At the conclusion of the burnt offering, God makes a covenant with Noah. The Deity seems to have felt that the lack of an explicit instruction manual for the practice of the religion of the prytaneum was one reason for mankind’s second fall. So God gives Noah that manual: the seven Noachic commandments. As Newton writes in the “Irenicum”:
All nations were originally [from the Flood on] of the Religion comprehended in the Precepts of the sons of Noah, the chief of which were to have one God, & not to alienate his worship, nor profane his name; to abstain from murder, theft, fornication, & all injuries; not to feed on the flesh or drink the blood of a living animal, but to be merciful even to bruit beasts; & to set up Courts of justice in all cities & societies for putting these laws in execution.22
Centuries later, God would introduce three more commandments; they would appear, along with the first seven, on the two tablets that Moses brought down with him from Mount Sinai. On Mount Ararat, God has given to Noah an Ur- or proto-Judaism.
Scholars today are almost certain now that Newton embraced the Stoic concept of cycles or vast rhythms affecting the totality of things. Plato taught that the physical universe and everything in it is organic and mortal, moving through growth to their decay and final destruction by fire or water. A priest tells Solon in the Timaeus, “There have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water. . . . [There is a tradition of] a great conflagration of things upon the earth, which occurs after long intervals [of time]. . . .”23
The notion of a succession of worlds haunts us still. The physicist Stephen Hawking told the audience at the BBC’s annual Reith lectures that “although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next thousand or ten thousand years. . . . By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race.24
The notion has been cropping up in the creative arts with increasing frequency. In the Matthew McConaughey film Interstellar (2014), the premise is that “Earth’s future has been riddled by disasters, famines, and droughts. There is only one way to ensure mankind’s survival: inter-stellar travel. A newly discovered wormhole in the far reaches of the solar system allows a team of astronauts to go where no man has gone before, to a planet that may have the right environment to sustain human life.”25
When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide captivated readers in the early thirties. Here is the plot: “A runaway planet hurtles toward the earth. As it draws near, massive tidal waves, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions wrack our planet, devastating continents, drowning cities, and wiping out millions. In central North America, a team of scientists race to build a spacecraft powerful enough to escape the doomed earth. Their greatest threat, they soon discover, comes not from the skies but from other humans.”26 But they survive their fellow men. And, since it so happens that a twin Earthlike planet accompanies the planet that is on target to strike the Earth, the escapees, now aboard their spaceship, are able to land on that planet and save the human race. (In his In the Days of the Comet, H. G. Wells had nicely finessed the problem. Mankind does not transition from one planet to another. Instead, a green gas from a passing comet transforms men’s minds, erasing negative thoughts and making mankind entirely good. Our species will transform the planet in accordance with its thoughts, and thus the transition will occur within our planet itself.)
Newton believed that emigrating from our world to a new one would be the last act before the curtain of the Apocalypse crashed down. He writes:
then doth this present world perish by fire & the heavens pass away with a great noise, & the elements (the Gold, Silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble, as Paul expresseth it) melt with fervent heat, & then the Saints according to God’s promise look for new heavens & a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. For as Noah was saved out of the waters, so in the judgment by fire a remnant may be preserved to replenish the earth a second time.27
The operative word is “remnant.” Newton sometimes uses it in the sense of an individual, one of “a few scattered persons which God had chosen, such as without being led by interest, education, or humane authorities, can set themselves sincerely & earnestly to search after truth.”28 The superlative human being could be a great prophet or the bringer of a wholly new body of knowledge to mankind. “Ezekiel, his [Daniel’s] contemporary, in the nineteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar, spake thus of him to the King of Tyre: Behold, saith he, thou art wiser than Daniel, there is no secret that they can hide from thee, Ezek. xxviii. 3. And the same Ezekiel, in another place, joins Daniel with Noah and Job, as most high in the favour of God, Ezek. Xiv. 14, 16, 18, 20.”29
To ferry a remnant of mankind across the river of space required a very great leader, and Newton was fascinated by Noah because he regarded him as being such a leader. Did Newton feel this about himself? Westfall writes: “There is no doubt that Newton placed himself among the select few. Some of his descriptions of the remnant have the poignancy of personal experience. . . . Isolated in his chambers from the hedonism and triviality of Restoration Cambridge, Newton may have wondered if he was another Elijah, like the first almost the only true believer left.”30 A Dead Sea scroll unearthed near Qumran in 1947 would have reassured Newton of the greatness of Noah and of his status as one of the remnant. First translated in 1967, called the Genesis Apocryphon, it tells the story of the first day of Noah’s life.
