Rain Page 7
The newly settled Israelites anguished endlessly about the availability of rain for their farms and pastures, and the timing; early showers were crucial to germinate seeds and sprout new crops. God promises not only rain, but rain at the right time: “And it shall come to pass, if ye shall hearken diligently unto my commandments which I command you this day, to love the Lord your God and to serve Him with all your heart and with all your soul, that I will give you the rain of your land in his due season, the first rain and the latter rain…”
Rain is God’s way of keeping us honest, according to the tradition, for the promise is immediately followed by the warning: “Take heed to yourselves, that your heart be not deceived, and ye turn aside and serve other gods and worship them; and then the Lord’s wrath be kindled against you, and He shut up the heaven, that there be no rain and that the land yield not her fruit, and lest ye perish quickly from off the good land which the Lord giveth you.”
As God told Job, only God is the father of rain and only He can create it. (Tell that to the geoengineers!) Only He can bestow it as a blessing or take it away as punishment. Idolatry, bloodshed, or lawlessness could all bring the wrath of drought. With the notable exception of the Great Flood, God’s rain wrath takes the form of drought far more often than deluge. The Hebrew Bible, or Christianity’s Old Testament, is full of tales of God starving crops of rainfall; sending it to one city but not another; withholding rain for months or years.
But it is likewise full of stories of rain as God’s blessing—His “good treasure” falling upon Israel and all of Earth: “The Lord shall open unto thee His good treasure, the heaven to give the rain unto thy land in his season, and to bless all the work of thine hand.”
Indeed, in a host of religious traditions, from Allah fracturing clouds into raindrops in Islam to Buddhist rain-cloud kings, rain is among the most important blessings possible. In Judaism, rainfall is said to be one of life’s greatest events, greater even than the giving of Torah. As Rabbi Tanchum bar Chiyya put it in the third century, “the giving of Torah was a joy to Israel, but the falling of rain is a joy for all the world.”
Religions hold a mirror to the history of humans and their complicated worlds, including their beliefs and perceptions about climate. The monotheism of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism all grew out of the arid sands of the Middle East. Some historians trace monotheism to agriculturalists in these dry lands looking to the skies for life-giving rainfall. Most of the polytheistic religions were born in the soaking monsoons. Some scholars speculate that as people evolved their belief systems in radically different climate conditions, they took radically different approaches to interacting with God, nature, and one another. “In the wilderness of the desert, where life struggles to survive, it would seem logical that a divine being would be responsible for the creation of living things out of nothing, and that in due course time and life will end in a final day of judgment,” writes the geoscientist Peter Clift, who studies the Asian monsoon and its human impacts. “In contrast, in the forested land that has grown under the influence of summer monsoon rains, life is everywhere and abundant. Tropical forests teem with life and the cycle of birth, life, and death are endlessly replayed, resulting in a theology that does not emphasize a beginning or end of creation.”
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The faithful pray for rain in every climate zone, for even the rainiest parts of the world can sometimes face drought. But it is often the wettest, monsoon-drenched regions in which the rains and rivers themselves have achieved immortality. This is especially true in Asia. In India, the nation’s estimated one billion Hindus consider the rain-fed Ganges River holy. And the lives of gods including revered Krishna are intimately tied to rain. Krishna’s skin is storm-blue, and his name means “dark as a storm cloud.” Rain follows him from the day of his birth to a royal family in Mathura during a terrific storm. The tempest helps obscure a ruse when his father secrets Krishna across the Yamuna River (the largest tributary of the Ganges) to switch him with the newborn child of a cowherd couple so he won’t be murdered by Mathura’s wicked ruler.
In one of Hinduism’s best-known stories, as a young man, Krishna convinces the people of the region to stop worshipping Indra, a rain god who is king of the gods as well as the storms. Krishna suggests his cowherd friends worship Mount Govardhana instead; Krishna will become the mountain and receive their offerings. Indra flies into a rage and sends down angry rains. Then Krishna lifts Mount Govardhana and holds it over the cowherds as a gigantic umbrella. The image of blue Lord Krishna balancing the mountain umbrella effortlessly with his finger, sheltering his happy companions, is the subject of some of Hinduism’s most significant artwork. For centuries it has been carved into temples and stone walls in bas-relief, embroidered into textiles, and painted with whimsy and bright colors, a menagerie of animals often tucked into the mountain crevices, rain falling harmlessly around.
