Genesis Chapter 7 v.1-24

So god told Noah to go into the ark with his whole family, which consisted of his wife, his three sons and their wives. Eight people. And god tells him also to take seven clean animals with him, and all the other animals should just be paired. Guess he changed his mind about the whole "two of every kind" thing. Oh, and seven of every kind of bird.

Seven days is all Noah has left before he knows the world will be destroyed. A whole week. Do you think he was busy doing all those things he'd put off doing, or do you think he just sat in his bedroom and stared at the wall? Cause I would've done the latter.

That's the thing, too. God didn't give Noah a chance to save humankind, didn't give him a chance to warn anybody, didn't tell him he could even divulge this information. Just, "I'm going to kill everything. Everything except you. Do you feel special now?" Must've been a depressing week for Noah, listening to people in the marketplace looking forward to the next season, or families planning for weddings that would never take place. Watching mothers carrying around their sons or daughters in their arms, whose futures are now just a short, watery doom. Or even little things like, "I'll pay you back next week." Nope. No you won't.

This is what really bothers me about teaching this particular story to children. Talk about desensitization.

"Noah did all that the Lord commanded him." Yeah, well, not much of a choice, is there?

So Noah was six hundred years old when he went into the ark with all the animals that didn't really fit and his whole family of sons and daughters-in-law. "On the seventeenth day of the second month" (that's unnecessarily precise) the whole world flooded from the bottom and the top. It rained for forty days and nights.

I'm assuming Noah didn't take any fish or waterfowl with him on the ark. That would just be stupid. But the author, for the fourth time now, talks about all the animals on the ark with him. And "Then the Lord shut him in." Presumably saying, "See you when everything you've ever known is dead and gone. Have fun!"

For forty days the waters increased, and Noah and the ark went up, up, up, and everything that had been land dwelling was totally and utterly f*cked. And after forty days, when the ark was at least twenty feet above the high mountains, the waters and the rain stopped.

The flood lasted (after that, I imagine) for a hundred and fifty days. That's about five months. I'm not sure what calendar they were using at that time, but it was almost half a year. At least two seasons of hanging out on a big boat with no one to talk to except some animals and your family. Noah probably spent a lot of time tending the animals.