It had seemed that the days of the great Biblical epic
movies – films such as The Ten
Commandments and The Greatest Story
Ever Told - were long over. But
there I was in the movie theater, waiting for the show to begin, when Noah’s
Ark appeared on screen, surrounded by Oscar winners Russell Crowe, Anthony
Hopkins, and Jennifer Connolly, plus Emma Watson (remember Hermione from the
Harry Potter films?). Noah will be released later this month, but it is already
provoking discussion and controversy. Personally, I think it is crazy to review
a movie without first seeing it. But with the Noah story coming to theaters and
on people’s minds, this is a good time for some preparation.
First – let’s be clear that this movie is, and I quote,
“inspired by the Biblical story.” So it isn’t necessarily trying to be faithful
to the text of Genesis or to any particular Jewish or Christian theology.
Directed by Darren Aronofsky, a challenging and dark director who last made Black Swan, this movie is likely to take
artistic liberties with the story and have its own message. In fact, the New
Yorker quotes Aronofsky’s description of Noah
as “the most unbiblical Biblical epic.” And I’m fine with that.
I value the
Bible. It is central to the faith that I live and share. It is sacred. But I do
not believe that it requires rigid defense. It’s strong enough to take care of
itself, and people will still be reading it long after any movie is forgotten. I
would much rather err on the side of having too much creative play with
Biblical stories than being so rigid that we can barely re-tell them except in
the most stilted, cautious way.
As long as we understand that the movie is not the same
as the Bible, I think that the movie actually gives us an opportunity to hear a
familiar story with fresh ears, even if we decide that we don’t like the movie
or that it distorts the message of scripture. It’s a chance to remember what
the story of Noah and the flood in Genesis is telling us.
The story of Noah and the flood is one of those Biblical
stories that surprises us for exactly the opposite reason that it surprised the
people who first heard it. We are used to thinking about God as caring and
protective, and so it surprises us to think that God would cause a flood to
deal with the presence of evil and violence among humankind. That doesn’t sound
like the God we know. But in ancient Israel, the story of God causing a flood
was absolutely normal and unsurprising. There are old Sumerian and Akkadian
texts which tell of the Gods who cause the world to flood, and one person who
builds an ark to save the animals and start anew. In the Akkadian version, the
Gods are upset by all the noise and clamor that humans make, and there’s no
telling when they’ll do it again. When people first heard the story of Noah, the
idea of a God who causes a flood to destroy nearly all people is not
surprising.
What would have been surprising at the time is the
promise by God never to flood the world again. When the ark comes to rest on
land, when Noah and his family and the animals step out onto the world again,
God puts a rainbow in the sky like a hunter hanging up a bow. The rainbow is a
reminder of the promise God makes. One may even think of the Noah story as a
theological contradiction of those other stories. It is a way of saying that
the God worshipped by the Hebrews, the One God, is not like Gods you have heard
about before. The story of Noah is one of the reasons that we now take for
granted the picture of God as one who loves and protects us.