By Roy B. Blizzard
One of the very interesting and yet controversial passages of scripture in the entire Bible is the story of Noah and the flood recorded in Genesis 8. Scholars have found ancient Mesopotamian documents which actually predate the Biblical story of Noah and the flood by several hundred years, the most notable of which is the Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh.
It is actually an epic poem that starts with the opening words, "He who saw everything…" The work is divided into twelve tablets the longest of which contains over 300 lines. If you go to Google search engine and type in the Epic of Gilgamesh, you will be able
The epic remarkably parallels the Bible story of the flood in many details. There is much in the story that is misunderstood and we could spend considerable time working through all of the problem passages. But, in our passage for translation this week, I want to mention only two. One of them found in Genesis 6:8 which, in English reads:
And Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.
In Hebrew, it is very brief and to the point:
Noach Matza Chen Beeyney YHWH.
This is an idiom in Hebrew that is still used today. If one likes something, they would say "Ze motzeh chen beynai." In other words, "I like it."
The passage Genesis 6:8 simply means and YHWH liked Noah. Why, we are not told. But notice it says that He liked Noah. It doesn’t say anything about his three sons. But, they were clearly spared because of Noah.
Then, there is the issue of the ark and Mount Ararat. One interesting fact is that in the Aramaic text, Mount Ararat is not mentioned.
One of the earliest of the Aramaic texts and the one that is considered to be the authorized Rabbinic Aramaic translation of the Torah is Targum Onkelos, which means the translation of Onkelos. The translation was completed some time before 400 of the current era. Since that time, it has been considered the authoritative Rabbinic text. It is the most literal of all Aramaic translations even though it contains over 10,000 differences from the Hebrew original.
The Targum attempts to correct and/or clarify what is considered by the translator to be anthropomorphisms and/or anthropropathisms, assigning a human feature or characteristic to deity and in general clarifying the Hebrew text for the average Jewish reader and not for the scholar who was familiar with the Hebrew text. But all of that is an aside to the point that I want to make from Genesis 8:4.
And the ark came to rest on the 17th day of the month on the mountains of Kardu.
Our translator frequently updates Biblical place names and identifies Mount Ararat here as Kardu which is in Kurdistan or Armenia.
It is interesting and perhaps more important than might be expected that another Aramaic translation, Pseudo-Jonathan, identifies the mountains as the mountains of Kardum and the Genesis Rabbah as the mountain range of Cordyene and Saadiah Gaon, a Talmudic Scholar (882-942) philosopher and leader of Babylonian Jewery who translated the Bible into Arabic, says Corda.
What does it all mean? From authoritative Jewish sources, the association of the Ark of Noah with Mount Ararat is not all that conclusive. From Jewish sources, it seems that we are talking about a mountain range in deference to a single peak.