Over time, Indra becomes far less powerful, and less popular, than Krishna. And worship of rain and rivers centers around the Ganges. The 1,570-mile Ganges—the world’s most heavily populated basin and sadly one of its most polluted rivers—rises in the Himalayas and flows south and east across the northern Indian plain into Bangladesh. There, the river returns the monsoon rains to their birthplace, the Bay of Bengal. Physically, the Ganges is a pilgrimage for Hindus. Personified, it is the goddess Ganga. A beautiful woman who sports a fish tail instead of legs, Ganga perches on Makara, a crocodilian water monster. In her right hand is a water lily, a symbol of rain and fertility. In her left, she holds a water pot. Hindus celebrate the Ganges in all sorts of rituals and festivals, including Kumbh Mela, which draws the largest single gathering of humanity in the world to plunge into a ritual bath, their faces joyous, colorful saris soaked to the skin. In 2001, the Indian government estimated that 70 million people congregated by the banks of the Ganges to bathe in its sacred waters.
Come summertime, when the great monsoon rains blow in from the Indian Ocean, hundreds of monsoon festivals likewise draw pilgrims or partiers to cities and villages throughout India. On the southern banks of the Brahmaputra River in the far eastern state of Assam—one of the rainiest places in the world and among the most sacred destinations in India—travelers descend upon the Kamakhya Temple for the Ambubachi Festival. As the monsoons swell the Brahmaputra, they are said to bring on the annual menstruation of the temple’s presiding goddess. The hilltop temple shuts down for her three-day period. A crush of devotees waits outside, and when the temple doors open, they make a mad rush to receive a small bit of cloth moist with the menstrual fluid—infused with all the power of the monsoons, fertility, and other blessings.
As the goddess Ganga and the Ganges River are central to the faith of Hindus, so remains the lost Saraswati River that is said to have flowed through the ancient Indus Valley Harappan civilization. Mythology surrounding the Saraswati was committed to memory and passed on in stories and songs for generation upon generation before being written down in the Vedas. Along the way, Saraswati, too, became a goddess—patron of arts and education.
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Leonard Woolley, the archaeologist digging at Mesopotamia’s Ur for a Genesis-scale flood, once said that “we ought to assume that beneath much that is artificial or incredible, there lurks something of fact.” Woolley was not trying to make history out of legends, he explained. Rather, he was trying to find history within legends. Surely there were truths waiting to be discovered in the greatest rain story of all time.
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Before the nineteenth century, westerners knew the story of the Great Flood only from the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible. The tale is as familiar as it is vengeful: Ten generations since Adam, humankind has become terribly wicked, “for all flesh had corrupted their ways on Earth.” God is sorry to have ever created the place, and decides to wipe out everything and start fresh. But he tips off one imperfect yet pious soul, six-hundred-year-old Noah. “I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights,”
God tells him, “and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.” God goes on to explain how Noah should build a wooden ark and save his family, along with a pair of each living creature. He lets loose the flood in rains from the heavens above and a surge of waters from belowground, until it drowns even the highest mountains. The disaster lingers interminably; in one account for 150 days, in another, a full year. Finally, Noah and his zoo crew float in an eerie, silent devastation until the ark comes to rest in the mountains of Ararat. Noah sends out a raven that never returns, then a dove that comes back with an olive leaf, a sign the waters are receding. Noah builds an altar and makes some burnt offerings to God. At the end of the saga, God promises that, despite our irretrievable evil, he’ll never again set out to destroy Earth and its living creatures, at least not with a flood. Rainbows exist as a sign of this pact: a reminder of “the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.”
