Noah and the Flood

Personally, I thought the Noah movie was okay, but not great.  I really couldn’t buy the Watchers as Transformer-like angels embedded in rock.  And the crazy-Noah-wants-to-kill-his-grandsons motif simply made no sense at all.  But it was fun.  It was certainly more “authentic” to the traditional biblical sources than the Thor movies’ relationship to Viking mythology.  (Really, no Norse god would be caught dead wearing spandex and funky plastic armor!)  I basically agree with Jeff Bradshaw’s excellent review.

For those interested in digging a bit deeper than a superficial Hollywood epic, here are some interesting studies about Noah.

Cultural background

Chen, Y. The Primeval Flood Catastrophe: Origins and Early Development in Mesopotamian Traditions (2013)

Finkel, I. The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood (2014)

Later Interpretations

Bailey, L. Noah: The Person and the Story in History and Tradition, (1989)

Cohn, N. Noah’s Flood: The Genesis Story in Western Thought (1999)

Dundas, A. The Flood Myth, (1988)

Huggett, Richard J. Cataclysms and Earth History: The Development of Diluvialism (1989)

Kugel, J.  Traditions of the Bible, (1998), 171-226.

Lewis, J. A Study of the Interpretation of Noah and the Flood in Jewish and Christian Literature, (1968)

Martinez, F. Interpretations of the Flood (1999)

Pleins, J. David. When the Great Abyss Opened: Classic and Contemporary Readings of Noah’s Flood. (2003)

LDS Perspectives

Bradshaw, Jeff and David Larsen, In God’s Image and Likeness 2: Enoch, Noah, and the Tower of Babel, (Interpreter Foundation and Eborn Books, 2014)