- 4 months ago
a 2003 documentary co-produced by BBC/Discovery Channel that examines the biblical story of Noah's Ark using scientific and archaeological evidence. It presents the narrative of Noah building an ark to save his family and animals from a great flood, while also investigating whether a global flood is historically or archaeologically possible and re-examining the life of the historical Noah. The documentary was hosted by Tom Hodgkins and is distinct from a separate 2015 BBC series titled The Ark, which offered a modern retelling of the biblical story
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00:00The story of Noah building an ark to save his family and save thousands of
00:07animals from a flood which destroys all life on earth is an epic from many
00:11people's childhoods. It's a wonderful story found in the Bible, the Quran, and
00:18the Torah. But is it in fact real history? Now the technology exists to examine
00:26this well-known epic with the eyes of science. We will weigh out the evidence
00:32from archaeological finds in Iraq. We will examine the proof that a global flood
00:39did cover the whole planet. We'll also create an historically accurate picture
00:46of the real Noah, who he was, where he lived, and what he might have looked like.
00:56The story of Noah is told in the book of Genesis in the Bible and the Torah. It's set somewhere in the Middle East about 5,000 years ago.
01:08The story of Noah is told in the book of Genesis in the Bible and the Torah. It's set somewhere in the Middle East about 5,000 years ago.
01:18Noah's family includes his wife, his three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and their brides.
01:30Noah stands out as a good person, the only virtuous man left in a world that had become filled with corruption and violence.
01:40He is described as a wine grower, a claim that has an authentic ring to it as wine was grown in the Middle East as far back as 3,000 B.C.
01:54And this reference also provides a rare insight into Noah's character. After the flood, the Bible says Noah planted the first vineyard.
02:04But it also tells us that Noah had a weakness. Having made the first wine, the story goes that Noah drank too much of it.
02:18In fact, one night, this holy man collapses naked and drunk.
02:32Horrified, his sons Ham and Shem cover their father.
02:46In the morning, Noah is embarrassed and perhaps suffering the first ever hangover, he curses the sons who saw him naked.
03:00Sounds like a flawed and complex man, but perhaps that is true of all great men.
03:12But Noah was probably a very reliable man because God gives him a very big mission.
03:18The story goes that God warned Noah in a dream that he was going to punish humanity for its sins with a flood that would cover the whole earth.
03:30To save Noah and his family, God told him to build a boat of wood and to line it with pitch inside and out.
03:36He also ordered Noah to give the ark three decks, a roof and a door.
03:44But the most surprising of God's instructions was the sheer size of the ark.
03:50The Bible spells it out in cubits. Traditionally, a cubit was the length of a man's forearm, about one and a half feet.
04:00The Bible says Noah built an ark 300 cubits long and 30 cubits wide by 30 high.
04:06That's almost as big as modern supertankers and cruise liners like Titanic.
04:24Nearly 450 feet long, it would have been a magnificent sight, certainly the biggest boat in the ancient world.
04:36Quite an achievement for an ordinary man.
04:43Now, the Bible assumes it was possible to build this monster vessel out of wood alone.
04:49It's a pretty big assumption.
05:02The familiar image from the story books and cartoons of our childhood is of a huge wooden ark with the animals marching inside two by two.
05:10But that is a 19th century image.
05:13It is completely at odds with what could have been built in biblical times.
05:18According to Tom Vosmer, an expert on ancient boats, not even 19th century engineers could have built a 450 foot ark out of wood alone.
05:28They had to use steel frames inside much smaller wooden boats just to keep them afloat.
05:35The problem with a 450 foot boat made of wood is that the wood as a material cannot maintain the shape of the boat.
05:45And the boat would start to distort at sea, the seams would open up and it would sink.
05:52It's a safe bet that the huge ark would spring hundreds of leaks along the length of its huge hull and sink like a stone.
06:02That's not to say Noah didn't build an ark. It's just that it would have been much smaller.
06:18Then there's another problem. How could he cram two of every different kind of animal into the ark?
06:27At the latest estimate there are 30 million species on earth.
06:42Even with a fleet of arks Noah would have struggled to fit them all in.
06:48And how would he have gotten the animals on board?
