Wendover lost a treasure this week with the death of Karen Crawford.
She had the quiet strength of a the pioneers and like them met with triumph and disaster and treated those two impostors just the same.
Her life was not easy but she was the first to say it was not as hard as some others.
She was modest and quietly proud and she was among the first to comfort a neighbor when tragedy struck.
Karen brought with her a sense of community, she knew we were all in this together and she let you know it too.
She had common sense and grit.
She could spot a fool from miles and a con artist from miles more and made no secret of her assessment.
We will miss her.
The movie Noah has prompted discussion about the veracity of the tale told in the Bible.
Frankly we do not understand what the fuss is all about.
The Bible does not spend a whole lot of time about creation, less than ten pages, just a few thousand words to recount the creation of the universe to the flood and the beginning of civilization.
We view it as a kind of summation, a divine summation but a summation nonetheless.
Today if we gave that task to even the most learned cosmologists, anthropologists and zoologists we don’t think they could do a better job and certainly not as poetic. Remember the Torah is chanted and not just read aloud.
Invariably when the story of Noah is brought up some yahoo will also bring up the epic of Gilgamesh and delightfully point out that the flood story in the epic was written about a thousand years before Noah. Invariably the word borrow will come up and that just raises our hackles. To hear them tell it seems that the ancient Hebrews having no creation myth of their own went next door to the Akkadians and borrowed theirs along with a cup of sugar.
Should we be worried that sometime in the future an Akkadian will knock on the door and ask for Noah back?
No.
The ancient Hebrews were Akkadians. Abraham was a child of Ur which means ‘city’ in both ancient Akkadian and modern Hebrew.
The epic of Gilgamesh is the story of Noah. Call it a first draft. But it wasn’t stolen or borrowed, it is simply part of the cultural heritage of Mesopotamia the cradle of civilization. Everything that came from it is the birthright of all men.
Was there a real Noah and was there a real flood? Did the events as recorded in the Torah actually take place?
Considering the account of is about four pages long and most of it is a conversation with the Almighty and the rest is pretty vague there isn’t much to contradict.
There probably was not a flood that covered the entire planet but there could have been a flood that covered all of world, the world Noah knew. As a man living around the time copper was just beginning to give stone a run for it money, that world was pretty small and could have very easily been swallowed. It is all a matter of perspective. The same applies to the animals. Just how many species does on encounter today in a day’s walk? A week’s?
Nit picking the story also distract from lesson.
The world was destroyed because men abused it and debased themselves. The seven Noahide laws for personal and societal conduct formed the basis of every culture and they have worked pretty good over the last 6,000 years.
The seven laws are:
The prohibition of idolatry.
The prohibition of murder.
The prohibition of theft.
The prohibition of sexual immorality.
The prohibition of blasphemy.
The prohibition of eating flesh taken from an animal while it is still alive.
The requirement of maintaining courts to provide legal recourse.
What is more the lesson that all men are brothers is good to remember.
We are all children of Noah and should treat each other as family.