In mid-1800s London, a young engraver named George Smith who was enthralled with Noah and other tales of the Old Testament (and also rocked a fabulous Noah beard) became obsessed with the antiquities turning up in the ancient Near East. British archaeologists were digging up stunning artifacts from the deserts of Iraq. Nineveh, flourishing capital of the Assyrian Empire, materialized straight off the pages of Genesis. Archaeologists had found the library of Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria in the sixth century B.C. Smith worked for a firm of bank-note engravers near the British Museum, where cryptographers were trying to piece together and translate thousands of cuneiform tablets and fragments from what was the oldest surviving library in the world. He began spending all his extra time hanging around the museum, shelling out whatever money he had on books to teach himself cuneiform and Assyrian. His instincts for the material impressed the museum’s scholars. They soon gave him a job, essentially piecing together two-thousand-year-old jigsaw puzzles. Smith had to examine and sort through thousands of marked bits and try to match them with their originals. He loved the work so much that he would become furious when the museum had to close due to London’s fogs; it did not yet have artificial lighting.
Smith was “a highly nervous, sensitive man,” according to his museum coworkers. Over a period of weeks in 1872, he was beside himself waiting for one of them to return to work to clean a limestone-like deposit that had solidified on an intriguing corner of tablet.
Only four inches wide, the hunk of clay would change Smith’s life. When the offending material was finally scrubbed off and he could make out the tiny scratches, what he read felt very, very familiar. He wrote of the moment, “my eye caught the statement that the ship rested on the mountains of Nizir, followed by the account of the sending forth of the dove, and its finding no resting-place and returning. I saw at once that I had here discovered a portion at least of the Chaldean account of the Deluge.”
Smith held in his hands an account of the Great Flood written at least a thousand years before the Bible’s first books. (Not to mention centuries before Homer and his heralded launch of the literary canon.) According to a colleague’s written account, Smith set the clay piece on the table, then “jumped up and rushed about the room in a great state of excitement, and, to the astonishment of those present, began to undress himself.”
Smith had discovered number eleven of the twelve chapters in the Epic of Gilgamesh. The story of the legendary Mesopotamian ruler Gilgamesh and his search for immortality is among the world’s earliest surviving works of literature. The piece Smith found describes Gilgamesh’s meeting with Utnapishtim, the trusted adherent forewarned of a plan by the gods to send a great flood across Earth. The telling is near-exact to Genesis: the warning and handpicked survivor; his building a wooden ark and saving “all the beasts and animals of the field”; the landing on a mountain; the dispatch of a swallow, raven, and dove to find land; even a final promise that the gods would never again sink humanity into watery chaos.
The flood tale got around the ancient world. The Babylonian version was known to the Canaanites. Fragments of the story have been found in central Turkey, in the royal library of the Hittites, who are believed to have transmitted it to the Greeks. The stories merge in Greek mythology, where the most powerful god, Zeus, was lord of the sky and the rain. In the Greek version, Zeus becomes so disgusted with humankind that he unleashes a tremendous flood to wipe out almost everybody. Only ark-building Deucalion and his wife, Pyrrha, are saved.
The Greeks pass the allegory to the Romans. Their Jupiter, like the Greeks’ Zeus and the Hindus’ Indra, was king of the gods and also meted out rain; in that role, he was called Jupiter Pluvius. Writing in Rome at the close of the first century B.C., Ovid recounts Jupiter’s disgust with the evil deeds of humans—their contempt for the gods, their violence, their lust for slaughter. He decides to wipe them out, which disappoints his fellow gods because…who will bring incense to their altars? No worries, Jupiter says, he’ll create another race of beings far superior to the first. Jupiter pours on the rain, lets loose the wind, sets the sea god Triton to raise huge waves, and makes the rivers overflow their banks. Most of humanity drowns. The rest starves. By the time Jupiter stops the rain and Triton blows his conch shell to calm the waters, only Deucalion and Pyrrha are alive. They start a new race from stones.
In Hindu lore, Brahma turns into a fish to warn his son Manu—the first man—of worldwide flood. Manu also builds a large boat and gathers seeds from all life. When everything else is wiped out, he makes an offering to the gods, who then produce a beautiful woman, with whom he parents a new race.