06:53Did he personally go and fetch them or did they come to him?
06:59It is something Noah would have had to consider, especially since he had a pressing deadline.
07:05Noah had just seven days to find all the animals and get them on board.
07:1130 million species in a week.
07:17Noah would have needed to load them at the rate of 50 pairs a second.
07:22But if one assumes a more realistic loading rate, then it would have taken Noah at least 30 years.
07:29It may seem like there's a stark choice.
07:45Dismiss the story as myth or appeal to the hand of God.
07:50But there may in fact be another explanation.
07:54The instruction to load all the animals could have referred only to all the animals in Noah's part of the world.
08:01In fact, the book of Genesis specifies which animals Noah was to load.
08:08The same book has a second set of instructions, which are much less well known, but present an even more realistic scenario.
08:19Noah is told to take seven pairs of clean animals.
08:25Clean animals are those considered suitable for ceremonial sacrifices to God.
08:34The books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy specify ten such species, including several types of sheep, antelopes, plus cattle, goats and deer.
08:44Seven pairs of ten species.
08:49That's 140 animals.
08:54Then Noah is directed to take a pair of each impure animal and bird.
08:59Again, the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy list 30 or more.
09:03They include the pig, the hare, the lizard, the snail and so on.
09:09That's a further 60 animals.
09:14Then finally, Noah is told to load seven pairs of the clean birds, like doves, ducks and cockerels.
09:24Adding all that up, Noah had 260 animals.
09:30That's child's play compared to 30 million.
09:35Especially if you discount the elephants, kangaroos and reluctant camels.
09:47A smaller ark and fewer animals.
09:50Suddenly, the Noah story looks more plausible.
09:53But the next part of the story may be the most far-fetched of all.
10:00Noah, the ark and the animals.
10:04It's all meaningless without the worst cataclysm in human history.
10:08The flood.
10:10According to the Bible, it rained until the whole world was covered in water.
10:29Such a catastrophe should have left evidence all over the planet,
10:37in the form of uniform marine sediments spread across the earth and the ocean floor.
10:45But have geologists found any proof of a devastating global flood?
10:51The scientific quest for traces of the biblical global flood that Noah, his family and the animals in the ark survived,
11:06actually began more than 150 years ago.
11:12But geologist Ian Plymer, after searching across continents, sometimes in the most extreme weather conditions,
11:19has found very little evidence.
11:22A great flood would leave a signature.
11:24It would be a very, very large signature, apparent all over the world.
11:29There is no such signature.
11:31There is no evidence.
11:33In fact, there is only overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
11:37The absence of direct evidence is only one of the problems with the story.
11:43The whole idea of a global flood flies in the face of what is known about planet Earth.
11:50To flood the entire planet to the top of the Himalayas would take three times the volume of water in the oceans.
11:58It's hard to imagine where such a deluge could come from.
12:02The Bible provides some clues.
12:05It says it rained for 40 days and 40 nights.
12:10But even non-stop, that's not enough.
12:15We know of how much water we've got in the oceans.
12:18We know how much water is in the polar ice caps.
12:21We know how much water is in the atmosphere.
12:23And we know how much water is in the rocks.
12:25If we put all of that together, which has happened many times in the geological past,
12:30we still do not flood the continents.
12:33If rainfall couldn't deliver enough water, what could?
12:51The Bible offers one more possibility.
12:54Deep springs.
12:56The book of Genesis says all the springs of the great deep broke through.
13:03Could the great flood have gushed out of the center of the earth?
13:08It's an impossibility to have that much amount of water coming out from springs, fountains or geysers.
13:24If all of that water was in the earth and in the crust, then well before it had been released as geysers, the crust would have been quicksand.
13:33You couldn't have walked.
13:37Even if the flood had been caused by a miracle, Noah, his family and the animals would have faced further problems.
13:45The amount of water flooding the surface of the planet would have changed the earth's atmosphere.
13:56The atmosphere would have had a huge amount of water vapor dissolved in it.
14:00So much so that you would have drowned by breathing and so much so that atmospheric pressure would have crushed your lungs.
14:10Geysers present another potentially fatal problem.
