Whilst channel hopping yesterday evening, I came across the maddest TV documentary I have ever seen, with Joanna Lumley trying to find Noah’s Ark, which certainly never existed. Ms Lumley, who seems to be a charming person, was filmed wandering around Mount Ararat, speculating to herself and with locals about precisely where the Ark ended up. At times she was deeply moved by what she found and with whom she spoke. The show’s researchers and producers should hang their heads in shame.
So much of the superstitious nonsense surrounding some of the more ludicrous biblical episodes wasn’t even vaguely challenged. We are supposed to believe that Noah was 600 years of age when God instructed him to build his Ark, which then took him 120 years to complete. Now, I may have lived a somewhat sheltered life but I have never heard of anyone reaching the age of 600, never mind 720, and still being able to build a gigantic Ark. And how gigantic must it have been? We were never told.
Why, for example, did she not seek to explain how Noah, who was 600 years old, managed to get two of each variety of beetle on board, given that there are at least 350,000 varieties that we know about? That must have taken a little while given that not all these varieties would have been in the near vicinity of the Ark. I am not aware that Noah had a team of wildlife experts to help him out given that this was supposedly at a time when no one really knew what was going on. If it had ever happened, collecting all these beetles and every other variety of animal on earth in time for God to drown everyone else would have been some achievement.
Ms Lumley seemed very disappointed when she met up with a geologist with a nice line in hair dye who explained, in drab, scientific language that the whole idea of Noah’s Ark was, an I paraphrase, a load of old bollocks. Everything, including the large rock that some claim is the Ark, could be easily explained through science. The show should have ended there and then, but of course it didn’t.
There was no reference to Noah the man, either, which was just as well since he had a predilection to get drunk on wine and roll about naked in the presence of his sons. I am not making this up – whoever wrote the Old Testament did that – but this does not seem appropriate behaviour for a biblical hero.
And throughout this dewy eyed performance, Ms Lumley never remotely questions the very idea that God should kill everyone and everything because, he must have concluded, humans (and animals) were wicked, they had bad thoughts, and the whole earth was violent and corrupt. It is estimated that 20 million people would have drowned as a result of the flood and the only people who survived were Noah and his family. That puts God right up there in the list of the worst mass murderers in history, alongside Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Ghengis Khan. Just as well it never happened.
The worst thing was treating the story of Noah as if it were fact, interviewing christians, jews and muslims alike who all pointed out that it appeared in their religious account of the times, whether that be the bible or the Qu’ran. A better idea would have been to have treated the whole thing as the fairy story it actually is but why spoil it with facts?
