Introduction
The biblical story of Noah and the flood stands as a complex and compelling site for thinking about climate change, one that contemporary readers interpret in strikingly diverse ways. Within certain evangelical Christian communities in the United States, a powerful and politically-engaged interpretative tradition often deploys the biblical flood for anti-environmental purpose, reading Genesis 9:11 as an enduring confirmation of covenant, an affirmation of God’s promise that “never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”Footnote 1 Such readings have been vigorously contested by Christian and Jewish readers who regard the biblical flood as a story that presages the threat of anthropogenic climate change—a stark reminder that human greed, violence, and moral failing can imperil the earth itself.Footnote 2 In the era of the Anthropocene, Jewish environmentalist Jeremy Benstein argues, we must confront the fact that human action might again destroy the world. “We are the ones altering basic earth systems,” Benstein writes, “from global warming that threatens ‘cold and heat, summer and winter’ as we know them, to chemicals such as endocrine disrupters that blur the distinctions between the sexes in animals, upsetting the procreation of species.”Footnote 3 Even as interpreters use the flood to crystalize contemporary risk, many also fashion the story as a call to environmental action. Rabbi Arthur Waskow’s “Haftarah for the Rainbow Covenant” speaks forthrightly of present-day environmental danger, describing a world where “the ice is melting, the seas are rising, the air is dark with smoke and rising heat.”Footnote 4 He frames the covenant as a prophetic call to environmental repair, a call to “raise once more that banner of the covenant between Me and all the children of Noah and Naamah” in order to preserve and protect the cycles of the seasons, the breath of life, and the goodness of the Earth.Footnote 5
While my own interpretive work emerges from these environmental orientations, it focuses on a dimension often overlooked by mainstream eco-interpreters: the recognition of differential risk that grounds movements for environmental justice and climate justice.Footnote 6 Conversations about the environmental implications of the Genesis flood story often frame the problem as one of collective human responsibility. But when the call to recognize human responsibility for climate change is framed in universal terms, when moral responsibility for the flood is understood as a shared human burden, interpreters make a grave error.Footnote 7 We blunt the most pressing power dynamics of contemporary climate ethics: the fact that wealthy industrialized countries and the world’s more privileged citizens are vastly more responsible for environmental damage and climate violence, while people who live in poverty are the ones who suffer first and most acutely from environmental harm.Footnote 8 I contend that contemporary eco-interpreters of the Noah traditions have a responsibility to recognize and reckon with these disparities of privilege and power. Though the biblical flood story gives little attention to such concerns, I turn to rabbinic Jewish narratives that crack open questions about who deserves saving, about whether those who drown are deserving of their fate. While I begin by considering rabbinic interpretations that heighten the trouble by figuring the ark as a moral-eugenic instrument that will only offer refuge to certain “pure” bodies, I close by illuminating rabbinic stories that offer alternative interpretive paths: that express empathy and solidarity with the people and animals left outside the ark, that refuse to regard their deaths in the flood as somehow justified or necessary.
Jewish interpreters have a long tradition of dissident reading practice. While the biblical text imagines Noah as a “righteous man” who “found favor with God” (Gen 6:8–9), later Jewish interpreters have offered a more ambivalent portrait of Noah, critiquing his silence in the face of monumental suffering, his willingness to accede without protest to the divine decree.Footnote 9 My thinking about these questions has been profoundly shaped by the work of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Julian Yates, literary critics and environmental theorists who probe the long and complex afterlife of Noah and his ark and grapple with this story in relation to climate catastrophe. In Noah’s Arkive, Cohen and Yates argue that the dominant narration of the biblical story of the flood, with its tiny little ark and a handful of chosen survivors, is a dangerous cultural template: one that inscribes the inevitability of deluge and disaster, one that imagines the ark as the only route to survival.Footnote 10 Yet they also trace “the long tradition of dissonant stories that unfold outside the ark,” the way the Noah story has been contested and reimagined by ancient, medieval, and modern readers, many of whom refuse this totalizing narrative and instead imagine striking alternative trajectories.Footnote 11
In this article, I examine rabbinic and medieval Jewish traditions about Noah that lay bare the violence of the flood and call into question the boundaries and borders of the ark. I bring these texts into conversation with contemporary accounts of climate injustice, focusing particularly on the lived experiences of disabled people and other marginalized communities who are frequently left behind during disaster. I begin with a provocative theological account of the disjuncture between the Genesis narrative and the experience of contemporary Pacific Islanders articulated by Tafue Molu Lusama, a Christian thinker from the Pacific Island nation of Tuvalu. I then examine biblical, rabbinic, and medieval Jewish accounts of the flood alongside the lived experiences of disabled people who experienced social and civic abandonment during Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy, two climate-intensified storms that ravaged the Gulf Coast and New York City. I situate my reading as disability hermeneutics, advancing a mode of reading that considers the ark from the vantage point of those who are not assured a place of safety and shelter on board. I seek out texts that contend with the violence of the flood, interpreting those accounts in ways that illuminate dynamics of privilege and vulnerability, that crack open its pathos. This is the question that haunts me in the Noah tale: the question of how a rosy narrative of the survival of a few gets laid overtop a watery grave. I am distrustful of that impulse—the way it effaces the casualties, the memory of those who do not survive. When I hear the story of the flood, my heart is with the lost and left behind.
