (polished old iron) with the flag, and paid us no greater attention. “Bah. A month, two, maybe? We will only know once all the filth has been washed away and the world is a clean slate for us to write a new beginning on! A righteous beginning! A beginning for…”
And we just tuned Him out. We had heard that part of the speech more or less every day for the past few months. Being a righteous pawn in the Master Plan got tired real quick. Our backs ached, our hands were blistered, we were deprived of sleep and rest, and our over-worked minds were wandering along shady paths of insanity in the dark of night, dreaming of lighter times, in a blissful world with no Gods to rule Man. Blasphemy, of course, but a small comfort to a hollow soul.
I helped my sons to get the food stores ready. We packed enough grain, dates, wine, water, olives and smoked meat to last us three or four months. We could always fish, right? We hadn’t pointed out to God that He couldn’t drown the fish, because we didn’t want to deprive ourselves of that food source. We snuck a few fishing rods on board in the dead of night and stashed them behind the barrels of fresh water, all the way in the back. We were at least prepared to fend for ourselves. Last, we also brought enough hay and dried fish to feed all the animals of Earth, however many that would be. For all we knew the miserable ark would sink to the bottom of the sea within the first minutes of voyage, with man and beast and all, so this could all be for nothing anyway. Come to think of it, that would have been a blessing.
Chapter 4
The next morning we were awakened by a low rumble, as if an army was marching upon our hidden camp by the shore. We jumped up from our bedding, prepared to fight for our lives, but the scene unfolding before our very eyes left us paralyzed in disbelief. There came the hordes of the beasts of Earth. Two by two, slowly making their way in a nightmare procession. There were the lions, ragged and dirty, walking next to the rabbits, limping and torn. Over there came a long horned cow, dragging his head in the sand, alongside a long-necked spotted beast with its tongue hanging out of its mouth. The fact that there was no sound, except for the shuffling of hooves and paws, and the heavy strained breathing of a thousand creatures, added to the surreal experience. They all passed us by, without even turning their savage heads, and filed up the ramp and into the ark.
From the mountains came promises of thunder and lightning, and dark clouds gathered on the horizon. “It has begun!” declared God, who came swooping down from the sky, “Get ready for the Righteous Flood! Whoooppiieee!” At that, the heavens turned black above us and then opened up in a horrendous torrent that drenched man and beast alike, as we struggled to get everybody in their right place.
It took the animals all day to board the ship, and once the last creature (a brown rat with a furry tail, hoisting his seemingly dead mate) was safely in place, we pulled the ramp and closed the hatches to the nether decks. God was presiding from His golden (shiny brass) tower, hollering orders and dancing around in the rain, and we were just about to cut the ropes that would send us charging into the water, when Ham remembered something.
“Ahoy! Lord God! What about the insects? There were no insects among the animals!”
Bless his heart for thinking about even the smallest of God’s creatures, I thought to myself. Ham truly was the best of my sons.
God stopped His dancing about, and glared down from His elevated position – the rain didn’t add any positive features to His person. His hair was standing out like tiny wet twigs, and His cloak was glued to his body. He didn’t look much like the Creator of the Universe at that very moment. “Insects? Insects are not animals. They are… they are… bugs! Cut the ropes!” And with that he sat down on the throne he had made us carry up there. “Off we go, Righteous Chosen of mine! Off to save the world!”
And off we went to “save” the world that was dying all around us. Thousands of millions of living creatures – men, women, children and every beast, bug and bird – all dying at the hands of the Creator. They weren’t righteous enough. Not blessed. Like us. I cursed the crazy God up in His tower, behind His back, and went below deck.
Chapter 5
“This is getting tedious. I am off.”
That was the last we ever saw and heard of our mighty Heavenly Master and Commander. One minute He was sitting there, bored out of His mind up in His tower - zapping clouds with little pink bolts, and the next He was off like a blue stream of light. Wham! Just gone.
It was now three months into the Righteous Voyage to New Beginnings and we were clean out of food. God had grumbled when we had broken out the fishing equipment, but when He realized that He had blundered by forgetting about the fish in the first place, He just pretended He didn’t notice. We had fed the last bale of hay to the strange beasts that occupied the grass-eating deck, and we had thrown the last barrel of smoked goat down to the deck of the meat-eaters. From the sounds of it, it was getting a bit rough down there. I shuddered to think what it would be like if we didn’t hit land very soon. Would the savage animals eat fish? What if they didn’t? What if we didn’t get any fish period?
It was clear to all of us that things were not going exactly as planned. The ship didn’t sink, but it had tilted heavily to the right, from day one, so we had to tie each other down every night, or we would wake up in the ocean the next morning. The ship design was not exactly perfect.
