The film “Noah” is hitting theaters, and as usual, there is a big stink from religious groups that the script doesn’t seem to follow the Scriptures–as if Hollywood has ever given us a faithful version of any historical or mythical text. Think “Troy”, “The Battle of the Bulge”, “War of the Worlds”, “300 Spartans”, “The Hobbit”… I could go on.

But every myth probably has real roots in the distant past. Catastrophic flood stories are common to every culture; after all, floods must have been terrifying events to our ancestors, and there was probably one old-timer in each tribe or band or village old enough to have remembered the last one, or campfire stories about it. Even the version in Genesis can probably be traced back to even older myths, like the story of Gilgamesh in the Fertile Crescent–modern day Iraq. Every now and then the Tigris and Euphrates rivers would overflow, turning the Land Between the Rivers into a shallow lake and devastating the agriculture and mud-brick cities and irrigation works of Mesopotamia. A period of war and pestilence probably followed, not to mention enslavement to rebuild the dikes and canals and city walls. A flood every few generations in a desert land where life was dependent on highly complex water control structures requiring social organization for their maintenance would be a big deal, and a particularly bad flood that might happen every few hundred or thousand years would become part of the folklore forever.

This didn’t happen in Egypt because the Nile flooded like clockwork at the same time every year. They were ready for it. But I bet the other great hydraulic civilizations, like the Indus Valley and China’s Yellow River, have their flood stories too.

So what was the flood that we remember today as the flood of Genesis? No, forget the Bible stories, there isn’t enough water in the whole world to cover all of it, and there’s no way all the animals on the planet could have fit in Noah’s ark, even if they had somehow been magically transported to the middle east. And there certainly wouldn’t have been enough food aboard to feed them for forty days and nights either.

But what if the ark was just something like a houseboat or raft, where a tribal chieftain, his family, retainers, livestock and his grain and property might have survived a few days of waist-deep water in relative comfort and safety? It isn’t even necessary to posit some form of water craft. Perhaps the ark was just a structure, or even a piece of high ground where the real Noah and his folk, their animals and possessions, were safe from the destruction visited on his neighbors who unwisely chose to settle in the fertile bottomlands by the river. Of course, Noah’s clan would then have to defend themselves from the destitute survivors of the deluge, or they might have chosen him as a leader to help organize the reconstruction. After all, Noah could pay them with his food stores for their labor. It isn’t hard to come up with a scenario easily distorted by the retelling to match the tale that has survived.