Had Eve Come First and Jonah Been a Woman. Nancy Werking Poling
“We are going to use this picture to build a real one,” she told them all. “For a great rain is coming and water will cover the earth.”
Because the land was parched and many days had passed since rain had fallen, Nochat’s family found her words hard to believe. Nevertheless, the following day the adults set about preparing wood and shaping pegs while the small children wove hemp for lashing. Three hundred cubits long the craft was to be, and fifty cubits wide. With many rooms and three decks. Foolish though the efforts appeared, everyone in the family worked.
Each evening neighbors came by to laugh, for they had never seen anything quite like this wooden structure that kept getting bigger and bigger. Then bigger yet.
“It looks a little like a boat,” they would say.
“Yes, it does rather,” one of Nochat’s grandchildren would answer.
“Have you ever seen one of these?” they would ask.
“No.”
“So you imagined it.”
“God told our grandmother to build it.”
At this point the neighbors would burst out laughing and ask each other, “How likely is it that God only speaks to this crazy woman?”
Their laughter increased when the vessel was finished, when out in the open field it stood, monstrous in size. Useless too—or so it seemed.
“Next,” Nochat told her children and grandchildren, “we will collect animals, two of each kind, male and female.” So they went forth to gather antelopes and pigeons, oryx and quails. And every other beast of the field and bird of the air.
Now, only seven days had passed since the construction of the craft had been completed, and the animals were barely settled in their stalls. Nochat looked into the west and saw a great storm cloud gathering. “It is time,” she said. Scurrying her family aboard the ark, she closed the doors.
What started as a gentle pitter-patter turned into hammering rain, causing the parched land to become moist at first, then saturated. Narrow streams became roaring rivers. Then rivers merged to form one vast sea, which lifted the ark from the land and set it afloat. Upon the waves of the sea, the vessel rolled and pitched, sometimes listing to one side so that animals and people tumbled to the floor, landing on top of one another, nearly suffocating those on the bottom of the pile.
Each night Nochat lay on the floor of the rocking vessel, worrying about her cousins and sisters-in-law, about their children and the plants and animals. About her neighbors even, though they’d always been unkind. Perhaps she should not have followed God’s directions so closely but built a bigger ark that could have held more people. Or she ought to have shared the detailed instructions with others so they might have built their own. Eventually she would fall asleep to the sounds of the rain pounding against the roof and of the creaking vessel as it strained to stay afloat.
How many days had it been now? Ten? Twenty? The grandchildren, who at first explored every nook and occupied themselves by playing with the animals, had become restless. They’d lost interest in Nochat’s stories and groaned whenever she posed a riddle.
“When can we go outside and play?” they asked time and again, tugging at her garments, wrapping their arms around her legs.
“There’s nothing to do,” one would whine, her chorus soon taken up by the others.
They scrapped among themselves, chasing each other, hitting and kicking. Yelling and screaming so loudly that their parents could not help but grab them at times and demand their silence. Not that the adults were behaving any better. Much as they had done as children, they bickered among themselves then appealed to Nochat to intervene.
It was easier to love her family on land, she decided, where adults could scatter and children had room to play their games. It was easier to love the animals when their excrement was not her concern. She who enjoyed nothing more than walking alongside a chirping rivulet was now surrounded by the clamor of shrieking children, the din of animals barking or mewing or roaring or whinnying. After a while their noises, their complaints, their demands became like the rain—incessant—and she wanted to flee. But there was no place to escape to.
On the thirtieth day, when the rains weren’t pounding quite as hard and the ark wasn’t rocking so violently, Nochat was able to step out onto the deck. Holding firmly to the rail, she looked with despair at what was before her. The gray of sky met the gray of water, and in every direction there was no sign of life. What was familiar had been submerged so that there were no landmarks, and she had no idea where she was or where she was going.
“How can you say you love me,” she yelled out at God, “when you have destroyed nearly everything I hold dear? The olive trees with their gnarled branches and fragrant white buds, the handsome wolves who came to be petted, the paths that wound along rugged hillsides and down into the beautiful fertile valley.”
God did not answer.
One morning Nochat and her children and her grandchildren awoke to a strange sound—rather to its absence. The rain had stopped. The animals too noticed, for their din ceased, as if they were waiting for a signal about what to do next. That was the first indication—the silence—that this day would be different. The second was the bright sunlight splattering the ark.
For days the family gazed out from the deck, waiting for the waters to recede. Where were they, they kept asking each other.
All was still calm the afternoon everyone stood around Nochat as she lifted a dove. “Go find land,” she instructed it. But it soon returned, bringing no sign that land was emerging from the water’s shroud. Seven days later Nochat again released the dove. This time it did not return right away.
“She tried too hard,” one of Nochat’s sons said, “flying and flying, until finally her wings gave out and she plunged into the water.”
“She’s lost,” a granddaughter suggested, “and is flying around and around.”
It was the oldest grandchild who first called out, “Look, look, there she is!” In her beak the dove carried an olive branch.
That day Nochat and her family felt the rebirth of hope, so that even though they did not know when they would again step on firm ground, they were not despondent as they waited.
Once the waters had receded and puddles of every dimension dotted the earth, Nochat went from the ark, she and her children and grandchildren. And every pair of animals: the ferrets and gazelles, the ibex and asps, all left the ark.
When every animal had crept or leaped or flown to the north, the south, the east, the west, Nochat looked at the desolation around her and felt a great emptiness. Nothing she had known remained. She sat upon the ground and cried.
“What kind of mother are you,” she called out to God, “that you would strangle your own child because it is willful? What kind of God are you that you would create animals as lovely as gazelles, as clever as foxes, as playful as goats, then kill them? What kind of God creates beautiful trees and flowers then destroys them?”
From nearby came the faint sound of weeping. The weeping became loud sobs. Then a haunting keen pierced the stillness of the desolate landscape.
“What have I done?” Nochat heard God wail. “What have I done?” Nochat rose and approached the Creator. Put her arms around God. Let God cry against her breast. “In the beginning I had such hopes and dreams, imagining everything to stay as lovely as it was. But my children spurned my love, and when I gazed upon all I had created, I decided it no longer had any value. I convinced myself that my rebellious children deserved my wrath.”
She said nothing for a while, simply sat there nestled in Nochat’s arms, heaving sobs of an immenseness that only God can heave.
“It is as if I have cut off my own breast,” she cried out, “plunged a knife into my own heart. To destroy what I had created was to destroy part of myself.”
For