Plato's Playground
Does anyone have an interesting take on the bird thing? The raven just flies round and round til the flood has receded - what does that mean? The dove, which seems to be tame or trained or both, picks a twig and brings it to Noah. But why? (And anyway, wouldn't being submerged for all that time have killed off the olive trees?) And it doesn't come back the last time - maybe a big pike jumped out of the water and ate it. Why does Noah use birds to assess the water levels?
(And how far has the Ark drifted? Does it have sails, do they row it, do they just anchor it? They might have drifted hundreds of miles in all that time, but I guess they couldn't tell. Everything would be poisonous mud for months or years to come...)
Well, you point up just a few of the reasons why this story is completely ridiculous. I don't know what any of this meant to the original consumers of this tale, but of course the dove and the olive branch have become a widely recognized symbol of peace. For some reason, the culture transferred this particular icon from peace vis a vis the natural world (which the ancients believed was controlled by God, hence natural disasters were in fact imposed on us by God as punishment) to peace vis a vis human conflict.
That's an interesting evolution of a meme, as it were, and I am curious about it. We no longer invoke the dove and the olive branch to mean that the great storm is over, but rather that the war is over.
Given that the victors get to write the history books, my reading of this story would be that the people on the boat (Noah's tribe) see the destruction of other people as a vindication that they were right. God has punished the unworthy and spared those who are "righteous in this generation". (Interesting parallel to the horrible "God send AIDS to punish gays" line.)
In this light, the dove/olive branch/peace connection is a thumbs-up to Noah's lot from God: conflict over (now that the unrighteous are destroyed). It's not the same in the modern use of the olive branch/dove theme, which just means conflict over (without the destruction of the baddies). The meme still means anger/conflict over, and given that this God described in this part of the Bible is bloodthirsty and destructive - he promises, after all, to destroy "all life" - he may have been seen as someone to be feared just as human enemies were to be feared. Or perhaps he could be seen as moving both through human opponents or through the natural world - maybe if you're a preliterate type you can see the anger of God meted out in various forms and still understand that it's God who's done it.
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