A surprising number of persons of ordinary intelligence even now, and in this enlightened country, continue to regard beds of water-worn gravels, and the fossil shells, etc., seen in the rocks, as relics of the Noachian deluge, and “diluvian” and “antediluvian” are terms that hardly yet have disappeared from popular geology.
The earliest available accounts of such a deluge as the Noachian are engraved on clay tablets recovered from the ruins of Babylonia, and written 2000 or more years before the beginning of the Christian era. Several narratives have been deciphered, agreeing in the facts of a vast destruction by water in Mesopotamia, and of a relatively huge house-boat built by a chosen family for the preservation of themselves and an extensive collection of livestock. After floating about for seven days this Babylonian ship grounded on a submerged hill-top, and seven days later the patriarchal shipmaster sent out as explorers a dove, a swallow, and a raven. The dove and the swallow returned, the raven did not.
The close similarity between this and the Biblical account of Noah’s voyage on a world of waters (which account appears to be a combination of two separate legends) leads to the opinion that the whole narrative is derived from some more ancient and widespread Oriental tradition; and there seems fair evidence that it does not describe any physical happening at all, but is a symbolical sun-myth, a hint of which is given, even in the Bible, by the incident of the rainbow. Let me quote the history in Genesis so far as it relates to our purpose:
“And it came to pass at the end of forty days that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made: and he sent forth a raven which went forth to and fro until the waters were dried up from off the earth. Also he sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters were abated from off the face of the ground. But the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned unto him into the ark; for the waters were on the face of the whole earth. Then he put forth his hand and took her, and pulled her in unto him into the ark. And he stayed yet other seven days; and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark. And the dove came in unto him in the evening, and, lo, in her mouth was an olive-leaf plucked off: so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth. And he stayed yet other seven days, and sent forth the dove, which returned not again unto him any more.”
As to the choice of these particular birds out of Noah’s great aviary, it is well to remember that doves were sacred in ancient Babylonia to Ishtar, who, as the deified (female) personification of productiveness, co-existent with the (male) Sun-god, was sometimes designated as Mother-goddess, or even as “Mother Earth”: so that it would be highly appropriate to send first a dove as a messenger to this incarnation of fruitful land. This falls in with Moncure D. Conway’s suggestion[[56]] that the dove and raven were tribally “sacred” animals among the people affected by this Babylonian deluge. The choice of the swallow was natural, when one remembers its habit of flying long and far over bodies of water; and that the raven should not come back is in keeping with its character as much as is the quick return of the semidomestic dove and swallow. Dr. Laufer[[52]] notes that St. Ambrose, in his treatise De Noe et Area, devotes a whole chapter to the “crow’s” impiety in not returning to the Ark. The Arabs, according to Keane,[[14]] even yet call this bird “raven of separation,” meaning the separation of the water from the land at the close of the Flood. Another Arabic source, quoted by Baring-Gould from the medieval Chronicle of Abou-djafer Tábari, transmits traditional particulars that considerably extend the too-laconic Biblical log of the Ark. “When Noah had left the Ark,” it relates, “he passed forty days on the mountain, till all the water had subsided into the sea.... Noah said to the raven, ‘Go and place your foot on the earth, and see what is the depth of the water.’ The raven departed, but having found a carcass it remained to devour it and did not return. Noah was provoked, and he cursed the raven, saying, ‘May God make thee contemptible among men, and let carrion be thy food.’”
Johann von Herder, the poet and friend of Goethe, either found or invented another story to account for the curse resting on the raven, which runs thus in the words of an old translator:
Anxiously did Noah look forth from his swimming ark, waiting to see the waters of the flood abate. Scarcely had the peaks of the highest mountains emerged from the waves, when he called all the fowls around him. “Who among you,” said he, “will be the messenger to go forth and see whether the time of our deliverance is nigh?” The raven with much noise crowded hastily in before all the rest: he longed ardently for his favorite food. Scarcely was the window open, when he flew away and returned no more. The ungrateful bird forgot his errand and the interests of his benefactor—he hung at his carcass! But punishment did not delay. The air was yet filled with poisonous fog, and heavy vapors hung over the putrid corpses; these blinded his eyes and darkened his feathers. As a punishment for his forgetfulness, his memory as well as his sight became dim; even his own young he did not recognize; and he experienced towards them no feelings of parental joy.
Quoting again the Arab chronicler Abou-djafer Tábari: “After that Noah sent forth the dove. The dove departed, and without tarrying put her foot in the water. The water of the Flood scalded and pricked the legs of the dove. It was hot and briny and feathers would not grow on her legs any more, and the skin scaled off. Now, doves which have red and featherless legs are of the sort that Noah sent forth. The dove returning showed her legs to Noah, who said: ‘May God render thee well pleasing to men.’ For that reason the dove is dear to men’s hearts.”
Still another Arabic version, given by Gustav Weil, is that Noah blessed the dove, and since then she has borne a necklace of green feathers; but the raven he cursed, that its flight should be crooked—never direct like that of other birds. This is also a Jewish legend. A more modern addendum is that the magpie, one of the same group of birds, was not permitted to enter the ark, but was compelled to perch on the roof because it gabbled so incessantly. A quaint 14th-century manuscript quoted by Hulme[[38]] says of the raven’s exit from the ark:
Then opin Noe his window