Rather than tell the Genesis story solely as a story of collective catastrophe, a disability hermeneutic takes the flood as a profound witness to the differential violence of climate change. In contemporary American culture, Noah’s ark is often cast as a children’s story, a tidy tale where all the animals line up neatly two by two. Sunny images of the ark and its panoply of animals are emblazoned on nursery walls and transformed into bath toys, while children’s Bibles are often adorned with a cheerful cover image where Noah’s ark and its menagerie rest beneath the bright promise of the rainbow.Footnote 12 Dominant religious readings likewise draw a reader’s gaze toward the rainbow, toward the reassuring symbol of covenant and the promise that comes after the flood. Yet shift the frame, and the ark becomes the story of a gated community, a story about a handful of privileged survivors who stay snug in their boat while the rest of the world is destroyed.
To reckon with that brutality, a reader must resist a core premise of the biblical text: that the violence of the flood is directed and ordained by God, that it is justified violence, that the people who drown deserve to die. The biblical text makes this claim explicit, depicting the flood as God’s response to wickedness and corruption that has engulfed the entire world. In Genesis 6:13, the biblical writer has God say, “I have decided to put an end to all flesh, for the earth is filled with lawlessness because of them; I am about to destroy them with the earth.”Footnote 13 Ancient and contemporary commentators often follow the lead of the biblical text, treating the drowned generation of Noah as deserving of their fate, as people whose wickedness was so hateful to God that it justifies the divine decree. But I reject that claim. I ground my conviction in a long line of feminist, Womanist, queer, disabled and decolonial theo-ethical reflection that seeks to recognize and resist cultural and religious strategies that force victims to shoulder the blame for their own suffering. I follow in the lineage of interpreters who commit to unveiling the power structures that undergird violence and violation, to work toward dismantling what Emilie Townes has called “the cultural production of evil.”Footnote 14 I argue that there is a terrible bewildering that happens at the heart of the Noah tale—one that makes the drowned to blame for their own deaths. When the Noah story is read as an environmental tale, this move becomes particularly pernicious. It obscures the most urgent moral inequity of climate change: the fact that the people and communities who are least responsible for causing the crisis are the ones who suffer its most devastating effects.
We’re Not All in the Same Boat: Rereading Noah’s Ark in the Pacific Islands
To reckon with the stakes of this story amidst contemporary climate crisis, let us turn first to the insights of Tafue Molu Lusama, a Christian thinker from the Pacific Island nation of Tuvalu, who argues that traditional paradigms for reading Noah’s ark fail to contend with the climate violence and intense precarity that Pacific Islanders experience. Lusama offers a chilling indictment of capitalism as a practice of extinction, one in which wealthy countries “feed on the very flesh and blood of the powerless.”Footnote 15 In such a world, the very notion of the ark as shelter has come undone. While Lusama maintains that the biblical ark was a vessel designed “to keep the innocent afloat, to give them salvation, and the affirmation of life,” rapacious political and economic forces have changed the very nature of the modern ark.Footnote 16 Who finds safety and shelter from the present storms? Not the innocent, Lusama argues, but the wealthy—those of us whose lives are entangled with practices of extraction and consumption that drive climate change. In the present day, Lusama contends, the ark is no longer a divine lifeboat, but a “ship of state” that “ignores the cries of the poor, the powerless and the marginalized while it tends to the voices of the rich and the powerful.”Footnote 17 The modern ark is a human-made instrument, one that offers refuge to the privileged, to those who have the means to pay. “The boarding ticket onto our present ark,” Lusama concludes, “is no longer innocence, but profit.”Footnote 18
Lusama’s pointed political analysis of the Noah story stands in striking contrast to more pervasive evocations of the biblical flood in Pacific Island communities. In an analysis of religion and climate activism in the Pacific Islands, geographer Hannah Fair argues that the Noah traditions are frequently evoked as a warning, as a call to prepare and respond to climate threats—a call that resonated with particular urgency during Fair’s fieldwork in the aftermath of Cyclone Pam in 2015. In storm-ravaged regions “awash with discourses of national resilience and sacks of donated rice,” Fair writes, “the story of Noah was repeatedly invoked as a parable for the need for greater preparedness.”Footnote 19 Her interlocutors evoked Noah’s story as a cautionary tale, one deployed to dramatize the dangers of doubt. Listeners weren’t meant to see themselves in Noah himself. As Fair shows, pastors and climate activists alike used the Genesis account to draw a kinship between contemporary communities and the doubting masses of Noah’s generation, the ones who failed to heed the prophet’s warning and were consequently destroyed by the flood. In these tellings, Noah becomes an exemplar of “preparation and climate belief”—a crucial counter to anti-environmentalist religious voices that evoke the rainbow covenant and its promise of divine protection in ways that further political disengagement or climate denial.Footnote 20 Yet the political charge of such calls is decidedly different than Lusama’s reading. In contrast to the preparedness parable, which aims to catalyze Pacific Islanders’ individual responsibility to prepare and respond to crisis, Lusama “emphasizes the responsibility of industrialized nations, who through their excessive emissions have cast innocent Islanders overboard.”Footnote 21 Lusama uses Noah to underscore the social and political inequities of climate change—to recognize Pacific Islanders as “unjustly outside the ark.”Footnote 22
The disproportionate risk Pacific Islanders face from the climate crisis is so stark as to need no recounting. In 2019, the Pacific Island Forum recognized climate change as the “single greatest threat to the livelihood, security, and wellbeing of the peoples of the Pacific.”Footnote 23 In 2021, Simon Kofe, foreign minister of Tuvalu, delivered a video address to world leaders at COP26 while standing at a lectern, in a suit and tie, half submerged in the rising sea water.Footnote 24 Though international diplomatic efforts to mitigate climate harms or to secure loss and damage funds to support low-lying nations remain frustratingly limited, the rhetorical power and pathos of Kofe’s “drowning island” appeal managed to capture widespread media attention—even from a Western public inclined to skim over international perspectives and flip past climate news. But the trope of drowning is not without its dangers. Pacific environmentalists argue that Western media have often couched the recognition of islanders’ risk in frameworks that promote passivity and helplessness.Footnote 25 Upolu Lumā Vaai, Professor of Theology and Ethics at Pacific Theological College in Suva Fiji, draws attention to the way that the “vulnerable Pacific” narrative fails to recognize “the resilience work already conducted by islanders on the ground.”Footnote 26 Pacific youth climate activists counter such discourse with a potent retort, a charge to the world: “We’re not drowning, we’re fighting.”Footnote 27
