Naomi and the Ark (Genebro 6-9)
This is the account of Naomi:
Naomi was a righteous woman, blameless among the people of her time and she walked with God. Naomi had three daughters from a failed heterosexual relationship, Shemmi, Hammi, and Japhachel. Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight and full of violence. God saw how corrupt the earth had become for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways. So God said to Naomi, "I am going to put an end to all people for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth. So make yourself an ark of cypress wood (for God knew Naomi could use a power drill as equally well as any man) ; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch, inside and out. This is how you are to build it: The ark is to be 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high. Make a roof for it and finish the ark to within 18 inches of the top. Put a door in the side of the ark and make lower, middle and upper decks. I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has breath of life in it. Everything on earth But I will establish my covenant with you, you and your lesbian lover and your daughters and your daughter's partners with you. You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you. Two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of every kind of creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept alive. You are to take every kind of food that is to be eaten and store it away for you and for them." Naomi did everything just as God commanded her. God then said to Naomi, "Go into the ark, you and all the people you hold in your heart, because I have found you righteous in this generation. Take with you seven pairs of clean animals, a male and its mate, and two of every unclean animal male and female, to keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth. Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living creature I have made." And Naomi did everything that God had commanded her.
Naomi was seven hundred years old ( They always say women live longer than men) when the floodwaters came on the earth. And Naomi and her daughter and her lesbian lover and her daughters' partners entered the ark to escape the waters of the flood. Pairs of clean and unclean animals, of birds and of all creatures that move along the ground, male and female, came to Naomi and entered the ark as God had commanded Naomi. And after the seven days the floodwaters came on the earth. In the seven hundreth year of Naomi's life, on the seventeenth day of the second month -- on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights. On that very day Naomi and her daughters Shemmi, Hammi and Japhachel, together with her lesbian lover and the partners of her three daughters, entered the ark. They had with them every wild animal according to its kind, all livestock according to their kinds, every creature that moves along the ground according to their kinds, and every bird according to its kinds, everything with wings. Pairs of all creatures that have the breath of life in them came to Naomi and entered the ark. The animals going in were male and female of every kind, as God had commanded Naomi. Then God shut her in.
For forty days the flood kept coming on the earth and as the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the earth. The waters rose and increased greatly in the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the water. They rose greatly on the earth and the mountains under the entire heavens were covered. The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of over twenty feet. Every living thing that moved on the earth perished -- birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth and all humankind. Every thing on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; humans and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds of the air were wiped from the earth. Only Naomi was left, and those with her in the ark. The waters flooded the earth for one hundred and fifty days. But God remembered Naomi and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with her in the ark, and she (for women have the right to become supreme power and knowledge in the universe too!) sent a wind over the earth and the waters receded. Now the springs of the deep and the floodgates of heaven had been closed, and the rain had stopped falling from the sky. The water receded steadily from the earth.
At the end of the hundred and fifty days the water had gone, and on the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. The waters continued to recede until the tenth month, and on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains became visible. After forty days Naomi opened the window she had made in the ark and sent out a a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth. Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had dried up from the surface of the ground. But the dove could find no place to set its feet because there was water over all the surface of the earth; so it returned to Naomi in the ark. She reached out her hand and took the dove and brought it back to herself in the ark. She waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. When the dove returned to her in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Naomi knew that the water had receded from the earth. She waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to her. By the first day of the first month of Naomi's seven hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth. Naomi then removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was dry. By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was completly dry. Then God said to Naomi, "Come out of the ark, you and your lesbian lover and your daughters and their partners. Bring out every kind of living creature that is with you the birds, the animals, and all the creatures that move along the ground they can multiply upon the earth and increase in number upon it. So Naomi came out, together with her daughters and her lesbian lover and her daughters' partners. All the animals and all the creatures that move along the ground and all the birds -- everything that moves upon the earth -- came out of the ark, one kind after another.
Then Naomi built an altar to God and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, she sacrificed burnt offerings on it (for we know just because she was a woman doesn't mean she could cook). God smelled the pleasing aroma and said in her heart:
"Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures as I have done. "As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease."
HTML © Copyright 1998 Andrew McCarthy