The First Book of Moses: Genesis, Chapters 5-11

These chapters tell the tales of Noah's Ark and the Tower of Babel.

Noah's Ark tells the story of how God grew angry at the corruption of mankind, and decided to flood the whole Earth, killing everyone but Noah and his family (whom he found to be good people), and asked them to bring one female and one male animal from every specie, and put them all on an ark so that they could survive the flood.

One thing that I found interesting about this story is the way Noah tried to figure out if the Earth was drying. He sent out a dove several times, and when it came back with an olive branch he knew he could land. It was just like "Gilgamesh," when the gods drowned the earth but decided to spare...Well, I still can't pronounce his name, but that's what happened. The two tales are remarkably similar in that the two men both found favor with a god, and a divine force decided to drown the world except these two and their family. Even the way they figured out if it was safe to land is similar!

I wonder if Noah's Ark was based on "Gilgamesh." Gilgamesh is a lot older, but they both come from the same place and maybe whoever wrote the Bible had read "Gilgamesh."

Another thing I found interesting about this story is that the dove came back with an olive branch. Now, I hate people who make up deeper meanings than actually exist, or pretend that something that means nothing at all and was written merely because the author was bored has some deep philosophical meaning. It just annoys me and I find it pretentious. But I've heard that "extending the olive branch" could mean offering peace, asking for a truce. Maybe the olive branch was God's way of saying, "Enough is enough, I'm going to stop destroying your home and allow you to live in peace." But I'm probably reading too much into this.

Then the Babel story was about how humans had wanted to do too much, and God made it unable for them to communicate by giving them different languages.

I find this a good way of way of explaining the languages, but I wonder if God thought that if there was only harmony, humans could do anything. Of course, it's impossible to be all harmonious, because people have such different perspectives on things, but maybe if we had all stayed one big country, with one central culture, and not all divided, we could have had the same point of view on everything, because we would have the same teachings and values and education, except for a few oddballs.

Now that I think of it, it's ridiculous. Civil wars occur because the same culture disagrees on something. And there are political parties, racism, and prejudice and discord in any country. So much for that.