Why I’m Rewriting the Bible

“Don’t Look Up” is just Noah’s Ark, and Life in Code

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I would like to convince you that the story of Noah’s ark is simply Netflix’s Don’t Look Up, but from thousands of years ago. I would also like to tell you why I’ve been rewriting the Bible, and what happens when you start home-brewing your own midrashic Bible satire. It’s actually quite surprising. Stay with me.

(As a side note, every now and again I’m going to do these nonfiction pieces. Someone once said that fiction is life in code. In these commentaries, I will tell you the code. Just a heads up: this post contains spoilers for Don’t Look Up. Also, Noah’s ark. Today is all about a short story I wrote called “Noah Tries to Fit Five Million Animals onto the Ark.” It’s one of my favorites so far.)

I grew up in Christian America during the 1990s, ministered to by Baptist preachers, “Positive, Encouraging K-Love” radio, and a very sincere Donut Man, who told me on each and every VHS tape that there was a hole in the middle of my heart. I also grew up with Noah’s ark. It never occurred to me, as a good Christian child entertained by singing vegetables, to ask why the God of love would destroy every living soul with a great big flood. But back then, if you would have asked, I would have said they deserved it.

There are generally four ways to interpret the story of Noah’s ark. These are:

1. as a cute menagerie for toddlers;

2. as the anti-intellectual decathlon for the fundamentalist Olympics;

3. as a disturbing story where God gets mad, shakes the Etch-a-Sketch, and kills 99.9% of all living, breathing creatures;

4. folklore!

I’m now in my early 30s, and am the proud parent of a toddler, so number 1 makes some sense to me. Children love animals, and having every conceivable animal grouped into one tableau is nothing if not a missed opportunity, especially if you’re a visual artist trying to get yourself noticed by the ‘under five’ crowd.

Number 2 is where I spent a lot of my adolescence, and when that didn’t work, I moved on to Number 3 in adulthood, with a little Number 4 mixed in. This mini article is all about getting yourself to Number 4, and answering an age-old question along the way: Why do lots of people (who are not total sociopaths) love stories where everyone dies at the end?

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The Bible is weirdly obsessed with the specifics of Noah’s ark. So were the traveling fundamentalists in white shirts and yellow ties who periodically showed up to the Sunday night services at church. My family had moved to Canada by this point, but the fundamentalists found us just the same. Armed with recycled jokes and fuzzy pictures of an uninteresting lump on Mount Ararat, these men worked devilishly hard to convince us of the Literal Truth of Noah’s ark, and smiled a great deal as they reminded us to beware the Evil Lies of science. Their general strategy, as far as I can figure, was to bludgeon the listener with an endless discussion of cubits and boat-related dimensions, before getting to the actual pseudoscience of the thing. Not to mention the fuzzy lump. And so most of the jokes in my story are jokes on these guys. Too much of my life was wasted on cubits, and I will have my revenge.

Weirdly, I also became obsessed with the dimensions of Noah’s ark, and whether or not the square footage of Noah’s ark was roughly equivalent to a Walmart (an averaged-sized mart, not one of the big ones). This was a joke in the story that my wife suggested several times I remove, but I refused. One must maintain one’s high-brow artistic principles, after all. Actually, I liked the definitive absurdity of the visual, and I wanted something that felt like an ending. Still, the real punchline (and the take-away from the entire piece) belongs to Mrs. Noah, when she says to Noah, “You’re in a folklore, darling. I’m sorry, I thought you knew.”

You’ve got to feel for the guy. I certainly do. It turns out that someone could have spared young Michael a lot of grief, trying to make sense of the impossible confabulations of the Biblical literalists, if they had only handed me the Epic of Gilgamesh, or any one of the other man-with-animals-in-a-boat stories that flooded the ancient world. And so, if you ever draw nigh unto the Biblical story of Noah, whether you’re a person of faith or not, I suggest you allow yourself this gentle reminder: “You’re in a folklore, darling.”

The thing to know is that Noah’s ark is patterned on stories that predate it by centuries, if not millennia, long before the Bible was being written. The Epic of Gilgamesh is an ancient Babylonian story that echoes an even older Sumerian tale. (Mrs. Noah in my story off-handedly mentions the main characters of both fables when they bump into another ark: “I expect that that’s either Atra-Hasis or old Utnapishtim…”). The parallels between the Bible and these Mesopotamian flood myths, particularly Gilgamesh, are eerie. Downright uncanny. The overall sequence of events is so perfectly synchronized, and the narrative specifics so exact, that it’s clear that someone was copying someone else’s homework. Here’s a decent summary of the similarities, if you want to nerd out.

All this can be very upsetting for modern people of faith. It’s hard to think that important parts of your sacred text are hand-me-downs from someone else’s belief system. It’s more difficult to suppose that they came to you straight from God. 

There was a time when I would have shrugged this off, in a ‘the truth hurts’ kind of way, perhaps because I was feeling bitter about being force-fed interpretation Number 2 for so many years. But rewriting Noah changed the way I feel about things. First, because my most immediate impression of the story is now filled with silly jokes about mastodons and the occupational hazards of cursing like a sailor. But more importantly, because Number 4, the folklore option, means that the people who put Noah’s ark into the Bible fully expect that you’d know about other versions of the story. In a way, they’re sort of counting on it.

Flood stories were in the water, so to speak, in the ancient world. So when someone decides to adapt a story everyone already knows, it means that the parts that they’ve changed are the parts they want you to pay attention to. It also means they’ve recognized something fundamental, something the creators of Don’t Look Up also figured out: that people will listen very closely if you tell them a story about literally everyone dying. In fact, they won’t just listen—they’ll absolutely love you for it.

