He stands in the door and sees me running from the car towards him, guitar in hand. “What a rain?” is the welcome.
It is indeed raining very hard, as it rained very hard the days before, and the guitar teacher sighs: “You expect to see someone building an ark at any moment.”
A not so crazy thought. We get hard and dry summers and winters with lots of rain instead of snow and ice.
He continues: “I hope that ark sails to a sunny spot.” I joke that he didn’t fully understand it. When Noah was in the self-built ark with his family and animals, it poured for 40 days and 40 nights and nowhere in the world was dry.
The water subsided after 150 days, after which the ship ran aground in the Ararat Mountains and everything and everyone disembarked again.
The question is whether that is correct. According to the Bible, the ark was 135 meters long, 22 meters wide and 13 meters high. Too small for the more than 1,000,000 animals, including 4,000 mammals, 4,000 amphibians, more than 6,000 reptiles, almost 10,000 birds, 50,000 molluscs and more than 750,000 insects. Although creationists put it at several thousand. Which makes it more realistic.
Such a flood could well have really happened. It appears in traditions from cultures all over the world. In the Koran, among the Masai, the Eskimos, the Mayans, the Greeks and so on. And what happened once…
We are moving well towards 40 days and 40 nights of rain. “So,” says the teacher: “when I see animals passing by two by two I pack a bag. I hope I can come along.”