Disability and Climate Violence: Reckoning with Disproportionate Risk, Centering Social Inequality, and Resisting the “Tragic Story”
My own research at the intersections of disability and climate change is anchored in a similar set of commitments: both to recognize the disproportionate harm that disability communities face from climate harms and to resist the ways in which disabled people are often figured as passive victims and inevitable casualties. I ground my work in a signature principle of environmental justice scholarship and activism—the recognition that environmental harm is unjustly distributed, that minoritized communities experience more intense environmental hazards, toxic exposures, and climate harms. Environmental justice activism has catalyzed protest and resistance work among Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian and other communities of color, drawing crucial attention to the way environmental risk intensifies racial and class-based injustice.Footnote 28 Environmental harm compounds structural inequality; the effects of climate change, toxic waste, and extractive industry hit hardest against people who already face social-structural barriers.Footnote 29 A 2024 Washington Post analysis of an ongoing toxic water crisis in the majority Latino city of Sunland Park, New Mexico chronicles the stark inequality and profound health impacts of years of arsenic contamination in residents’ drinking water, concluding that the story stands as a devastating reminder that “safe water is not available to all Americans.”Footnote 30
While environmental justice frameworks have often foregrounded disability as a consequence of environmental inequality, scholars and activists increasingly recognize that disabled people are also disproportionately at risk from environmental harm.Footnote 31 As wildfire smoke and heat crisis engulf more communities, as climate change intensifies extreme weather and catastrophic storms, disabled people often bear the harshest impacts. Recent studies suggest that disabled people are up to four times more likely to die in the aftermath of natural disasters.Footnote 32 Disabled people who survive the immediate crisis often experience long-term displacement or institutionalization, as well as life-threatening disruptions to crucial medical care and support services—imperiling access to dialysis treatment, physical therapy, in-home care assistance, prescription refills, and more.Footnote 33 Extreme heat likewise strikes disabled people most intensely. Heat crisis causes heightened risk for people with a wide range of physical and mental health disabilities, especially as prescribed medications often reduce the body’s capacity for thermoregulation.Footnote 34 Beyond the immediate impact of any particular crisis, the social instability and chronic disruptions brought on by climate change are also often felt particularly acutely by disabled people: increasing food and water insecurity, intensifying global conflict, disrupted access to health care, and climate migration frequently make disabled people’s lives more precarious.Footnote 35
While it is crucial to recognize the way disabled people face disproportionate harm from climate change, we must also guard against two key dangers. First, the danger of sidelining the ways that disabled activists around the world are strategizing and responding to climate change, advocating for structural change to mitigate harm while also innovating practices of mutual aid amidst crisis.Footnote 36 Second, the danger of compounding a widespread perception that disabled people’s lives are inherently unlivable, that disability is always already tragic. Especially as climate change accelerates, this “tragic story” can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy—one that makes it seem inevitable that disabled people die more frequently in the aftermath of disaster. As I have argued elsewhere, to imagine risk as inherent to disability itself is to elide the way that social, political, and policy failures exacerbate harm.Footnote 37 We have an ethical obligation to recognize that disabled people’s disproportionate climate risks are not simply a “natural” consequence of bodymind difference. They are also a consequence of structural inequality, a consequence of entrenched social barriers that become magnified by crisis. Disabled people regularly contend with a world that fails us: navigating hostile architecture, meager public services, shoddy public transportation systems, precarious communication access, and bureaucratic tangles for basic life needs. Disabled people, especially multiply-marginalized disabled people, experience chronic crisis and precarity as an ongoing condition of ordinary life. When a storm strikes, when climate crisis tears through our usual support systems, these everyday inequalities turn even more deadly.Footnote 38
Who gets access to shelter and safety? When we ask this question with disability in mind, it brings into focus sharp disparities around risk. In a landmark New York City lawsuit following the devastation of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, the court ruled that “the City’s plans are inadequate to ensure that people with disabilities are able to evacuate before or during an emergency; they fail to provide sufficiently accessible shelters; and they do not sufficiently inform people with disabilities of the availability and location of accessible emergency services.”Footnote 39 While the court observed “no evidence that these failures are a result of intentional discrimination,” they emphasized that US disability rights law does not require malicious intent; it also protects disabled people from de facto discrimination that results from neglect and failure to make accommodations for people with disabilities.Footnote 40 Consider just a few illustrative examples from the lawsuit: “The City’s plans generally assume that people will be able to evacuate their buildings without assistance,” such as the Ready New York emergency planning guide for seniors and people with disabilities, which instructs people “not to use elevators during an emergency, but fails to suggest an alternative for those whose disabilities prevent them from navigating stairs.”Footnote 41 Representatives from New York City’s police and fire departments testified that they had no plans that address high-rise evacuations for people with disabilities. Fire departments do have access to specialized equipment like stair chairs that assist in the evacuation of people who cannot walk. But while the court concludes that rescue workers are clearly “capable of rescuing individuals with disabilities from high-rise buildings under ordinary circumstances,” it is less clear that they can do so “during a large-scale evacuation, particularly one that occurs with little or no notice.”Footnote 42
