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.
Christianity, of course, preceded Islam by six centuries, and Noah’s ark was part of its earliest iconography. Hiding from their persecutors, early converts not only painted Noah’s ark on catacomb walls but also depicted it on coffins and sarcophagi. Most ignored the Genesis geometry, making the ark look something like a modern-day washing-machine, including the lid on top. Even without knowing the size of a cubit, it’s easy to figure out that a vessel built according to the biblical proportions of 300 by 50 by 30 cubits would look more like a giant grandfather clock floating on its back than an appliance bobbing through raging waters. Nevertheless, representations of the ark as a box, sometimes with legs like a fancy cedar chest, lasted well into the 17th century. In some representations, the box has the same proportions as the Ka’aba, early depictions making Noah look like a puppet popping out the top of a jack-in-the-box rather than a man dwarfed by a gargantuan animal-filled barge.
Some scholars have attributed the cube-like ark to classical Greek images of Danae and Perseus put out to sea in a box. But it is more likely that the image of Noah popping out of a lidded box reflects biblical rather than pagan influences. First, the Hebrew word for Noah’s ark—tevah—means “box,” and is also used for the floating container which saved the baby Moses. Even more significant may be early Christian allegories: Noah as a type of Christ rising from the sepulchre. Tertullian (c.155-230) believed that the water and the dove in the Genesis story anticipate Christ’s baptism. The 4th-century Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, taught that the wood of the ark represents the cross. Following Ambrose (in more ways than one), Augustine (354-430) asserts in The City of God that the ark
is certainly a figure of the city of God sojourning in the world; that is to say, of the church, which is rescued by the wood on which hung the Mediator of God and man, the man Christ Jesus. For even its very dimensions, in length, breadth, and height, represent the human body in which He came … . And its having a door made in the side of it certainly signified the wound which was made when the side of the Crucified was pierced with the spear: for by this those who came to Him enter.
Such symbolism, anticipating the resurrection, explains why Noah and the ark appear on so many Christian sarcophagi.
Perhaps building off these parallels, another shape for Noah’s Ark became popular: the pyramid. Origen (c. 185-c. 254) describes the ark as pyramidal in his second homily on Genesis. This may have influenced the illustrators of the 4th-century Vienna Genesis, who make the ark look like a Sumerian ziggurat floating on the waters. Strange as it may seem, pyramidal arks appear at least through the middle of the 15th century, most famously in one of Ghiberti’s panels for the Baptistery at Florence.
The chest image, however, seems to have won out over the pyramid, endorsed as late as 1675 by the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher in his Arca Noë. The endurance of the chest image for the sacred containment of Noah’s ark may have been influenced by the fact that medieval codices were often stored in chests called arcae. Mary Carruthers, in her study of memory in medieval culture, asserts that “when Hugh of St. Victor says that wisdom is stored in the ‘archa’ of the heart, … he is taking advantage specifically of the long association of arcae with books.” In his 12th-century treatise on memory, “De arca Noe morali,” Hugh writes, “I give you the ark of Noah as a model of spiritual building, which your eye may see outwardly so that your soul may be built inwardly in its likeness.” [2]Â The soul, like a chest, will contain the sacred Word which reveals truth only from the inside: the place of escape from the profane.
The association of Noah’s ark with the sacred Word was dramatized—quite literally—in 1376: the year of the first known production of a play about Noah’s ark. Performed in York, England, the play was part of a cycle developed to celebrate the Feast of Corpus Christi, a midsummer holy-day instituted in the 13th century to honor the Eucharist. During the early years of the Feast, clerics would process through town, carrying the Transubstantiated Host before them in an elaborate chest. [3]
As the Corpus Christi procession evolved, representatives of various guilds would follow the Host-holding clerics while carrying biblical images related to their craft: water-drawers would tote an image of Noah’s ark, goldsmiths would shoulder the Ark of the Covenant. (Though this ark comes from a different Hebrew word than that of Noah, exegetical tradition established a correlation between the two arks, since both Hebrew words mean “box” or “coffin.”) These images became more and more elaborate, such that, in some towns, they were replaced with wagons displaying tableau vivant: people in poses illustrative of biblical stories. From there it was an easy step to full-fledged drama, the people on wagons acting from a script.
Though scholars disagree as to whether the Corpus Christi plays originated from these processional images or developed simultaneously with them, there is no question but that the pageant performances were meant to dramatize salvation history. The cycles usually started with a play about the creation and fall of the angels and ended with a representation of the Last Judgment or Christ’s harrowing of hell. Although different towns developed their own scripts, with different sequences and numbers of plays, only five Old Testament stories are common to the four complete cycles extant today, and Noah’s ark is one of the five. In fact, for one town, Newcastle-upon Tyne, the ark script is the only play of the cycle to survive. [4]
Evidently, there is something about the flood story that seeps into our chests. We love its symbolism of sacred space saving us from the formless fluidity of the profane. Perhaps this is why, throughout the history of Christendom, readers have built and stocked the ark with elements reflective of their own cultural values. And sometimes these elements are profane. The most famous of the Corpus Christi ark plays, the Wakefield Noe, embellishes the sacred story with marital tensions often credited as inspiring Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. The first conversation between Noe and his wife, Gill, leads to blows after Noe calls her “ram-skit”—a word pronounced in other parts of England, then as now, with an “h” instead of the “k.” Later, Gill refuses to get on the ark because she has too much work to do; she keeps at her spinning until advancing waters force her to rush onboard—where she and her mate continue bickering until the dove’s olive branch elicits a reconciliation.