Before He vanished, God had paced back and forth and thrown angry glances at the water levels – but they always remained above the highest mountain peak. It seemed He hadn’t figured out how to drain the world, after the Righteous Flood had filled its function. Not that He would ever admit that to us, of course. He put on the pretense that it was all going well, and that we were right on track, shouting words of encouragement and giving speeches to his loyal servants. I guess He just got fed up with pretending after a while, and took off for His Kingdom of Heaven, leaving His righteous flock to drift where they may.
And drifted we did. On and on across the endless oceans.
Chapter 6
I didn’t care much for the grilled saber toothed cat. The hairy elephant was tasty and fed us for almost two weeks. We even fed some of the bigger meat-eaters that were still alive down there, offering them the bones and the fat. We had already eaten our way through half of the grass eater deck, but some of the animals looked so strange that we feared for our well being if we were to digest them. The saber tooth had been flung out the window of the Cat Wing by an angry black bear earlier yesterday, and Japheth had roped him and we had all hauled him back on deck. The big cat had coughed up a few urn-fuls of water, but before he could stand up on unsteady legs, Shem smacked him over the head with an oar. “It’s either that or that funky spotted animal with the long neck down there,” he said. We shrugged and prepared the stew. Eight long and hungry months at sea tend to desensitize your taste buds to a certain degree.
We had started to break up the ship for fire wood a month ago, and the whole left part of the upper deck was gone by now. We figured we would either die from starvation or in a blaze of fire in the end, and the bets were in favor of the fire. Personally, I was wondering whether you could die from insanity.
Still no sign of God, nor land.
Chapter 7
It was Ham that came up with the idea that we should send out one of the doves to look for land. We were in the process of trying to get rid off some of the rotting carcasses from below deck, as the stench was becoming unbearable, and it was when we got to the bird cages that Ham got all elated. His thinking was that if the waters had receded somewhere, and there was land, the freed dove would not come back, and we would know to be more alert when looking for land masses.
We sent it out a few mornings in a row and it came back before sunset every evening. On the fifth day it had something cradled in its talons. With shaking hands we unfastened the folded thing and gathered around. It was a note. From God.
It said: “What are you guys doing?” in angry scribbles.
From then on we let the dove fly at nights instead.
Chapter 8
We were just about ready to draw sticks for who was to be the roast that following night - we would rather eat each other than even lift the hatch to go down and see what was still alive down there – when Japheth pointed to the sky.
“Look!”
We looked up and saw that it was the dove, returning home as usual, but this time it had, once more, something in its tiny talons. Not a note… It was a twig! A twig with green sprouts. This twig had grown on land somewhere! Off a tree! Oh, joy! To be off this damned Ship of Death. The dove had come from the West, so we raised our pathetic and tattered sails for that direction and strained our eyes until the point of blindness to see a glimpse of anything but water. Just to die on land, would be a blessing at this point.
Chapter 9
It was on the third day after the dove had returned with the twig that we finally saw land. We had let the dove fly the night before and he never returned in the morning, so we figured he had either perished or made himself a new home in an actual tree top somewhere. All thoughts of hunger were gone – partly because we had just feasted upon the delicious meat of that one horned white horse God had seemed so fond of; both of them, actually. It felt good to be bad.
Once we had sighted land, and performed the obligatory merry dancing about the deck, we just hung on to that horizon with all our might, slowly steering the leaking broken boat towards salvation. We may all have been as crazy as people can get… we may have been dirty, defiled, skeletal and broken down by the Righteous Hands of God… but we would survive… if nothing else so to show God that He couldn’t beat us. That He couldn’t keep us down. Our shattered minds and broken souls crept towards the black dot in the far away. Closer and closer.
Epilogue
As I am writing this we have just landed our pitiful wreckage of a boat onto the shore of an unknown land. I think it might be a mountain side. I don’t care. I am going to kick that ark hatch open and make everything out there mine. All mine. Noah’s Land. I shall be the ruler, the very opposite of that crazy demented God that sent us to suffer the Slow Death at sea after He killed a whole world of beautiful wonders. Well, this will be my world and there will be no room for God here. May He regret the day He chooses to return to dwell with his “righteous humans” again!
Epilogue 2 – The Gospel of Ham
Dear Gospel,
It seems that daddy has gone bonkers. He roams around the countryside naked, taking deep swigs out of his pot of wine, talking to the trees and proclaiming blasphemy like it was nothing. I can’t say I blame him after all that mad God did to us, and to the rest of the world, but I just wish he didn’t lay down with my wife every night. My brothers feel the same. We might have to do something about it. He has had a long and fruitful life, so it’s not really a sin, is it, Gospel? It’s not like it will have any effect a thousand years or so from now. We are the righteous ones, after all. Our legacy will be pure.
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Religion is the source of most things evil. Let me bone it out for you.
In Me I Trust.
~ The Divine Tragedy ~