Asking critical questions about evacuation access also brings transportation inequity into sharp relief. Evacuation plans often assume that everyone has access to a personal car and a robust bank account, two critical resources that enable flight in the advance of a storm. But when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, nearly 15 percent of women workers in the city reported that they had no vehicle available in order to evacuate.Footnote 43 For disabled people, the situation is similarly stark. More than 5 percent of American adults age 18-64 self-report disabilities that “make it difficult for them to travel outside the home”; above the age of 65, the number jumps to 14 percent.Footnote 44 The data reveals patterns well known within disability circles: disabled people are significantly more likely to live in a household without access to a vehicle, to live in lower income households, and to rely on friends or disability-specific transportation programs to make essential trips. Disaster often upends these systems. Consider Benilda Caixeta, a wheelchair user living in New Orleans who relied upon the city’s paratransit system for accessible transportation, a service notorious for its unreliability in the best of circumstances. As Hurricane Katrina advanced, she worked for days to arrange transportation to evacuate. But despite repeated promises, her driver never arrived. When floodwaters rushed into her apartment, Caixeta drowned—waiting for transit that never came.Footnote 45
When we tell Caixeta’s story, we face a choice: We could use her story to illustrate the essential vulnerability of people with disabilities; or we could use it to tell a political story about disability discrimination, about transportation systems that are inequitable and unreliable even in fair weather—and that fail, utterly, in the face of a storm. The political story makes plain that Caixeta’s inability to evacuate isn’t a personal tragedy caused by disability, but a public failure: a devastating indictment of the deadly cost of ableism and inequality. When Hurricane Sandy struck New York City seven years later, the same pattern unfolded. City preparedness plans direct people with disabilities to continue to rely on paratransit in an emergency—the city’s information hotline actively did so during Hurricane Sandy. Yet New York City made no actual provisions for service to be available. Upon review, the court found that “the City’s plans do not, for example, mandate that paratransit be available without reservations during an emergency; that it remain open for a certain amount of time after the issuance of an evacuation order; or even that it be available at all during an emergency.”Footnote 46 Quite the contrary. Paratransit shut down almost immediately after the emergency evacuation order was issued; outbound accessible van trips ended at noon, even though the subways continued running until 7 pm and the buses continued until 9 pm. After standard service shut down, police officers requisitioned public buses and drove through the affected zones, providing transportation to people who had no other route out. But bus drivers had no instructions to prevent overcrowding or to ensure that buses made space available for disabled people; court testimony reports that no wheelchair users were evacuated.Footnote 47
Who Can Enter the Ark? Rabbinic Discourse on the Exclusions of Sanctuary
To read the Noah traditions with these realities in mind helps sharpen a question that receives little attention in the biblical text: Who gets to enter the ark? Jewish interpretive traditions grapple with the exclusions of sanctuary, recognizing the way in which the very creation of an ark prompts questions about who will be allowed to board. Let’s consider a passage that appears in Bavli Sanhedrin 108b, the Babylonian Talmud’s longest sustained discussion of the flood, which considers how specific non-human animals were selected to board the ark. Bavli Sanhedrin 108b reads:
From every pure animal you shall take seven—
seven husbands (ish) and wives (ishto). (Gen 7:2)
Is there wifehood for animals?
Rabbi Shmuel bar Naḥmani said that Rabbi Yoḥanan said:
From those with whom a sin was not done.
How did he know?
Rav Ḥisda said:
He passed them before the ark.
All that the ark accepted—
it was known that a sin had not been done with them.
And those that the ark did not accept,
a sin had been done with them.
Our passage begins with a verse from Genesis 7, which instructs Noah to bring seven pairs of each “pure” animal aboard the ark.Footnote 48 In the biblical context, an animal’s designation as pure (tahor) indicates its availability to be eaten or sacrificed. But the rabbinic discussion of this verse emphasizes the animal’s sexual or moral purity.Footnote 49 Rabbi Shmuel bar Naḥmani picks up on a peculiarity of the biblical language, asking why the verse describes these animal pairs as “husbands and wives.” The biblical phrase prompts an exegetical inquiry: Isn’t marriage an institution reserved solely for humankind? Shmuel bar Naḥmani resolves the difficulty by imagining that this evocation of heterosexual marital coupling is used to emphasize the sexual fidelity and propriety of these chosen animal pairs. The representative animals who are allowed to enter the ark are imagined as sexually pure bodies—ones to whom no sexual sin was done.Footnote 50
The violence condensed here is thick and tangled. It needs parsing from several directions at once. Shmuel argues that the Torah’s evocation of marriage in Genesis 7:2 serves as an index for sexual sinlessness, a marker of a particular kind of heterosexual propriety. Rabbi Shmuel bar Naḥmani’s exegesis relies on an assumption that a signature element of human culture—marriage—is not something in which animals partake. Though Shmuel recognizes that animals do not marry according to human tradition, he ultimately reads the verse to argue that animals become worthy of admission to the ark when they behave like “proper” wives. He maintains that God is invested in the sexual propriety of animals. His conclusion is stark: Shmuel asserts that the ark allows entry only to animals who had no involvement in sexual sin. Let me be clear: I call attention to these dynamics not to single out this rabbinic tradition for particular feminist critique, but to illuminate ethical elisions that still often arise in contemporary accounts of violence and violation. Notice, for example, the way Shmuel’s query brings sexual scrutiny to bear solely on wives. In keeping with prevailing rabbinic sex and gender norms, he is unconcerned about the sexual pre-history of husbands, regardless of their species. It is only proper wifehood, Shmuel avers, that is incommensurate with sexual sin. Let us also consider how Shmuel’s account silences the question of consent. Elsewhere in the Babylonian Talmud, in legal passages that grapple with sexual violence, the rabbis reckon with compulsion and force; they recognize rape and seduction as categories that matter, that contour the legal implications of victimhood.Footnote 51 But none of that complexity enters into Shmuel’s assessment. The language that he uses to describe the sexual act is strikingly passive: “a sin was not done with them” (shelo nʿavdah bahem ʿaveirah). In Shmuel’s estimation, the question of the animal’s complicity in the sexual act is irrelevant. Merely being involved in forbidden sex is sufficient to sully the animal body, to keep her from access to refuge.