14:13They release poisonous gases from deep within the earth's core, which probably would have killed everybody whether or not they were in the ark.
14:20Geysers pump out huge amounts of noxious sulfur rich gases. Even before the flood, you could not have breathed.
14:29If nothing on earth could cause the flood, how about something from space, like a comet?
14:51They contain vast amounts of frozen water.
15:00But to flood the entire planet, the comet would have to be a thousand miles wide, or as big as Brazil.
15:09And if a comet that size hit the earth, not many people would live to worry about a flood.
15:15The friction caused by the comet's forced entry into the earth's outer atmosphere and its impact as it struck earth would be equivalent to 12 trillion megatons of TNT.
15:33The biggest explosion of all time.
15:36Comets carry water. They are dirty ice. As they come into the atmosphere, they explode. They are a massive shockwave.
15:49Massive areas of forest wiped out.
15:55Huge extinctions of life from a comet.
15:57The comet's devastating impact would force the temperature of the atmosphere to rise to 12,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
16:11Hotter than the surface of the sun.
16:17We would have had no life to go onto an ark.
16:20Noah, his family, and all the animals two by two would have been fried to charcoal before the whole flood started.
16:43End of story.
16:45Not quite.
16:50According to the Bible, Noah's ark landed in the mountains of Ararat, today in eastern Turkey.
17:02The earth was revealed at last, and the animals disembarked after months below decks to repopulate the world.
17:08So are there any remains of the ark?
17:15The problem is that the evidence, wood, rots in a matter of centuries.
17:21Countless expeditions have been drawn to Mount Ararat, seeking to discover the ark's resting place.
17:30There are no obvious remains of the ark on the slopes of Mount Ararat.
17:35This hasn't stopped a thriving tourist industry, pilgrims, ark hunters, and locals convinced that they will find the remains of the ark somewhere on the mountain.
17:49One French expedition in the 50s did find an ancient-looking piece of wood, 12,000 feet up, in a glacier.
18:10As a geologist, Ian Plymer wanted to find out more.
18:21He knew that for the timber to be part of Noah's ark, it would need to be dated to around 3000 BC.
18:28When this piece of wood was found, it was thought to be the clue.
18:36This is what we need to show we have Noah's ark.
18:39And so, they took the wood to date it, and you can date wood by measuring tree rings or by carbon dating.
18:47It wasn't old enough.
18:49The wood was from the 8th century, 4,000 years after Noah's time.
18:54But what was the wood doing on the slopes of Ararat?
18:58The wood would have been transported there to build a structure, something like a church.
19:03There is a Birmingham ark business there now. There was in the past. It certainly didn't come from Noah.
19:11But just as Ararat was looking like a false trail for ark hunters, this ancient mountain came up with a new twist.
19:18In 1949, US Air Force planes photographed the summit of Mount Ararat.
19:30Rumors began to spread that they'd spotted a boat structure in the ice.
19:35For decades, the CIA withheld the pictures.
19:40But then, through the Freedom of Information Act, the CIA finally released the photos in 1995.
19:53At first, there's nothing in the CIA picture to suggest a boat.
19:58But look closely. You can see a huge dark shape sticking out of the ice cap.
20:03It's about 450 feet long, the right length for the ark.
20:09The anomaly has tantalized ark hunters since the pictures were released.
20:14But geologists remain unconvinced.
20:18It's such a poor quality, grainy image that it's very hard to tell whether it's an ark or chicken entrails.
20:26You can see dark shapes anywhere from the air, be they in ice or on the ground.
20:32Some of them are ark shaped, others are not.
20:35It's not at all convincing from one single poor quality photograph.
20:40But hopes were raised again in the year 2000 with new, pin-sharp satellite images of the strange shape.
20:46This one shows a snow ledge believed by ark hunters to conceal a boat-shaped outline.
20:53But for Ian Plymer, this is just another of nature's random shapes.
20:59Well, this is a fabulous photograph. Far better resolution than the CIA photograph.
21:04However, we see nothing spectacular here.
21:07All we see is evidence of retreating and advancing ice.
21:10In fact, all the geological evidence indicates that an ark could not have remained frozen in a glacier for long.
