What Was Aboard Noah’s Ark?
The biblical tale of the Great Flood is told as a bad cop/good cop story. In the first part, God was angry with Mankind and decided it should perish in the watery avalanche. Then God decided to save the human race and other life forms by telling Noah to build an ark that will survive the catastrophe, and take on board his family (for Mankind’s survival) and all manner of animals, in male & female pairs.
Critics Of the Bible have
pointed out that the ark, whose dimensions are given, could not have possibly hold all the purported animal species. The valid comment has, however, a simple yet an amazing explanation.
We now know that the biblical
deluge tale came from earlier sources - the writings of the Sumerian civilization that blossomed out in Mesopotamia (mostly today’s Iraq) some 6,000 years ago. In that tale it is one god, Enlil, who seeks Mankind’s demise, and another (Enki) who devises the rescue plan. The latter was the Mesopotamian god of science, a great biologist who was involved in genetically upgrading Homo erectus to Homo sapiens. And what did he provide to Noah to take aboard to save animal and crop life? The Sumerian text clearly answers: the “Seed of Life,” the DNA of animals and crops not the animals as such!
A Mountaintop Laboratory
Modern
science attributes the appearance - some 10,000 years ago -- of certain animals (such as sheep) and plants (cereal crops) to Man’s gradual “domestication” efforts. The Sumerians credit that to the gods:
After the Deluge, a relenting Enlil joined Enki at a mountaintop laboratory to reconstitute there the animals (starting with sheep) and crops (starting with wheat and barley) from the saved DNA. Several Sumerian texts, cited in my books The Twelfth Planet and Genesis Revisited describe the process in great detail.
The seed preservation plan in Spitzbergen is thus not the first effort to biologically preserve earth’s life from a catastrophic occurrence...
The “Frozen Ark” Project:
Several years ago British
scientists announced the “Frozen Ark Project” to preserve, as a start, the
DNA of endangered species, and then of another ten thousand living
creatures -- a kind of "Jurassic Park” in laboratory flasks
A similar project called the
Frozen Zoo was undertaken by the San Diego Zoo. Other zoos and
biological centers, in Australia, China and India have also announced
similar plans.
Some of them recognize the
similarity of their efforts to the Bible’s tale of Noah’s Ark. Few, if any,
realize that the similarity is much more profound - that modem science is
just catching up with ancient knowledge.
© Z. Sltchin 2006