Ordering the flood

It is an article of faith in the talk.origins newsgroup that I am somewhat older than dirt. One day someone accused of ordering the flood instead of having just survived it. This is how I answered.

Oh, that. I suppose I should set the record straight about that, there being all sorts of wild stories going around. It all happened a little while after they invented dirt. The problem was that nobody was used to dirt and didn’t know what to do about it, so they just kept dirtier and dirtier. It got to be a real mess, I tell you, and it didn’t smell too good either. It got to the point where something had to be done about it.

So there I was with everybody saying that I had to do something about it. My thought was that it would be a good idea to rain whiskey for a day. It would wash everything off and would cauterize all the infections that were springing up. Well, I put in an order to central services (you really don’t want to know about that – it’s where the Old Ones hang out) for a one day whiskey rain. Things didn’t quite work out right.

The problem was that we hadn’t invented writing yet. We were using stone tablets (great invention, stone) with marks on them but we hadn’t settled on what the marks meant. So I sent in a stone tablet that looked like this:

XXXX
////

The //// stood for rain; the boys in central service (they didn’t exactly have gender but you have to call them something) figured that part out. I had meant the XXXX to stand for aged whiskey (rotgut being just an XXX) and they took them as a Roman forty so that’s how we forty days and nights of rain. I always figured that the whole thing was a shuck. You see, we hadn’t invented Rome and Romans yet, so there is no way that they should have had Roman numerals. My theory is that they had drunk up all the good whiskey and were just covering their ass. (They don’t exactly drink, but you really don’t want to know about that.)

It’s funny how Noah got mixed up in the story. The thing is, Noah was one of those religious cultists. He was really into dirt. It wasn’t just him; it was his whole family. What is more he had a big zoo with all kinds of animals so that he and his believers could get a really good mixture of dirt.

Now Noah wasn’t too popular because he smelled so bad. We all smelled bad in those days because we hadn’t invented bathing yet, but Noah was really something special. So what we did was put him on a big boat and push him out to sea. He used to be anchored just off shore in his big boat and preach to us with a big bullhorn. (I’ve always regretted inventing bullhorns.)

When the big rain came why he just drifted out to sea and we lost track of him until after things dried out a bit. The way I understand it he ran aground on Mt. Ararat (actually it was a small hill in those days) and smashed up his boat something terrible. There was nothing left but a pile of kindling that drifted out to sea. I dunno what happened to the animals but I expect that Noah and his boys ate them – they weren’t stocked for a forty day boat trip. I will give him credit though. He spent forty days in a solid rain storm and then he went through a ship wreck and he didn’t get wet a bit – nary a drop of water touched him.

Well, that’s about the way it happened. I might have misrecalled a detail or two here and there but for the most part you can take my word for it. And if you doubt me, why just check with the boys in central service.