What is the nature of that sin? Shmuel’s tradition rests on a widespread midrashic motif, evoked earlier in the Bavli’s discussion of the flood, which asserts that the “corruption” that prompts the cataclysm was widespread sexual transgression, one that violates the distinctions between human and animal kinds.Footnote 52 Bavli Sanhedrin 108a reads:
“God saw the earth and how all flesh (kol basar)
had corrupted its way (darkho) upon the earth.” (Gen 6:12)
Rabbi Yoḥanan said:
It teaches that they mated the domesticated animals (behemah)
upon the wild animals (ḥayah)
and the wild upon the domesticated,
and all of them upon the man (adam)
and the man upon all of them.
Elsewhere, I have argued that this passage is best understood as a condemnation of sexual relations that cross certain categorical lines. While the tradition inveighs against what we might call “cross-species” sex, it focuses its ire on certain kinds of forbidden crossings—sexual relations that blur charged distinctions between wild and tame, human and animal. It also singles out human culpability, condemning the Generation of the Flood not simply for participating in forbidden sex, but for orchestrating it. While the biblical text attributes agency more universally, imagining “all flesh” as having “corrupted” itself without regard for species distinctions, Rabbi Yoḥanan’s tradition lays the agential blame squarely on humankind. In his gloss, it is humans who establish a deliberate breeding program, one that violates the distinctions God ordains between kinds.
The Bavli traditions clearly position these sinned-with animals as the victims of violation, not its orchestrators. But their victimhood makes no moral difference. Instead, it is because of their violation that they must and will die. They cannot be survivors; the very terms of the ark’s refuge are constructed so that they will not be saved. The claim that animals are punished for sexual or other transgressions rests on biblical precedent. Leviticus 20:15–16 asserts that if a man or woman has sexual relations with an animal, both they and the animal involved in the sex crime are put to death. As Beth Berkowitz has shown, this verse prompts significant and complex rabbinic reflection; rabbinic texts variously recognize animals as culpable for their involvement in forbidden sexual relations, as the instrument of human sin, and as a material reminder of sin and shame whose palpable presence must be erased.Footnote 53 Such texts reveal what biblical scholar Rhiannon Graybill calls the “sticky affect” of sexual violation, the way the “ick” of sexual transgression attaches to the body of the violated individual. But the impulse to blot out sexual sin by killing or containing the victim is hardly limited to rabbinic discourse. Graybill argues that contemporary American universities often treat survivors of sexual violence as “unhappy objects,” in part because “they serve as reminders that violence prevention campaigns have failed.”Footnote 54 The violated body has itself become toxic; the powers that be often want it to simply go away.
Convenient, isn’t it? That there is a flood coming that will swallow up certain undesirable bodies and wash all this ickiness down the drain? Theorists working in queer and trans studies, critical race studies, disability studies, fat studies, and feminist thought have long tracked this kind of cultural eugenic impulse: this impulse to purge certain bodies from society, to constitute certain people as undesirable, as people one would rather not have as members of a rosy imagined new world.Footnote 55 Alison Kafer’s Feminist, Queer, Crip argues for the urgency of imagining disability futures “because disabled people are continually being written out of the future, rendered as the sign of a future that no one wants.”Footnote 56 Disaster theorists likewise call attention to the way that post-disaster recovery is a deeply political project.Footnote 57 Which communities are rebuilt and which are disenfranchised? Whose neighborhoods are restored and whose are deemed unsalvageable? Disaster recovery is a project of world-making, one that often consigns black, brown, and poor communities to the ruins. This is the brutal underside of a discourse that imagines disaster as a kind of opportunity—a catalyst to clean up untidiness, to sweep the world clean of undesirable bodies and blighted neighborhoods.
Noah’s ark is a potent site for crystalizing this fantasy. As Cohen and Yates have shown, religious and secular evocations of Noah’s ark are a powerful locus for articulating these kinds of exclusions, for making manifest the recognition of which bodies and which lives are imagined as worthy of conservation—as well as for singling out the bodies that are “not wanted on the voyage” that the ark will make into a new and better world.Footnote 58 Such refusals are on stark display in Bavli Sanhedrin 108b. When the rabbis are imagining the fleshy bodies who will inhabit and repopulate the post-flood world, they don’t want bodies that have been “contaminated” with sexual sin. Rav Ḥisda’s tradition imagines Noah bringing each animal body before the ark, letting the ark itself open up to accept certain bodies and bar passage to others.Footnote 59 If the animal has been subjected to improper sexual intimacies, then it is rejected by the ark. Those implicated in sexual sin are part of the old order that must pass away; their bodies cannot cross over to the new world. Rav Ḥisda’s ark itself becomes a moral arbiter: inviting some, turning others away. It offers a profoundly conditional refuge. It calls us, I contend, to ask hard and urgent questions not just about the ancient biblical flood, but about the way similar dynamics unfold during the contemporary climate crisis. It asks us to reckon with the ways in which refuge is often secured for a select few, at the expense of other bodies—unsavory bodies, bodies deemed too disabled, too fat, too poor, too brown to save.