The ark built for the Wakefield Noe has a “castell,” a 14th-century word signifying a village, a tower, or a fort: any of which would make for a distinctive ark. The Noah play from Chester is a bit more traditional, employing the word “chest” to describe the ark—albeit a chest with oars. In this play, the recalcitrant wife of Noah proclaims that she will not come onboard unless her friends are saved as well:Â “If thou wilt not have them in thy chest / Why then row forth, Noah, whither thou list, / And get thee a new wife” (spelling updated).
But even when the chest was not mentioned in Corpus Christi plays, it was visualized, for Noah’s ark in most of the cycles was constructed out of the box-shaped wagon employed by each guild for the staging of their stories. The name of this wagon was a “pageant,” coming from the Latin pagina—the same word from which we get the term for a leaf in a book. Both the Chester and the York records, in fact, call each pageant a pagina well into the 15th century. [5]
Once again we see the idea of architectural containment aligned with textuality. There is no question but that each pageant wagon was associated with the Corpus Christi container that began the procession, a chest in which bread was transubstantiated into flesh, a sacred space enclosing the Word of Truth. In the 16th century, the association between sacred text and Noah’s ark was literalized by Paracelsus (1493-1541), who claimed that Noah discovered a stone tablet inscribed by Adam when he landed on Ararat. In the 20th century a similar claim was made by a Christian searcher for the lost ark. In an interview with the Southwest Radio Church of Oklahoma City during the 1970s, Bart LaRue asserted that “there is the mysterious frozen mid-section of Noah’s Ark on top of Mt. Ararat still to be explored … . I think we’ll find the written history of the world from the beginning of time up through the Flood.” The ark is aligned with the truth of existence—as it is for many who fund expeditions to Ararat. [6] Such searchers read the lost ark as proof of sacred truth, proof that Genesis contains, like an arca, a scientifically and historically accurate account of a young earth created in six days. A recovered ark will provide salvation from a sea of skeptics.
Thus, while early church fathers read the ark allegorically, reflecting their own developing Christologies, contemporary searchers for the lost ark read it scientifically, reflecting the Enlightenment assumption that truth must be empirically verified. Evan Almighty, then, is merely part of an Ark Armada: the last in a line of floating signifiers built according to cultural materials at hand (and heart). And, like other ark appropriations, it is about salvation. Furthermore, it is about a kind of salvation that has become increasingly important to evangelicals in the 21st century: the salvation of both our environment and our government from manipulation and exploitation.
The story begins with a perfectly coifed, immaculately groomed Evan, anchorman turned congressman, moving his ideal family into their beautiful new house, propped up on excavated—and hence destroyed—meadowland outside Washington, D.C. Privy even to Evan’s personal toilette, we watch as he trims his appearance to perfection while repeating his personal mantra: “I am successful; I am powerful; I am handsome; I am happy!” The traditional American dream, is it not?
Evan maneuvers his shiny new SUV through strangely sterile streets to his luxuriously appointed congressman’s office on Capitol Hill, where he is met by a fastidious staff who seek to satisfy his every demand. From his fashionably styled hair to his spotlessly polished shoes, Evan is the perfect politician, an American family man bent on preserving and promoting the traditional American ideal. And he especially wants to please Congressman Long, who symbolizes the status quo parading as the Word of Truth. Evan therefore supports the longtime (and Long-endorsed) American tradition of unimpeded growth and progress: paving paradise to put up parking lots.
While Evan primps for the folks at Capitol Hill, his wife, Joan, prays for the family to grow closer. Prodded by Joan to “take all the help he can get” before he officially takes office, Evan decides to kneel by the side of the bed and pray as well. Hesitantly, yet earnestly, Evan asks God to help him change the world.
Although Evan and Joan quickly forget their heartfelt pleas, God takes them at their word and moves into action. The alarm clock, set for 7 AM, awakens Evan at 6:14—the digital clock mysteriously displaying “GEN” to the left of “6:14.” A wooden box full of archaic tools mysteriously appears on the doorstep. Birds follow Evan to work. Animals of every kind appear two by two, blocking the streets and crowding the yard around Evan’s house. A fleet of trucks deliver unsolicited shipments of wood planks. Evan experiences extraordinary hair growth, which eventually turns a Noahic grey. Unable to read the signs at first, Evan finally deciphers the meaning of his alarm-clock message and, blowing the dust from a Bible buried at the bottom of a box, turns to Genesis 6:14: “You shall build an ark of gopher wood.” He knows now why the company that delivered the wood is named “Go-4-Wood.” When Evan asks, “Why me?”, God (played by Morgan Freeman) replies, “You want to change the world, son. So do I.” Evan learns, like patriarchs of old, that if you pray for rain, be prepared to get wet.