21:20The ice is constantly pushing material down the slopes of Mount Ararat
21:25and ultimately taking any ark that might have been there to the bottom.
21:30It would have spattered out as all glaciers do.
21:33As they move downslope, anything they pick up, they spit out, be it rocks, be it arks.
21:40In addition to fragments of wood and photos, there are dozens of alleged sightings of the ark.
21:48Biblical scholar Lloyd Bailey has made an exhaustive analysis of all the claims and found them to be false.
21:57An amazing amount of evidence has been produced by ark searchers in support of the ark having landed there.
22:04But photographs are alleged to exist, but you can't find them.
22:08Newspaper articles of sightings are alleged to exist, but they are lost.
22:13Ark searchers want desperately to be able to support the Bible in an age of doubt, in the modern rational age.
22:21And that desire is so strong that they can rationalize away the overwhelming evidence that there is no boat there,
22:28and no evidence whatsoever that there ever has been.
22:35The traditional Noah story may not pass a rational historical test.
22:39But maybe it was never meant to.
22:42Biblical scholars using clues in the language used by the Bible are agreed that the story of Noah was physically written down in the 6th century BC.
23:00The scribes who wrote it were Jewish priests who were in exile in Babylon, today modern Iraq.
23:12Maybe they sat down one day to make up a cautionary tale about what happens when people disobey God.
23:19But it's said that all stories have some seeds of truth.
23:27Maybe the Noah story is an exaggeration, an embellishment of something that really happened.
23:34One hundred and fifty years ago, archaeologists made some extraordinary finds in Iraq.
23:44Evidence that would rewrite the famous story about Noah and his ark, full of animals.
23:50In 1851, British archaeologist Sir Henry Layard explored the ruins of the Babylonian Library of Nineveh.
24:12His finds were a breakthrough. Hundreds of clay tablets of all sizes and shapes.
24:37They may have held vital clues about the Noah story.
24:41The trouble was, Sir Henry couldn't decipher the ancient Babylonian script.
24:48So he packed the tablets and sent them off to London, to the British Museum, to be deciphered by experts.
24:56The museum staff had no idea about the sensational information encrypted in the tablets.
25:10So they languished in their vaults for years until 1872, when they came to the attention of museum assistant George Smith.
25:21Dr. Irving Finkel today runs the department in the British Museum, where George Smith worked.
25:31Smith had a peculiar quality, tantamount to genius, which meant that he could look at a cuneiform tablet and know what it was about.
25:38More than anybody else before him, and probably anybody else since.
25:41I mean, he wasn't a trained philologist, he knew a bit of Hebrew, he knew a bit of Arabic, he could look things up in the dictionary.
25:46But he just had this amazing quality that he could look at a bit of clay which to everybody else looks like a dog biscuit, and know what the words meant.
25:53And he was the person in our department who read about the flood for the first time.
25:59What George Smith discovered among the tablets was an ancient story about a great flood, the epic of Gilgamesh.
26:06It was a breakthrough Smith himself could barely comprehend.
26:10The impact on him was something he could hardly control.
26:14He dropped the tablet back into the tray like this, and started to run around the room holding his head and making funny noises.
26:21And according to the narrative which is recorded, he started even to take his clothes off in his agitation.
26:27Because he was the first person after all that time to read this funny writing and see that there was, to all intents and purposes,
26:33the text that everybody knew from the Bible.
26:35And it was just too much for him to tolerate. He just nearly went crazy.
26:39What seemed to upset him so much were the similarities between the stories of Gilgamesh and Noah.
26:51The great gods decided to make a deluge.
27:00Build a boat.
27:02Take into the boat the seed of all living things.
27:19Irving Finkel has a theory why George Smith behaved so oddly that fateful day.
27:25The sheer excitement might have triggered some sort of brain seizure.
27:30I was reading something about the history of epilepsy where this phenomenon was described as a particular kind of epilepsy,
27:36making this funny noise and trying to disrobe yourself in the agitation of having an epileptic fit of some kind.
27:42And it did occur to me to wonder whether the shock that hit him, the real shock, might not have triggered something of that kind.