The Limits of Refuge: Triage Death and the Boundaries of Sanctuary
The risk, of course, is that thinking with the ark turns such questions into metaphor. But these are questions of embodied life and death, as visceral as breath and bone. Think with me about a story from Hurricane Katrina, the storm that made landfall in New Orleans in 2005, whose devastation laid plain so many differential impacts of climate and disaster inequality in the United States.Footnote 60 It is the story of Emmett Everett, a fat Black disabled man who was denied evacuation from Memorial Medical Center and who died at the hands of medical staff. His death is documented in harrowing detail by Sheri Fink in her Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative essay, “The Deadly Choices at Memorial.”Footnote 61 Everett was born in Honduras; he grew up in New Orleans as part of a large extended family. He was loved; he was cherished. When Hurricane Katrina struck, he was in the hospital, awaiting colostomy surgery to ease an obstruction of his bowels. Everett was alert and awake, though let us be clear, neither of these criteria should be prerequisites for rescue. He had watched his roommates be evacuated. Fink reports that he appealed several times to his nurse, “Don’t let them leave me behind.”Footnote 62 He was a man with a vibrant sense of humor and a rich family life; he was also 380 lbs. and a paraplegic. Memorial physicians who managed emergency triage decided he was too heavy to be evacuated, though Fink reports that the staff who helped lead boat and helicopter transport said “they would certainly have found a way to evacuate Everett,” had they been aware of his presence.Footnote 63 But Everett and several other patients who were deemed too difficult or too frail to evacuate were given sedatives and then killed by medical euthanasia. Physician John Thiele reported later that while others died peacefully, Everett continued to breathe. He was smothered with a towel.Footnote 64
I cannot think of the ark without naming this violence. I cannot think of the ark without remembering those who were denied refuge, those who were left behind to drown. Is this the only path we can imagine?
Let me turn back to ancient text, to surface a different possibility. On its face, the story I tell next is a whimsical tradition, a rabbinic tall tale about how a mythical creature survives the flood. There is something that feels impossible about placing this story alongside the account I have just given of Emmett Everett’s death, something that twists in my gut, something about the elision of the material body, something about erasure, something about the rawness of the choice to leave him behind. But I want to suggest that the rabbinic story also matters—that we might make it matter, because of the way it reckons with the limits of the ark, because of the way it recognizes those left outside the borders of sanctuary, because of the way it tries to slam a wrench in the gears of inevitable death, because of the way it tries to refuse the inexorable drowning.
The story is told in the Babylonian Talmud, as the rabbis debate how the massive mythical creature known as the reʾem (Aramaic: reima) survived the flood. The reʾem appears in several biblical passages; the Jewish Publication Society translates it as “wild ox.” Footnote 65 Modern biblical commentators often identify the reʾem as the ancient aurochs, a large primordial ancestor of domesticated cattle who stood six feet at the shoulder, with wide, forward-facing horns.Footnote 66 But pre-modern Jewish and Christian exegetes, in line with ancient translation choices in the Septuagint and the Vulgate Bibles, understood the reʾem differently. They recognize this creature as the unicorn.Footnote 67 While contemporary pop culture figures the unicorn as a casualty of the flood and one of its most celebrated extinctions, rabbinic discourse takes for granted that the unicorn survives.Footnote 68 The question the rabbis ask is not if the reʾem endures, but how her survival was accomplished. Bavli Zevaḥim 113b begins:
How did the reima survive?
Rabbi Yannai said: They brought cubs into the ark.
But doesn’t Rabbah bar bar Ḥana say:
I myself saw a day-old child of the reima
who was as large as Mount Tabor.
How large is Mount Tabor?
It is forty parasangs!
The length of the reima cub’s neck is three parasangs.
The place where his head rests is a parasang and a half.
And when he excretes, he dams up the River Jordan.
The tradition begins by considering Yannai’s assertion that they brought a baby unicorn aboard the ark, rather than a full-sized adult. His proposal garners an immediate objection, rooted an eyewitness account of Rabbah bar bar Ḥana, a famous rabbinic figure known for a series of legendary tales about extraordinary sights he saw upon his journeys.Footnote 69 One of those sights was purportedly a day-old reima cub, whose stature Rabbah bar bar Ḥana likens to the height of Mount Tabor, a mountain in the Jezreel Valley that rises dramatically from the flat land that surrounds it.Footnote 70 Our passage measures out the vast expanse of the reima’s body, calculating not just his massive newborn height, but also imagining his head and neck as their own gigantic landscape. Talmudic measurements are notoriously slippery and opinions vary about their modern-day equivalents. Nosson Slifkin takes the parasang to be equivalent to roughly two miles, which would make the mythical day-old unicorn eighty miles tall—far larger, Slifkin notes, than the physical mountain to which he is compared.Footnote 71 Suffice it to say, the reima’s body represents a striking logistical challenge for the rabbis who are determined to stow the creature safely aboard the ark.