For more than a century, the torrent tales from around the globe have sparked endless theories, research expeditions, books, and more than a movie or two. Inspired by Smith’s find and other clues, Leonard Woolley at his Ur excavation in the 1920s was convinced that if he could dig deeply enough through time, he could find tangible evidence of a Genesis-scale flood.
Shoveling into the strata below the Sumerians with their art and metallurgy, Woolley ultimately dug down to the first settlers of Mesopotamia, and the time when Ur was still a tiny village. There, he hit waterborne silt. What was clearly a flood deposit went on for ten continuous feet. It had inundated houses and temples. Woolley believed he had discovered an ancient deluge large enough to have wiped out an entire population.
Woolley’s announcement grabbed the world in newspaper headlines, radio broadcasts, and movie-house newsreels, not to mention church pews. Not only had Woolley unearthed a lost biblical city, but now he had literal proof of one of the most important stories in the Hebrew Bible. His 1929 book, Ur of the Chaldees, became the most widely read book on archaeology ever printed.
Woolley’s great flood discovery lived on in the popular imagination for decades. But scientifically it turned out to be a bust. Subsequent excavations at Ur and in neighboring ancient settlements failed to reveal the same silt layer. After decades of increasingly technical probing, archaeologists determined the Ur flood was localized—perhaps only a single breach in a Euphrates River levee.
Could a local flood have inspired such grand epics? Any flood would feel like the end of the world if your neighbors drowned and your community washed away. In Mesopotamia when torrential rains hit alongside spring snowmelt, the Tigris and Euphrates would burst their banks, drowning the region under hundreds of miles of lakes. Archaeologists say an ancient Sumerian city called Shurrupak (Iraq’s Tell Fara) was laid waste by flood nearly 5,000 years ago. A Babylonian version of Gilgamesh mentions Shurrupak by name. It describes a deluge that wipes out mankind, and a pious king called Ziusudra who overhears from a sympathetic god that the great flood is on its way. Ziusudra builds a huge boat and survives.
To the American geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman, a river flood doesn’t jibe with the drama of the narratives. There would be no warning of disaster, no time to build an ark. For two decades, Ryan and Pitman have built evidence for an actual flood in the Middle East 8,500 years
ago that would have brought a cataclysm worthy of Gilgamesh and Genesis. They make the case that today’s Black Sea was once a smaller and landlocked freshwater lake. Sediment cores and high-resolution imagery of the seafloor reveal once-dry plains. Neolithic people likely settled on the fertile lands to farm and harvest fish. The worldwide climate was still rapidly warming following the last Ice Age, the seas steadily rising. The geologists hypothesize that the oceans rose to a critical point that pushed the Mediterranean Sea through the narrow Bosporus Strait, which divides modern Turkey from Europe—with a daily force perhaps two hundred times greater than Niagara Falls. The waters would have risen ominously day after day and week after week. As villagers realized this was not the beneficent annual flooding that helped seed their crops—but a sea of death—they would have torn apart their homes and sheds to obtain beams and braces for makeshift boats to flee.
Following in Ryan and Pitman’s footsteps, a team of scientists and engineers led by the oceanographer Robert Ballard, best known for finding the sunken ocean liner Titanic in 1985, began to map the Black Sea floor in search of a lost settlement. Remote underwater vehicles beamed up sonar images revealing both the plains and the shoreline of the ancient lake. Yet so far, no one has been able to find Noah’s neighborhood—just some extinct freshwater shells and well-preserved shipwrecks at the bottom of a lonely sea.
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Skeptics use the great climate swings of Earth’s history—the civilization-crushing droughts and whatever epic deluge may have inspired our flood myths—to argue that the heat-trapping gases of modern life are not to blame for today’s global warming and the rise of extreme rains, storms, and floods. In fact, our past climate swings—and the flood myths themselves—give us all the more reason to overcome our differences and confront a new threat with the beams and braces of human ingenuity. The wisdom in the flood stories surely involves heeding the forewarnings from the skies; Noah and our other ark-building heroes have something to tell us about coming together to ride out stormier times. It is what we’ve done for thousands of years, rain unifying humanity from the deserts to the seas.