A Note on the Death Zone

Noah and his family and the animals on the ark are said to be atop floodwaters that are at least 20 feet taller than the highest mountain. This is probably for the sake of sounding believable (stifled laugh there), because already, for some reason, the dimensions of the ark have been described, and the author wants to make sure the story is cohesive.

The thing that the author(s) didn't know was that when you go very high up into the atmosphere, like when you're climbing Everest, you run out of oxygen. This is why some climbers (pansies) take oxygen tanks with them, and the others take their sweet time acclimitizing to the rarefied air.

The 'death zone' is the term used by mountaineers to refer to any height above 8,000 metres, or 26,250 feet, above sea level. The summit of Mt. Everest is 8,848 metres above sea level, or 29,028 feet. The reason for giving these altitudes such a buzz-killing name is that the air pressure is much lower and therefore your blood will only be partially saturated with oxygen. Your body will try to compensate for lack of oxygen by ramping up the production of red blood cells and increasing frequency of breathing and heart rate. This acclimitization should happen over a long period of time, and I think that forty days and nights would be a pretty good length of time for it.

The only problem is that humans (and many other animals) cannot live in the death zone (imagine that!) for very long. Your digestions shuts down, and you can't sleep, and all your bodily functions slowly deteriorate and then you die.

In contrast, the summit of Mt. Ararat is only 5,137 metres,16,854 feet, high. Twenty feet taller than this would be a walk in the park as compared to twenty feet above Everest. And it's likely that the author knew about Ararat, and unlikely they knew about Everest.

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.

A new year

It's been a little while since I've been able to get time away to read the bible, let alone make sport of it. I intend to pick up where I left off, though, and hopefully continue for quite a while (it's a long book!) and not stop and start.

Thanks for any of you that actually care about it.

-Millicent