Noah’s Ark: The Real Story
The Rev. Dr. Erik E. Sandstrom
T
he latest and most-fantastic-yet movie depicting the story of Noah and the
Ark opened in U.S. theatres in late March. There have been a number of
such movies in the past. In 2009 the movie 2012 depicted the final end by flood
from melting icecaps, where thousands of people survived by building similar
but modern, motorized, self-contained arks – in the Himalayas!
One of the hallmarks of being New Church is knowing that the story of
Noah’s Ark is not to be taken literally. Searches for the ark in Turkey’s Mt. Ararat
region are countless, as are the claims of discovery. What actually happened,
narrated within the story of Noah, is totally different, but even more exciting.
The people among whom the flood actually took place were not able to
record their own story while it was happening. Some type of writing probably
did exist, since the first written records involved events leading up to the flood,
recorded by a group of people called Cain.
The first thing to get used to in reading the first 11 chapters of Genesis –
the creation, Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, Noah and the
Flood, the Tower of Babel – is that all names were groups of people, or a trend
of the most ancient church, or religion, which could be identified by a name.
“Cain” meant those who emphasize faith instead of charity. In the process the
“mark” put on Cain lest he be slain means that they preserved the wisdom of
the first or most ancient church. (Arcana Coelestia 609) Their record consisted
mainly of a list of correspondences.
This first step taken to an actually written Word of God probably was
recorded on animal skins or clay tablets, but has been totally lost – at least to
date. Or, we just would never recognize it by looking at it. In any case, as the
church declined further, and perception became ever more and more general
(Ibid. 508, 523), a later group of people systematized these earlier recordings
into doctrine. It was a manuscript, being the “internal sense” of the Word,
i.e. doctrines formed from correspondences. What everything means in the
internal sense, when taken together, forms doctrine. (Ibid. 10400.3)
This later group of people are meant by Enoch: “Enoch walked with God.
And he was no more, for God took him.” (Genesis 5.24) Enoch copied down
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