27:49Since then, yet more accounts of the flood story were unearthed in Iraq, confirming that the story first emerged in ancient Mesopotamia,
28:10the place where the great Sumerian, Assyrian and Babylonian civilizations were born.
28:19The ancient flood stories had different names and were written at different times.
28:25But they all pointed to a common ancestor composed some 5,000 years ago.
28:31One original story about a disastrous flood.
28:35It is very likely that the biblical story has a Mesopotamian prototype because they are so similar.
28:45In both cases, the gods decide to destroy the human race.
28:48They do so by a great flood.
28:50One family survives in a boat.
28:52They take on board animals.
28:54They disembark and then they repopulate the earth.
28:56One of the oldest flood narratives, the epic of Atrahasis, written before the more famous epic of Gilgamesh, was discovered only recently.
29:06Alan Millard found it while sifting through the British Museum's backlog of clay tablets.
29:12It made him wonder.
29:14Perhaps the Bible never meant a global deluge.
29:16The ancient Hebrew language has one word for land and country and earth.
29:24And it's easy to suppose that means the whole earth.
29:29But it certainly need not.
29:31And I think that it was a local flood that is described there.
29:34The discovery of these older versions of Noah's story raised a tantalizing possibility.
29:44What if they had been inspired by an actual flood?
29:48Not a global deluge, but a regional flood in Mesopotamia.
29:52In the 1930s, archaeologists returned to Iraq to find out.
30:00In 1931, a team of archaeologists led by Leonard Woolley and his wife Catherine were excavating the ruins of the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur.
30:22The Woolies were a colorful husband and wife team, friends of Lawrence of Arabia and of Agatha Christie, the novelist.
30:38They left a detailed record of their finds, revealing that they dug five to six thousand years into the past.
30:45The right time frame for the Noah story.
30:53One day, his workmen struck an unusual layer of soil.
30:57One that could only have been deposited by water.
31:03When the soil was analyzed, it showed that the silt had been deposited by river water.
31:07Now, Mesopotamia suffered regular, seasonal floods.
31:14But this was a massive layer.
31:17Something out of the ordinary.
31:19In fact, later archaeological excavations of ancient city streets show that five thousand years ago, at least three Mesopotamian towns were hit by large river floods.
31:34So Leonard Woolley and his wife had hit the jackpot.
31:44There had been a massive flood in ancient Mesopotamia after all.
31:48It was conclusive proof.
31:51A real story lay behind the biblical and Babylonian epics.
31:54In committing the story to writing, the Sumerian scribes may have embellished it with myths and supernatural events.
32:12But there are plenty of practical details, too.
32:17And they are priceless in reconstructing a story that's historically plausible.
32:23However, it does mean starting afresh.
32:26It means setting aside the storybook image of the huge ark.
32:38The global doge.
32:41The number of animals.
32:43And the landing on Mount Ararat.
32:47Above all, it means abandoning the familiar biblical image of Noah.
32:52And introducing a very different image of what he might have actually looked like.
32:57And how he might have lived.
33:04Archaeological finds have established that the Noah story may actually have happened in Samaria.
33:10An ancient civilization in what is now Iraq.
33:16The Babylonian accounts say that the story begins in the city of Shurupak.
33:20This was the cradle of civilization.
33:25The Sumerians invented writing, the wheel, and accounting.
33:31And what is known of Sumerian culture offers the first glimpse of the historical figure behind the flood stories.
33:40The most obvious difference is how Noah looked.
33:43Forget the man in biblical robes and imagine instead a Sumerian from head to toe.
33:50Wearing eye makeup with a bald head and even a kilt.
33:54Then there's what he did for a living.
33:58The epic of Gilgamesh says the Sumerian Noah owned silver and gold.
34:05Five thousand years ago, these were the currency of wealthy merchants.
34:09Suggesting that the Sumerian Noah was not a farmer or a wine grower, but a businessman.
34:14Instead of an ark to survive the flood, the Sumerian Noah is more likely to have built a boat to make money, hauling grain, beer, and animals.
34:26All the big trading centers, like the great city of Ur, lay on the Euphrates.
34:36It was cheaper to take cargo on river barges than by overland caravans.
34:40The question is, how big a barge did this Noah have?
