In Genesis: Chapter 6, having told Noah to load two of every animal onto his ark, this Bible's god, in Chapter 7:1, commanded him to load, of every "clean" animal (birds included), seven pairs of males and females - for any gay animals that applied, if they wanted a seat, it was strictly, "don't ask, don't tell." And of the "unclean" animals, one pair, a male and female. No instructions were given as to which were clean and which were not, but I have a feeling that the classification had little to do with whether or not the animal in question had showered.
    What we have here, besides a failure to communicate, are the differences between the Yahwist Source and the Priestly Source, previously mentioned, and since it's "in the book," and since the Bible is inerrant, one must assume that the reader is expected to accept both as true. Remember that one little lie, that in the preface, I mentioned my son had told as a child, that prevented me from ever again being able to say, "My son never lies?" How many do we have to find in the Bible before we begin to question its veracity?
    As we might expect, Mark Twain, in his Letters from the Earth, had something to say on this subject:

    "Noah began to collect animals....We have to guess at how long it took to collect the creatures and how much it cost, for there is no record of these details. When Symmachus made preparation to introduce his young son to grown-up life in imperial Rome, he sent men to Asia, Africa and everywhere to collect wild animals for the arena fights. It took the men three years to accumulate the animals and fetch them home to Rome. Merely quadrupeds and alligators, you understand--no birds, no snakes, no frogs, no worms, no rats, no fleas, no ticks, no caterpillars, no spiders, no houseflies, no mosquitoes--nothing but just plain simple quadrupeds and alligators: and no quadrupeds except fighting ones. Yet it was as I have said: it took three years to collect them, and the cost of animals and transportation and the men's wages footed up $4,500,000.
    "How many animals? We do not know. But it was under five thousand, for that was the largest number ever gathered for those Roman shows, and it was Titus, not Symmachus, who made that collection. Those were mere baby museums, compared to Noah's contract. Of birds and beasts and fresh-water creatures he had to collect 146,000 kinds; and of insects, upwards of two million species."

    Oh, did I neglect to mention it? In Genesis 7:4, god gave Noah a week to get his menagerie together - but no pressure --
    Even if we were inclined to believe that through some form of magic, two (or seven) of every kind of animal were telepathically instructed to make their ways to the Ark, so that Noah didn't actually have to go out and round them up, we're left with the fact that although Europe, Asia and Africa are all connected by land, North and South America, as well as Australia, are separated from beautiful, downtown Mesopotamia by vast oceans.
    We all know by now that Archbishop Ussher and Sir John Light-foot were fanatical when it came to attempting to precisely date various events in the Bible, but no more so than the writers of this portion of Genesis 7:11, which informs us that,

"In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the deep broken up and the windows of heaven were opened."

    We can't be sure here, whether "the deep" in this instance means deep within the earth, or if it refers to "the deep" from Genesis: 1:2 - you remember, the water in which all of the stars float, that surrounds the giant air-bubble in which the Earth is contained? The final frontier?
     The above quotation is from the King James version of the Bible - the Catholic version, The New American Bible, has a slightly different take: "All the fountains of the great abyss burst forth, and the floodgates of the sky were opened." Not a great deal of difference, to be sure, but now, in addition to having a "deep" we can't find, we now have a "great abyss" whose location is a bit obscure. One thing on which both books agree however, is that it rained for forty days and forty nights.
    The New American Bible continues:

    "As the waters increased, they lifted the ark, so that it rose above the earth. The swelling waters increased greatly, but the ark floated on the surface of the waters. Higher and higher above the earth rose the waters, until all the highest mountains everywhere were submerged (italics, mine - for a reason), the crest rising fifteen cubits higher than the submerged mountains. All creatures that stirred on earth perished: birds, cattle, wild animals, and all that swarmed on the earth, as well as all mankind. Everything on dry land with the faintest breath of life in its nostrils died out. The lord wiped out everything on earth: man and cattle, the creeping things and the birds of the air; all were wiped out from the earth. Only Noah and those with him in the ark were left."

    As you may recall from the epic of Ziusudra, the floodwaters rose 15 cubits above the point of flood stage of the Euphrates River - here, hundreds of years later, those 15 cubits are still in use, but used to describe how high the waters rose above, "all the highest mountains everywhere." That's why, boys and girls, when telling fish stories, you should always make it a point to go last, because it's a time-worn adage among fishermen, that the first liar doesn't stand a chance.
    And for those of you who insist on reading the Bible to your own little children, perhaps as a bedtime story, you should probably be deciding right now what you intend saying when you relate to the little tykes that this god, whom you've no doubt assured them is absolutely loaded with love for them, just drowned every living human being on the face of the earth. And that innocent little cherub looks up at you in abject shock and horror, and asks, plaintively, "But Daddy, what of the children --?"

    Most ministers I know tend to wince when they see me coming. I normally have more questions than they have answers.
    As a teenager, I once asked a minister how his god could possibly drown innocent little children - that was, of course, before I realized that the biblical flood fable is nothing more than exactly that, a plagiarized recycling of the Ziusudra/Atrakhasis/Utanapishtim flood story, written hundreds of years earlier. In those days, I bought the whole religious experience, hook, line and sinker, we're talking both sprinkled, then dunked, just to be on the safe side.
    He explained to me that god was omniscient - that he could see that these children were going to grow up to be wicked sinners, so, in essence, drowning the little brats was no big deal.
    First, we know that that isn't true - if this god were omniscient, he would have foreseen all of the events leading up to the flood and nipped the whole thing in the bud before he ever slapped together the first blob of mud to make Adam. He'd have known Adam and Eve were going to brunch on fruit salad, and he'd have known that if his original, flawless Adam, copied for ten generations, was going to create a population deserving of drowning, starting over with the tenth copy as an original, would be an even worse idea. But that foreknowledge isn't forthcoming - this god is just as surprised as any of the rest of us, when things happen unexpectedly. It may be open for debate, whether old Yahweh can leap tall buildings in a single bound, but you can forget omniscience - that's a super-power he simply doesn't possess.
    But the thing that's really disturbing about the minister's statement to me, is that it completely precludes the possibility of free will. In other words, drown the children now, because no matter what they do, regardless of how hard they try to be otherwise, those kids are going to grow up to be wicked sinners, and better off dead.
    Without free will, why should any of us aspire to anything? If free will is removed from the equation - and the minister's statement implied it was - we're predestined to be whatever we're going to become, no matter how hard we try to be anything else.
    What place is there then, in any of our lives, for hope?
    In essence, we have an either/or situation:

• either this Bible's god allows free will, in which case, he drowned all of those children prematurely, before they could grow up and choose to be other than evil,
• or this Bible's god allows for no free will, in which case, nothing we can do will change what we will be.

    If the former is true, this Bible's god killed all of those innocent children for no valid reason - if the latter is true, we are what we are and can never be otherwise and since the Bible tells us that Yahweh made us, then he decided, from the beginning of time, what we would ultimately be, and if that should be evil, it's because he deliberately designed us to be so.
    He can't have it both ways.
    Chapter 7 concludes with the statement (7:24): "And the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days."

pax vobiscum,
archaeopteryx