The biblical story of Noah and the Flood has been of interest to modern scholars mainly for the critical concerns it raises. Historians of the Ancient Near East point out that the story is based on an earlier Mesopotamian tradition preserved in The Epic of Gilgamesh and the so-called Babylonian Genesis. Source critics note that the Hebrew text has been clumsily stitched together from older written sources and that the resulting seams are easily detected. Geologists pronounce that the universal flood described in Genesis never happened. And theologians ask whether a God who orchestrates a genocidal purging of human beings should inspire anything other than fear. But Philip C. Almond’s Noah and the Flood in Western Thought is concerned not with the ways the Genesis flood story is understood by modern biblical scholars, but with the ways it has sparked the imaginations of Bible readers for two millennia.

Almond is particularly interested in two features of the flood story’s legacy: Noah’s importance in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as the founder of post-diluvial human civilization; and his “much forgotten role, from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, in the development of secular thought in an array of modern scholarly disciplines—biology, geology, geography, anthropology, demography, zoology, mythography, religious studies, and even naval engineering” (2). To illuminate the first theme, Almond traces the history of interpretation through rabbinic literature, intertestamental Jewish midrashim (e.g., Josephus, Philo, and The First Book of Enoch), Islamic tradition (the Qur’an and “Stories of the Prophets”), Gnosticism (e.g., The Apocalypse of Adam), Church Fathers (e.g., allegorical readings by Origen, Augustine, Tertullian and Justin Martyr), and medieval interpreters such as Hugh of St. Victor (1096–1141).

Almod devotes more attention to early modern accounts of Noah and the ark, which focused on two principal issues: the size and shape of the ark, and how it could accommodate and feed all the animals rescued from the flood. Books, sometimes in several volumes, addressed these questions and proposed imaginative solutions. Johannes Buteo (1485–1560) concluded that to sustain its living cargo Noah would have had to take on 146,000 bales of hay for his herbivorous passengers and 3,650 sheep for the carnivores (159). Other early modern writers offered drawings of the ark’s design, estimates of how long it would have taken to construct, and encyclopedic lists of the ark’s animal inhabitants. Prior to the eighteenth century, estimates of the number of animals requiring passage on the ark numbered in the hundreds. But when Carl Linnaeus (1707–17778) identified 7,700 plant and 4,400 animal species, the problem of overcrowding on the ark became acute. (Linnaeus’ own solution was to identify Paradise as a raised island that survived the flood and preserved “all things … which our gracious Creator had destined to the use of man” [178]). Another question that perplexed early modern Bible readers was how Noah’s descendants got to Europe and America. Since Noah lived 350 years after the deluge and was an accomplished sailor, it was suggested that he travelled around the world discovering and allotting lands to his descendants, including New World Indians.

Almond reminds us that in an age which assumed the Bible was a reliable source for ancient history, it was possible not only to date creation (4004 BCE was the number established in the seventeenth century), but to pinpoint the time of the flood to 1,656 years later, or 2,349 BCE. This chronological precision, however, gave rise to a vexing problem: how could the eight survivors of the flood (Noah, his three sons, and their wives) give rise in around 4,000 years to a world population estimated at over 300 million? The burgeoning science of demography attacked this problem with great ingenuity. One solution required each of Noah’s sons to annually bear twins (in each case a male and female), who in turn bore twins each year starting at age 20, and so on. Less appealing solutions involved Isaac La Peyrère’s (1596–1676) unorthodox theory of “pre-Adamitism,” which proposed the existence of human beings prior to Adam.

One of the more interesting sections of Noah and the Flood in Western Thought involves early modern “cometology,” that is, the science of comets. The key figure here is William Whitson (1667–1752), who expanded on the view, made popular in Milton’s Paradise Lost, that human sin had vitiated a perfectly spherical earth spinning on a vertical axis. For Whitson, the earth’s postlapsarian features were brought about by a comet “hitting obliquely upon the Earth along some parts of its present equator.” Whitson’s comet theory also presumed to explain the mechanism of the flood, since the “prodigious quantities of … Condensed and Expanded Vapours” on the comet’s surface could easily produce “a Deluge of Waters” (235).

Noah and the Flood in Western Thought addresses many other topics, including efforts to harmonize the biblical story of a universal flood with the fossil record, attempts to connect Noah with Druidism and the Celtic language, correlations between Noah’s family and mythological figures from other cultures, and endeavors to locate the origins of racial difference and slavery in Noah’s family. The last chapter is a fascinating study of the flood story’s role in “young earth” Seventh-Day Adventism, “creation science,” expeditions to locate wood from theark, and the Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Kentucky, which creates a new legend of Noah “through text, music and animal sounds, art, sculptures, interior settings, and interactive animatronics figures” (326).

Noah and the Flood in Western Thought is a remarkable achievement. In prose that is eminently readable despite the book’s references to dozens of authors and texts, it demonstrates the surprising ways the flood story in Genesis has exercised the western imagination. Educated Bible readers today may be tempted to view the biblical flood story as the province of children. But Almond teaches us that for most of the past two millennia the story has been taken with utmost seriousness.