Barge

Imagine it's 2,500 BC. You've got a family, within a tribe, within a country, within a continent. The more your worldview expands, the more you realize how deep and how wide the Great Power goes. But unfortunately, you also start noticing something else. The beauty of the vastness of the Great Power is starting to get overshadowed by the pride and judgment of different feuding tribes. Tribes are starting to claim that they have a monopoly on worship, and that anybody outside of their tribe is wrong. Instead of looking at the world through the lens of how great and mysterious and beautiful and profound this Great Power is, they start looking at how different everybody outside of their tribe is. In an attempt to try to explain this to your kids as they grow and start witnessing the same things you're witnessing, a story similar to the following would have been familiar to you. It would have been passed down from generation to generation, reminding each of how important it was to look at the world through the lens of beauty and not judgment . . .

"Now the tribe that came up with this story had a lot of contempt towards sex. Maybe they worshiped a god that they believed denounced sex, or denounced the female race, but there was obviously some kind of disdain there. According to the sources of this narrative, Adam's family line started multiplying real quick within a few hundred centuries. Sons and daughters were popping up everywhere, and it seemed that as soon as a boy was born, he'd be on his way looking for the woman he was gonna hook up with. Of course, this whole concept of sex wasn't even that old, so there was a freshness about it, a curiosity, a fascination. And men and women began experimenting with this centuries old concept to figure out what it could do for them.

And the tribe leader who first started telling this story felt like the Great Power was telling him that the Great Spirit wouldn't have a part in the sexual conduct between men and women. And so sex was looked at as not a gift from the heavens, but a curse of the earth - or, a curse dating back to Adam. And there was also a gender based stereotype that prevailed at the time. Men were considered "sons of the Great Power" and women were considered "sons of men." Women were inferior to men, and that's how these early tribes saw things. 

And so, those early tribes saw the sexual conduct happening around them, and they felt like the Great Power condemned all of it. They believed the Great Power thought the attraction between male and female was wicked, and that it stemmed from the evil desires of man's heart. They believed that the Great Power regretted ever establishing the evolutional order that led to the human being, and that the Great Power's heart was grieved over this.

At some point, the tribe - paying close attention to the weather patterns and the lights in the night sky - realized that something catastrophic was about to happen. And to them, this was because the Great Power was about to strike humankind with a wrathful vengeance for its sexual deviance. They felt like the Great Power was going to wipe out everything, and so they injected a character into the script named Noah. Noah represented perfection. He was divine and human at the same time.

And according to the tribe that originally circulated this story, these are the records of the generations of Noah. They believed Noah was perfect - no mistakes, no wrongdoings, just pure as the driven snow. But the real bias here was, Noah believed in the same Great Power that this tribe believed in. If you were outside of the tribe, you were exotic and you worshiped foreign idols. But if you were in the tribe, that was a different story. And Noah was definitely in the tribe. Noah became the father of three sons as mentioned before: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. 

According to this tribe, the earth (outside of their tribe) was corrupt. People were wicked. People were violent. Their Great Power looked at humanity with scolding eyes and a raised fist. They were the good guys, and the people outside were the bad guys. To them, anyone outside of their clan had corrupted their purposes on the earth."

And so, in the story they created, the Great Power told this Noah that the end of humanity was coming. The Great Power tells Noah that since humanity (outside of the tribe of course) has filled the earth with violence, the earth is going to react with violence. And according to the story, the Great Power tells Noah to build a massive barge out of gopher wood. It'll have tons of rooms and Noah was to cover it with a tar-like substance called pitch. And Noah was given specific instructions on how to put this boat together: "Make it 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high. Make a window for the barge that stops 1.5 feet from the ceiling. Create a door for the side of the boat that opens long and wide. And make the boat have three decks." And in the story, the Great Power tells Noah that the earth is going to fill up with water like a bowl. Everything that has life is gonna die. But, being the hero that he is, Noah and the Great Power make a covenant together that his family will be preserved. They'll be the only ones allowed to go on the boat. And the Great Power tells Noah to gather two of every kind of living thing that's on the earth, every bird that's in the sky,  and to herd them over to the boat. And the Great Power also tells him to gather as much food as he can find so that he can preserve the wild edibles of the land.

The tribe that circulated this story just knew that the Great Power was going to blot out all the wicked people around them, and so they created the first apocalyptic fiction ever told. And this story spread like wildfire. While it was obviously fiction, there was a principle behind it that people were grabbing onto: if you don't act and behave and believe and worship as we do, our Great Power's gonna smack you down. Just wait and see."