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General reference | Jewish Encyclopedia | Details

General reference

Comment: Unfortunately, there is no modern scholarly encyclopedia entry on the web.

1913 Catholic Encyclopedia: Noah's Ark by Chas L. Souvay. Summary, dismissing the notion that "every detail of the narration should be literally interpreted and trusted in by the historian."

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica: The Deluge. Long, with lots of scanning errors and lurching suddenly into the article on "Delphi." See also Noah, which is short with lots of scanning errors. Unfortunately, no scans are available to check against.

Jewish Virtual Library. Very short.

Wikipedia: Noah's Ark. This is a typical Wikipedia soup—a committee of "creationist" and "sceptical" autodidacts battle it out for a "Neutral Point of View," as if truth emerged from the conflict of opposed ignorance. As usual "Christian" and "Biblical" always means Protestant Fundamentalist. Until I added it, neither Catholic (1+ billion people) nor Orthodox (200+ million) perspectives were even mentioned.

Deluge (mythology) surveys different cultures' stories.

Jewish Encyclopedia (1901-1906)

Comment: For what it covers the 1901-1906 Jewish Encyclopedia is among the best general scholarly resources online. In the field of ancient and medieval history the other top resources are the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia and Charles Smith's 19th century Classical Dictionaries (here). This strange state is, of course, a result of copyright, but an observer is also free to conclude that the internet has set scholarship back by a century!

The Flood (various authors). Excellent long article covers all the bases. These include summaries of the biblical account, the (many) additional stories in Rabbinic literature, a close (and essentially modern) examination of the source traditions within the biblical account, a summary of the Babylonian flood story, and, as is common with the Jewish Encyclopedia, an excellent summary of the Koranic data, pointing out similarities with Rabbinic acccounts.

Noah (various authors). Another excellent article, this one much concerned with Rabbinic opinions of Noah's actions. There was, for example, two opinions on when Noah entered the ark, one maintaining that Noah's faith was so slight he waited until ankle-deep in water; the other claimed, just as he waited to leave the ark, Noah also waited to enter the ark until instructed by God. Other problems are also addressed, such as how Noah could tell the clean animals from the unclean:

"Noah could distinguish between clean and unclean animals inasmuch as the ark of itself gave admittance to seven of the clean animals, while of the unclean ones it admitted two only…"

Ark of Noah. Shorter, but also excellent. Also includes survey of Koranic passages and Islamic interpretation.

Also see Shem, Ham (which triggers some rather unfortunate Google ads), Japheth, The Seventy Nations and Languages and other entries.

Details

Brush up your Bible: Noah's Ark. Except from Michael Macrone's Brush up your Bible (see also Forty Days and Forty Nights). Entertaining low-impact Bible-brushing, from Grace Cathedral, San Francisco. All the excerpts are available there as well. Macrone is something of a creative dynamo, writing books and running websites. I've admired two of his books, Brush Up Your Shakespeare! (1990) and It's Greek to Me! Brush Up Your Classics (1991), both with HarperCollins.