Traditional commentators have often treated these accounts of the reima’s extraordinary body as allegorical, or they have regarded the debate in Zevaḥim as one designed to sharpen the intellect, a give and take that has no significance beyond the elaboration of Torah for its own sake.Footnote 72 But I want to linger with the gargantuan body as a material presence, precisely because the vast stature of the unicorn brings the problem of access into sharp focus. Read through the prism of disability theory, we can recognize the relationship between the body of the reima and the physical architecture of the ark as an example of what disability theorist Rosemarie Garland-Thomson terms “a misfit,” a material arrangement where bodymind and world do not harmoniously align. While disabled people are often portrayed as misfits—Garland-Thomson chooses the term in part because it captures this very affective experience of disability—she highlights the way in which the experience of misfitting is more properly recognized as a disjuncture in the relationship between two things, rather than as a static failure of a particular body or system. “The problem with a misfit,” she argues, “inheres not in either of the two things but rather in their juxtaposition, the awkward attempt to fit them together.”Footnote 73
As the rabbis confront the misfit between the architecture of the ark and the reima’s expansive size, the Talmud proposes a flurry of proposals, objections, and responses. Bavli Zevaḥim gives an account of accommodation in action, making visible a process of boarding the reima that confronts these structural and material constraints. Considering the vast dimensions of the creature’s full expanse, Rabbi Yoḥanan suggests that they brought only his head on board. But even this more limited entry threatens to capsize the ark, to overflow the vessel. The anonymous voice proposes an alternative: Perhaps it is only the very tip of the reima’s nose that rests upon the deck, just enough to let the unicorn breathe? But the Talmud protests this delicate arrangement, finding it incongruous amidst the tumult of the storm, the wildness of the water. Reish Lakish offers a solution, suggesting that they tied the reima’s horn to the ark itself, a solution that imagines the ark as a giant piece of driftwood that the unicorn could float beside (b. Zebaḥ 113b).Footnote 74
Let me tell you what I love about the strange, ungainly text: That the rabbis treat the reima’s survival as a bedrock necessity. That they cherish this big, beautiful, inconvenient creature and know he must survive. That they devise a strategy that makes survival possible, and when their initial efforts result in yet another misfit, they strategize some more. That they allow us to see the awkwardness of the enterprise. That they are dogged in the face of failure. That the reima’s body is never moralized. That they never say he is too vast, too fat, too crip to come aboard. I name fatness alongside disability in evocation of Anna Mollow’s trenchant recognition that the structures of oppression that target disabled people and fat people are strikingly similar: architectural barriers, structural exclusions, and discrimination, as well as the practice of pathologizing divergent bodies.Footnote 75 A potent epistemic kinship undergirds both disability and fat politics: a recognition grounded in the fundamental rightness of bodies and minds that the world judges as undesirable. It is this recognition, this embrace of the reima’s sprawling body as-it-is that makes me feel this text to be generative for disability ethics, for the practice of counter-eugenic imagination.
But let us also reckon with its limits. Like many projects where access is an add-on, the proposed solutions do not shift the structural elements of exclusion. I am thinking of the question one of my students asked, when first encountering this text: “Did God forget about the unicorn?” Confronted with the obvious after-the-fact efforts to fashion a way for the reima to board, my student homed in on the inequity of these late-stage rabbinic efforts. Wouldn’t it be better to have designed the ark with the unicorn in mind? How can it be acceptable to reduce the reima to such meager circumstance, to leave his survival up to a last-minute hack? Shouldn’t the ark have been designed from the outset so that all creatures had a chance to survive? The Talmud’s account of the reima’s access into (or beside) the ark is a classic example of a disability retrofit, a practice that cracks open a space for the non-normative bodymind even as it enshrines certain assumptions about who really belongs.Footnote 76 The retroactive act of inclusion cements the reima’s presence as an afterthought. Push these questions further and they lay plain the acts of exclusion that are central to the very enterprise of ark-making. To fashion an ark is to mark a border, to craft a too-small space for too-few. Parsed from this perspective, the Talmud’s story of the floating unicorn offers a fantasy of more expansive shelter—as well as a stark reminder of shelter’s limit. “Perhaps the worst thing you can do,” Cohen and Yates argue, “is to think that you are not on an ark.”Footnote 77 Taking their warning as a catalyst, I linger with the way a dissident disability reading of this talmudic tradition surfaces a different set of questions: Who finds refuge? Who can make their way into the charmed circle of the ark’s floating sanctuary? For whom will accommodations be made, and to whom will they be denied?
Rabbinic Rescues and Survivals: Breaking the Borders of the Biblical Ark
Near the conclusion of the discussion in Bavli Zevaḥim 113b, the Talmud makes mention of one other survivor of the deluge: Og, king of Bashan, a man of giant stature who is regarded by certain midrash traditions as the sole survivor of the flood who was not aboard the ark. In the Hebrew Bible and in later Jewish tradition, Og figures as the last of the mythical giants who once populated the land; Moses defeats him in battle, after God promises to deliver the mighty man into the prophet’s hand (Num 21:33–35; Deut 3:1–13). Many midrashim trace Og’s story back to ancient days, imagining him as a contemporary of Noah and a servant of Abraham.Footnote 78 The midrash Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer, which scholars date to the early medieval period, recounts a striking tradition that considers how Og survives the flood:Footnote 79
Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark (Gen 7:23)
Except Og, king of Bashan,
who sat on one rung of the ladders of the ark
and swore to Noah and to his sons
that he would be their servant forever.
What did Noah do?