35:00The Sumerians used a variety of boats on the Euphrates, from small reed canoes to wooden ones 20 feet long.
35:07But the Babylonian sources agree the flood boat was much bigger than those.
35:14There was an obvious incentive for merchants to build the biggest commercial river barge possible.
35:21But they would have been limited by the technology available.
35:25No remains or inscriptions of large Sumerian boats have been found yet.
35:30So instead, marine archaeologists have asked how big a boat could the Sumerians have built with the available know-how.
35:50One simple solution would have been to tie smaller boats together.
35:53Hold it a bit!
35:56Marine archaeologist Tom Vosmer believes there are clues to this effect in the Epic of Gilgamesh.
36:03It says that the boat was divided in sections.
36:06Probably one of the best ways to do it would be to build it in units, such as the size of this, and use it as a pontoon in a river barge actually.
36:18And hold a number of these together, lash them together with some rope and heavy timbers, and then they could build the ark on top of that.
36:25And it was probably a system that could have been used on the rivers quite easily.
36:28Since the historical ark was a cargo vessel, it's easy to say what the Sumerian Noah loaded onto his barge.
36:47Forget the animals marching two by two, and think instead of Noah loading animals, grain, and beer for sale.
37:02Even for a rich merchant, it's quite an undertaking to mastermind such a big construction.
37:07But according to the Babylonian sources, Noah had more than just wealth on his side.
37:23They say Noah was the king of the city of Shurupak.
37:28But he wasn't above the law.
37:31Failure to deliver his cargo would have meant social and financial ruin for Noah,
37:35whether he was king or not.
37:38In Sumeria, anyone who failed to pay their debts, including kings,
37:43was liable to end up as a slave.
37:48But how did the flood come into it?
37:51The most likely answer is that Noah was caught out by a freak combination of natural events.
37:58Parts of the Euphrates were only navigable when river levels were at their peak.
38:03That meant Noah would have had to time his departure carefully.
38:08That meant waiting for the melt waters.
38:34Melting snow from the Armenian mountains increased the flow of the Euphrates in July.
38:40Records indicate that only then were the river channels deep enough for large vessels.
38:44But there was a risk.
38:52If Shurupak was hit by a freak storm just at the moment that river levels were at their highest,
38:59then the peaceful waters of the Euphrates could turn into a raging flood.
39:03But the average rainfall in dry years in July was zero.
39:10The odds on a catastrophic river flood in Mesopotamia would have been remote.
39:15About one in every 1,000 years.
39:17So if it happened, it should have been worth writing about.
39:29The Babylonian tablets say that on the day of the flood,
39:32Noah and his family were having a banquet on the barge.
39:35Then the weather suddenly began to change for the worse.
39:40A freak storm was beginning and a catastrophic flood was on its way.
39:48A storm that would threaten Noah's very survival.
39:51If a flash flood was big enough to sweep away Noah's Ark and put his life in danger,
40:14it would have begun with rainfall of tropical intensity in the mountains where the rivers rise.
40:19Mesopotamia isn't in the tropics.
40:24But there's evidence that hurricanes and tropical storms could get that far.
40:33Some 6,000 years ago, it was much warmer and wetter.
40:36And it would be no surprise whatsoever to get a tropical storm.
40:42We could have had 10 times the rainfall.
40:44Some of these meteorological events are absolutely catastrophic.
40:49And these are the sort of events that we record in history.
40:52We don't record the normal day-to-day humdrum.
40:59If a freak storm coincided with the seasonal snow melt,
41:03then the Euphrates could easily have flooded the Mesopotamian plain.
41:09The Bible says the storm lasted for an incredible 40 days.
41:13The Bible says the storm lasted for an incredible 40 days.
41:15The Bible says the storm lasted for an incredible forty days.
41:39The Babylonian tablets say it was seven.
41:44Not even a single day would have been terrible, life-threatening.
41:55With much of his cargo left behind or swept away, Noah's barge would have been at the mercy
42:00of the raging Euphrates.
42:05The Babylonian tablets say it was seven.
42:16The Babylonian tablets say it was seven.
42:22The following day, say the Babylonian tablets, Noah and his family couldn't see land.