Thus, through a sacred symbol launched into the secular arena, the story exposes the profane through the prophetic. Evan’s long grey hair and beard mark him as a rebel. His flowing ragged robes brand him as crazy. Joan misinterprets his commission to change the world—she’s convinced that he’s suffering from stress-related depression—and when he speaks out against Congressman Long’s Land Access Bill, Evan is accused of trying to stop progress.
What he experiences is a different kind of progress: animals from every region near and far journey toward Evan, bleating and baying, wagging tails and stamping their feet. They follow him to work, leaving their mark on those unfortunate enough to step in the way. They crowd the senate hearing room, disgusting the senators and their aids with their raucous rankness. Could these animals symbolize the voice of the people—the silenced majority often ignored or pushed to the margins by those elected officials more interested in lining their own chests with perks, power and prestige? In a moment of courage, Evan stands and speaks to Congress saying, “These animals are not trained. I think they want me to save them.” Like the prophets before him, Evan suffers derision and embarrassment, misunderstanding and rejection. Unable and unwilling to run with the congressional pack, relieved of his congressional duties, Evan recruits his three boys for boat-building duty and, along with the animals, they set to work.
They finish their ark the very day God said the floods would come. But nothing happens. Media reporters swarm the site; neighbors come out in droves; the curious from congress come to gloat and giggle over Evan’s ark. As the clouds darken and the wind picks up, some of the laughter dies down. Rain drops begin to fall, only to barely dampen the ground before the sun comes out again. But just as a demolition crew is about to destroy the ark, a dam (built to push nature aside so that suburbia might sprawl) suddenly breaks, sending a wall of water straight toward the ark and its mockers.
In true prophetic fashion, Evan lifts his arms and calls those who will listen to board the ark in order to escape the thundering water rushing their way. Some enter motivated by faith rather than sight. But most are like Gill in the Wakefield Noe: waiting for empirical evidence and then rushing up the ramp at the last minute, water lapping their feet. However, also in prophetic fashion, Evan Almighty shows that some refuse to either hear or see, too proud to accept salvation by such unconventional means, preferring to be in control of their own drowning.
Meanwhile, after a thrilling ride, Evan’s ark crashes into the Capitol building, coming to a stop with its prow pressed against the window frame of the senate hearing room. A shocked congress watches as animals and humans pour out, safe from the danger of the unconstrained water. Evan explains that the flood occurred because Congressman Long, who funded the dam in order to profit from suburban development, cut corners in its construction. Long should have instead listened to the voice of honesty and integrity: the voice of prophets, not profits.
Significantly, just as viewers start thinking that the film entirely misses the point of the flood story, God tells Joan that “a lot of people miss the point of [the flood] story.” Because they “like to hear about God’s wrath,” people tend to read the ark as a sign of heavenly anger. In contrast, God argues, Noah’s Ark should be read as a love story: the sign of salvation offered to all. As we have seen, different cultures read this sign differently: as a chest, a pyramid, a pointer to the Ka’aba, an allegory of Christ’s loving sacrifice, the means of reconciliation between husband and wife, the source of truth about history. In Evan Almighty, we are instructed to read the Ark as an acrostic sign: A-R-K, representing Acts of Random Kindness. Morgan Freeman, as God, explains, “You change the world by one act of random kindness at a time.”
Though this bumper-sticker cliché sounds cheesy—especially in the mouth of God—it has biblical precedents. Take Matthew 25, for example, when Jesus tells his disciples, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.” Those most Christlike among us commit acts of kindness randomly because love directs everything they do. In this light the ARK—Acts of Random Kindness—is indeed salvific, the love of Christ changing the world.
Hence the ark as reconstructed in Evan Almighty remains true to the spirit of the biblical arca and to the historical tides that have guided its journey through the ages. As Evan’s ark offers refuge from destruction, its very placement in the profane space of daily life serves to accentuate its continuity with sacred tradition.
Crystal Downing is professor of English and Film Studies and Sharon Baker is assistant professor of theology and religion at Messiah College in Pennsylvania.
1. J. David Pleins traces the interpretive history of the Sumerian and Hebrew tales in When the Great Abyss Opened: Classic and Contemporary Readings of Noah’s Flood (Oxford Univ. Press, 2003).
2. Quoted in Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), p. 44.
3. Municipal records of Corpus Christi processions do not use the words “pyx” or “monstrance” for these containers. Instead, they report the Host was paraded in a “box” or, most often, a “shrine.” Significantly, the word “shrine” comes from scrinium, a Latin word, like arca, denoting a chest for books. In fact, the word scrinia still refers to chests containing the Torah.
4. The other four plays are the Fall of Lucifer, the Creation and Fall of Man, Cain and Abel, and Abraham and Isaac. The Ark play also appeared in Beverly and Norwich, as well as in a Cornish cycle.
5. “Pageant” preceded the word “page” in the English lexicon by 200 years.
6. The most recent attempt, led by Bob McGivern, president of Shamrock-The Trinity Corp, was denied access to Ararat in 2004.
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