He bored a hole in the ark
and he put through his food each and every day—
so he also remained,
as it is said, For only Og king of Bashan was left… (Deut 3:11).Footnote 80
Our midrash imagines Og as a man of extraordinary stature, one who can perch on a ladder on the outside of the ark and be tall enough to keep his head above the raging waters. The threat the flood poses to Og is not drowning but famine. He’s got a secure seat, but what’s he going to eat? To solve the dilemma, Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer expands Noah’s classical role as the master of provision. Rabbinic discourse portrays Noah and his sons engaged in ceaseless labor on behalf of the animals, feeding and nourishing all the creatures in their charge.Footnote 81 Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer extends Noah’s role to encompass the giant who seats himself outside the ark. After Og swears fealty, after he offers himself in perennial service to Noah and his heirs, Noah bores a hole in the side of the ark. He brings Og food every day, a practice that allows Og to survive the deluge.
Noah’s act of sustenance is hardly the pinnacle of generosity, tempered as it is by Og’s promise of eternal servitude. Does Noah wait to extend provision to the giant until he secures a promise that Og will never be his rival? Does Noah feed Og because he stands to gain from his own openhandedness?Footnote 82 The power dynamics are treacherous. Reading this midrash, I am struck by the way it evokes a charged discourse of risk that often surrounds the gated community, the way the impulse to wall off a protected space imagines the people outside as monstrous and dangerous.Footnote 83 Is Og a threat? And is that threat neutralized by his oath of service? Yet let us notice also the way Noah’s own response intensifies a certain kind of risk. Boring a hole in the side of the ark surely heightens the danger for those on board. Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer does not explore this narrative trajectory. But as I read the medieval midrash alongside contemporary debates about immigration and border policy, as this Jewish story jostles provocatively alongside accounts from contemporary climate and conflict refugees, as I parse the intensifying discourse of scarcity and limited resources, I cannot help but ask: Were there those on board who counseled Noah not to risk it? Not to make a breach in their tidy little boat? Not to think beyond their walls? Not to worry about those outside?
I want to linger with this midrashic portrait of Noah, because of the protest it registers against the brutality of the ark, the way an ark necessarily condemns the outside world to destruction and deluge. For all its ethical limits, for all its investment in hierarchy and servitude, for all the meagerness of the shelter it offers to the giant Og, Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer nonetheless imagines Noah as one who dares to break the borders of the ark. It is a break that matters, a break that pulls at the very foundations of the enterprise. “Built from suffering, moored in death,” Cohen and Yates write, “the ark needs you to buy into the no of its closed-wall insistence that to be outside is to die.”Footnote 84 Our midrash is not entirely alone in questioning the moral claims that undergird the biblical account of the flood. As Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg observes, Midrash Tanḥuma also allows itself to grapple with the implicit assumptions of divine justice: “Of the generation of the flood, our sages said that there were many decent people like Noah who were obliterated with the generation” (Midrash Tanḥ. Re’eh 3).Footnote 85 But most classical rabbinic treatments of the ark align themselves with the overt biblical claim that those outside the ark are condemned to destruction, that they do not deserve rescue. In Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer, Noah breaks the implicit rule that governs the ark’s creation. He refuses the divine decree. He extends a hand to Og. He breaches the wall between them.
The ethical stakes of Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer’s telling sharpen even further if we read this tale alongside the startling critique of Noah that appears in the Zohar, Midrash Ha-Ne’elam. Our text begins when Noah emerges from the ark, sees the devastation, and weeps for the utter destruction of the world:
Noah said, “Master of the World! You are called Compassionate!
You should have shown compassion for Your creatures!”
The Blessed Holy One answered him, “Foolish shepherd!
Now you say this—but not when I spoke with you tenderly?…
I lingered with you and belabored you with all of this,
so that you might seek compassion for the world.
But as soon as you heard that you would be safe in the ark,
the evil of the world did not touch your heart.
You built the ark and saved yourself. (Zohar Ḥadash 23a)Footnote 86
The midrash begins with Noah’s sharp critique of God, asserting that the Compassionate One should surely not have brought such death and devastation. But God’s reply turns the critique back toward Noah, asking why Noah never argued on behalf of his generation or called forth God’s compassion.Footnote 87 The full midrash quotes a series of biblical verses from Genesis 6 and 7, reimagining God’s long discourse with Noah as a kind of divine invitation, an extended opportunity for Noah to protest on behalf of his neighbors. But Noah never takes advantage of the opportunity. Instead, Midrash ha-Ne’elam imagines Noah as content to settle for his own safety, willing to accede to the dictates of the divine decree so long as his own refuge is secure.
To bring a disability hermeneutic to these tales of Noah and his ark is to read in ways that center the lives and deaths of those who find no easy refuge when the waters rise. It is to refuse to be seduced by the lure of the rainbow, to hold open the enormity of grief. It is to reckon not just with the losses that the ark leaves in its wake, but also with the violence of the barred door, the exclusions that structure this ark’s conception of shelter. And it is—at least for those of us who live with some recourse to refuge, who live in a place of relative safety, who live buffered in certain ways from the worst of the storm—to be confronted with the question that hangs in these two very different accounts of Noah’s own response to the deluge. The contemporary moment lays before us a difficult set of moral questions. Our own climate prophets tell us that the waters will rise. We have choices to make, choices that can still blunt the force of the storm. But the choices we face are not simply those that might lessen the brute force of climate change, that might stem the devastation by slowing the rising seas, by cooling a warming world. We also face choices about how to respond when crisis comes. Which Noah will we be? The prophet who tucks himself into a private sanctuary, as the waters rage? Or the one who breaks the boundaries of the ark? This is the thin, fierce hope I hold: that we resist the lure of the closed community, that we refuse to be satisfied with a tiny ark where just a few float safe upon the waves. That we commit ourselves not just to the promise of personal sanctuary, but to the building of a world where no one is left to drown.
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