wordsout by godfrey rust
The
sailing of the ark < 13
of 45 >
13
The
ark sailed sometime in the 1980s.
The animals went in two by two
or
seven
by seven depending on which source takes
precedence:
its motley cargo—Jonah's fish, Job's friends,
eight-foot
Goliath, Balaam's talking ass,
limping Jacob, branded Cain, the subtil
snake, even
the
primal pair themselves, naked and unashamed—
all herded in with Noah and his sons.
That
clear blue evangelical assurance
clouded over with the cumulus
of
archaeology and reasoned common sense
in ever-darkening folds; beneath its weight
the
heavens bowed. The muddy deluge broke. The ark
sailed out of history and into myth.
The first turning point of the sequence: the ark’s departure as a defining image for the abandonment of a literalist faith.
two
by two
cf Genesis
7:8.
seven by seven cf Genesis 7:2. The inconsistencies of the Flood stories seem most readily explained by the existence of two separate versions edited together. There are, of course conflicting views about this.
subtil The King James Version’s adjective to describe the serpent in Eden.
into myth "Myth" is not used dismissively (as “something untrue”), but with its more potent meaning of a story that contains profound truth regardless of its historic status.