42:46The flood extended for miles.
42:53After the storm, Noah and his family must have longed for the waters to subside and ground
42:58them on the banks of the Euphrates.
43:02In fact, their problems had only just begun.
43:09All versions of the story agree that they couldn't see land for at least seven days.
43:14The Bible concludes that Noah's flood covered the whole world.
43:19But there is, in fact, another explanation.
43:25Noah's family would have believed that they were drifting on the flooded Euphrates.
43:29They would have been relieved that, at the very least, the river water meant they wouldn't
43:33die of thirst, but the Babylonian versions suggest that the water was salty.
43:54Noah's ark was no longer drifting on the flooded Euphrates.
44:01If you plot Noah's course from Shurupak, now in the flooded plain, the currents would have
44:06swept his barge downstream into the Persian Gulf.
44:12This tallies with the epic of Gilgamesh, which says that he looked upon the sea.
44:23There's no telling how long Noah and his family would have stayed marooned in the Persian Gulf.
44:28The Bible records more than a year.
44:31The Babylonian tablets suggest just a week.
44:37Either way, Noah and his family had a big problem, salty water.
44:42What would they drink?
44:47Without fresh water from rain or river, their only alternative would have been the beer they
44:51were carrying for their traders.
44:55Beer is actually a good alternative.
44:58And we know they had it three and a half thousand years ago, they were brewing beer.
45:02And beer anyway is 98% water.
45:03And it's full of nutrients.
45:06Most important, it's sterile and wouldn't suffer from contamination like water might.
45:24One of the hallmarks of the Noah story is that the ark is said to have landed in the mountains
45:29of Ararat.
45:33But if there was no global flood, then it's far more likely that it landed somewhere else
45:37altogether.
45:41The mountains of Ararat lie to the north of Shurupak.
45:45Swept down river, the barge would have grounded 500 miles away on the shores of the Persian Gulf.
45:52In the Bible, once the ark has grounded, the story is almost over.
45:57But the Babylonian tablets hint that Noah's adventures were far from over.
46:06There are several puzzling references.
46:09One talks of the overthrowing of his kingship.
46:12Another says the flood hero was expelled.
46:20All of these references clearly suggest that for some reason, Noah couldn't return to Shurupak.
46:26That even when the flood was over, he was still in mortal danger.
46:32The most likely explanation is that many of Noah's creditors had survived the deluge,
46:38had tracked him down, and were now demanding their money back.
46:44Under Sumerian law, Noah could be forced into slavery to repay his debts.
46:50He would have had to flee the country to avoid prosecution.
46:58Precisely where the fugitive Noah went is something of a mystery.
47:03One of the Babylonian tablets say that Noah went to live in a land called Dilmun.
47:10Now that's the Sumerian name for the modern island of Bahrain.
47:15Maybe this is where he came to rest.
47:24That is where, after the flood was over, the Babylonian Noah was settled by the gods.
47:30Apparently it was a pleasant place to be where he could exist without much work and pass the time away as he pleased.
47:40If he did end up in Dilmun, then the modern island of Bahrain may have a remarkable secret.
47:53Its landscape is dotted with hundreds of thousands of burial mounds, and only a handful of these tombs have been excavated.
48:01But many date back to Sumerian times.
48:05They are the sort of place a great king would be laid to rest in.
48:15In time, the memory of a king who survived a flood could have been turned into a great Sumerian legend.
48:23It would have been embellished with miraculous and mythological elements.
48:32Eventually, it would have been written down, copied and recopied by generations of scribes, giving rise to new versions.
48:452,000 years later, one of these versions, languishing in a library in Babylon, could have come to the attention of the Jewish priests who wrote the Bible.
48:56When they first read the story, how could they fail to recognize the lessons it offers?
49:04If humankind falls short of God's laws, there's a dreadful price to pay.
49:12Behind that moral message lies one of the world's great stories.
49:19And behind that story, we can just glimpse a real man, a real boat, and a real adventure.
49:29One of the moments in which...
49:32One of the many dangers shows there
49:49are drivers of transgression ...
49:54Transcription by CastingWords
50:24CastingWords
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