Noah (wine maker of Aram)

• Mount Ararat and story of the flood

77:4.12Mount Ararat was the sa­cred moun­tain of north­ern Mes­o­po­ta­mia, and since much of your tra­di­tion of these an­cient times was ac­quired in con­nec­tion with the Baby­lo­nian story of the flood, it is not sur­pris­ing that Mount Ararat and its re­gion were wo­ven into the later Jew­ish story of Noah and the uni­ver­sal flood.

• Mount Ararat and story of the flood

78:7.3Al­most five thou­sand years later, as the He­brew priests in Baby­lo­nian cap­tiv­ity sought to trace the Jew­ish peo­ple back to Adam, they found great dif­fi­culty in piec­ing the story to­gether; and it oc­curred to one of them to aban­don the ef­fort, to let the whole world drown in its wicked­ness at the time of Noah’s flood, and thus to be in a bet­ter po­si­tion to trace Abra­ham right back to one of the three sur­viv­ing sons of Noah.

78:7.4The tra­di­tions of a time when wa­ter cov­ered the whole of the earth’s sur­face are uni­ver­sal. Many races har­bor the story of a world-wide flood some time dur­ing past ages. The Bib­li­cal story of Noah, the ark, and the flood is an in­ven­tion of the He­brew priest­hood dur­ing the Baby­lo­nian cap­tiv­ity. There has never been a uni­ver­sal flood since life was es­tab­lished on Uran­tia. The only time the sur­face of the earth was com­pletely cov­ered by wa­ter was dur­ing those Archeo­zoic ages be­fore the land had be­gun to ap­pear.

• advocated houses be made like boats

78:7.5But Noah re­ally lived; he was a wine maker of Aram, a river set­tle­ment near Erech. He kept a writ­ten rec­ord of the days of the river’s rise from year to year. He brought much ridicule upon him­self by go­ing up and down the river val­ley ad­vo­cat­ing that all houses be built of wood, boat fash­ion, and that the fam­ily an­i­mals be put on board each night as the flood sea­son ap­proached. He would go to the neigh­bor­ing river set­tle­ments ev­ery year and warn them that in so many days the floods would come. Fi­nally a year came in which the an­nual floods were greatly aug­mented by un­usu­ally heavy rain­fall so that the sud­den rise of the wa­ters wiped out the en­tire vil­lage; only Noah and his im­me­di­ate fam­ily were saved in their house­boat.

• cf: Mithraic flood legend

98:5.3The Mith­raic cult por­trayed a mil­i­tant god tak­ing ori­gin in a great rock, en­gag­ing in valiant ex­ploits, and caus­ing wa­ter to gush forth from a rock struck with his ar­rows. There was a flood from which one man es­caped in a spe­cially built boat and a last sup­per which Mithras cel­e­brated with the sun-god be­fore he as­cended into the heav­ens. This sun-god, or Sol In­vic­tus, was a de­gen­er­a­tion of the Ahura-Mazda de­ity con­cept of Zoroas­tri­an­ism. Mithras was con­ceived as the sur­viv­ing cham­pion of the sun-god in his strug­gle with the god of dark­ness. And in rec­og­ni­tion of his slay­ing the myth­i­cal sa­cred bull, Mithras was made im­mor­tal, be­ing ex­alted to the sta­tion of in­ter­ces­sor for the hu­man race among the gods on high.