When I was much a child "Noah's Ark" was without a doubt my most favorite part of the bible. I even ended up getting it as several toys.
As I became older and learned more and more it is one of the stories I have the most trouble in accepting.
Yeah, Noah's Ark is anything but a children's story. The annihilation of every human being on earth except 8 should never have been rebranded as a light-hearted bedtime story, imho.
A couple interesting thoughts about Noah's Ark for you to ponder:
- Many people label 'the flood of Noah' as just another 'global flood myth' because nearly every major culture on earth has its own version of a legend about a catastrophic flood. Personally, I think the prevalence of 'flood myths' lends credibility FOR the veracity of the Biblical account. If there truly was a global flood that wiped out all of mankind except one family, then one would expect that 'story' to be talked about by the descendants of those survivors for many generations. And, one would expect the 'story' to change a lot from retelling to retelling (so that different groups of descendants would end up with widely varying versions of the story).
- According to the Biblical record of genealogies from Adam to Noah, Noah's dad was 56 years old when Adam died (at the age of 930). That means 9 generations were all alive at the same time. When you think about having 900 years of productive learning, experimenting, etc., combined with 9 consecutive generations of wisdom to simultaneously build upon, it is quite possible that the civilization that existed before the flood may have developed technologies far more advanced than some of ours. When I look at technology today, I see a pattern wherein advances in technology enhance both our ability to do good and our ability to do evil. It may very well be that the reason evil was so prevalent during the time of Noah was because their civilization had advanced technologically to the point where their propensity to do evil was greatly enhanced, and they acted upon that propensity, and God finally said enough and brought judgment.
I don't expect you to agree with either of the above points -- just providing them as food for thought.
The toys were more centered around having two animals of each type... so you ended up with a bunch of toy animals. If I remember correctly the toys didn't even have any humans. :)
I wasn't implying that there is anything macabre in the way Noah's Ark stuff is presented to children; just that it is a misrepresentation of that event -- a global catastrophe that no doubt broke the heart of God -- seeing His creation become so corrupt that He had to wipe the slate clean, and there was only one family on earth displaying any righteousness at all.
When Abraham confronted God about destroying Sodom and Gomorrah, God was willing to relent if there were as few as 10 righteous people in the city, but there weren't. At the time of Noah, there were only 8 righteous people in the entire world. Sad days. Sad time in history.
Yeah. I knew what you meant. I was just recalling what it was packaged as to me. A toy with a bunch of plastic animals.