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In case you’re not as hip with the kids as I am, Don’t Look Up is a movie on Netflix, starring a bunch of famous people like Leo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, and Meryl Streep. A giant comet is on a collision-course with earth. Like the Biblical Noah, humanity in the movie has six months to prepare for an extinction-level event.

And, as the producers of the movie, and all the people I know on Twitter have relentlessly pointed out, the comet in the movie is a nine kilometer-wide metaphor for climate change. Humanity’s bumbling, bickering ineptitude in response to impending disaster is intended to be a darkly comedic satire of our real-world state of affairs.

For weeks on my social media feeds, people have been posting things like: “Ug. ‘Don’t Look Up’ is so depressing. You MUST watch it.” And I would think to myself: “Why?” I already believe that climate change is a clear and present danger, and I don’t like feeling depressed. Why suffer more?

Then it hit me: Don’t Look Up is a morality play—a cosmological disaster parable, as I’m calling it. It’s got a moral I happen to agree with, but I couldn’t help noticing all the same, especially because I was rewriting Noah at the time. It occurred to me that at the level of metaphor, they are functionally the same story.

Here’s what I mean: the ancient Mesopotamians, who created the Ur-text for Noah’s ark, lived in holy terror of two things: floods and droughts. If you’re a bronze-age agrarian living on the floodplain between the Tigris and the Euphrates, a flood is an unmitigated disaster. And unmitigated disasters attract stories. Witness, as a modern example, all the stories about comets and asteroids hurtling towards earth: Deep Impact, Armageddon, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, etc. Like most of these movies, the Mesopotamian flood stories don’t really assign much moral significance to the impending disaster: it’s just something that happens, largely outside of human control. In the Sumerian flood story, the gods send the flood because humans are too noisy and the gods can’t sleep. This is not yet a parable, more of a “crazy upstairs neighbor” story. 

This changes with Genesis. The Bible takes the established genre of Death-By-Deluge and makes it about sin. Sin causes the flood. Now we’ve got ourselves a morality tale. In the same way, Don’t Look Up takes the established genre of Death-By-Asteroid and makes it about climate change. Not explicitly, but they’re still very open about it. Now we’ve got ourselves a morality tale.

Of course, sin and climate change are not at all the same, nor do the people who talk about them generally run in the same circles. My point is that both stories (Noah’s ark and Don’t Look Up) ask us to think about them as negative human behavior that humans can change. Then both show us that humans are too stupid and inept to do so. And of course, the best (or worst) people get their very own ark, which serves to demonstrate exactly what kind of people they are.

I think it’s valid to look at Noah’s ark and say, “What sort of sick twisted bastards think this stuff up? Who actually likes this?” Hilariously, the internet will be making Top 10 lists of recent global-death-by-asteroid movies while you do so. Knowing that helps, somehow. It also helps to recognize that there doesn’t have to be a literal flood or a literal asteroid for the story to work. Nor do the people who enjoy these stories have to be rooting for humanity’s total destruction. If it’s a cosmological disaster parable, it’s usually quite the opposite, and why they’ve told the story in the first place. They’ve simply discovered that turning the catastrophe dial all the way up to 10 is a fabulous conversation starter for what they really want to talk about.

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I wish to avoid doing to you what those fundamentalists, with their chintzy yellow ties, did to me all those years ago: namely, suggest that there’s one inevitable outcome for a story. If anything, this is what I find most bewildering when rewriting Bible stories—there are just so many options. I’m told that actors often compliment each other’s performances by saying simply, “Nice choices.” When it comes to interpreting characters, that’s all you get: choices.

I had to turn Noah’s ark into a kind of comedy to realize it was a paraenetic kind of tragedy. Maybe that’s not for you. That’s okay. There are other options. Maybe Noah is a symbol for apocalyptic salvation, as he was in the early centuries of Christianity. Or maybe he’s to blame, for failing to plead for mercy on behalf of the world, as the 13th century Kabbalistic text of the Zohar suggests. Maybe he’s a kind of prefigurement for COVID-era isolation and trauma, which is the impression I got from this lovely New Yorker cartoon. That’s just how it goes with this sort of thing, and also why people claw like anything to get back to interpretation Numbers 2 or 3. Once you open Door Number 4, the folklore gets kind of hard to pin down.

Here’s what I want to leave you with: for millennia, religious people were perfectly happy to write and rewrite stories. Sometimes they retold other people’s stories and stuck them in the Bible. Sometimes they rewrote Bible stories because they felt the original didn’t get it quite right. Occasionally, both the original and the rewrite make it back into the Bible, perhaps as a cosmic joke on inerrantists. Other times, the rewrites happily existed alongside the Bible as midrash, haggadah, legends, apocrypha, parables—religious fan-fiction of all kinds.

It seems to me (this is just a hunch, but a good one, I think) that some time around the invention of the printing press, this rewriting mostly stopped. And the stopping was to the great detriment of the religious people, and probably everyone else as well, because the stories became more inflexible and lifeless. 

I plan to say more about that sometime in the future. For now, it’s enough to notice that stories like Noah ark have been told and retold for centuries. If you’re paying attention, you can watch the storytellers adapt them to fit the needs of each new context and circumstance. If these storytellers are any good at all—and if they can get their cosmological disaster parable in front of the right sorts of people—you even get to watch as those people turn around and say to the next person they meet: “Ug. This is so depressing. Let me make sure you know all about it.”

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