We don’t know who wrote the scroll, but the fictional narrator is sometimes given as Noah’s father, Lamech. We’e told that Noah’s nature was encoded in his name, that name meaning “rest.” The Genesis Apocryphon quotes Genesis 5:29, when Lamech says, “This name shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground which the Lord hath cursed.” Lamech believed the word “rest” meant “respite from labor.”
Old Testament scholars Aryeh Amihay and Daniel A. Machiela believe the word actually means “remnant” or “leftover,” because Noah, in bringing the ark through the flood, made himself “simultaneously a savior and a survivor, or remnant.” They quote Ezekiel 14:12–20, which states that Noah is someone “who would be saved from any plague or calamity that God would bring on the earth.” They cite the apocryphal Book of Enoch, which asserts that Noah “will survive the flood and ‘be your remnant, from whom you will find rest.’”31
Noah is, then, the great hero who will save mankind. One of the hallmarks of the hero is that he or she displays great strength at a very early age. As a baby Hercules strangled two snakes in his crib. Frontiersman Davie Crockett “kilt him a bear when he was only three.” Britain’s King Arthur pulled the sword Excalibur out of a stone, a feat no one else could accomplish, when he was just eleven. Jesus Christ bested the temple priests in religious debate when he was twelve.
Noah outdoes all of these great heroes. He is born able to speak. His first conversation, on the first day of his life, is with God. Amihay and Machiela comment:
Unlike other animals, who learn to stand just hours after their birth, the human newborn takes hours to master the human traits of standing upright, walking, and speaking. In our texts, however, Noah is an astounding exception. His instantaneous speech marks him as out-standing, and the fact that his first words are addressed to the Lord of righteousness marks him as a wise and prophetic individual.32
Noah is born with a face that radiates light. His newborn body is “whiter than snow and redder than a rose; his hair was all white and like white wool and curly.”33 Amihay and Machiela believe that red and white were the second-century BC equivalent of black and white, and that these extremes of coloration of Noah’s body express “the notion of good and evil residing together”34 within him. At birth Noah already encompasses the extremes of human experience.
He is so amazing that his father, Lamech, can’t believe this is really his
biological son. He accuses Batenosh, his wife, of having conceived Noah by a “watcher,” one of the two hundred angels or “sons of God” who (Gen. 6:1–4; 1 Enoch) descended to Earth to couple with the “daughters of men.”*29
With Batenosh’s anguished reply to Lamech, we seem to feel on our cheeks the hot breath of a sexuality four thousand years old. Lamech narrates: “Then Batenosh my wife spoke with me very harshly, and wept / And she said, ‘O my brother and my husband, you yourself should [believe me], remembering my pleasure . . . / in the heat of the moment, and my panting breath! Now I am telling you everything truthfully.’”35
But Lamech doesn’t believe her and rushes off to consult with his father, Methuselah (the same Methuselah who will live to be 969 years old). Methuselah doesn’t believe her either and rushes off to consult with his own father, Enoch. Professors Amihay and Machiela explain that Enoch “quells all fear regarding Noah and foretells the child’s key role in the post-deluge reestablishment of righteousness upon the earth. . . . Enoch predicts one of the activities that Noah will undertake: ‘He is the one who will divide the entire earth’ [between his three sons and their progeny].”36
Enoch gives Lamech a birthday present for Noah (1 Enoch 108:1): a special book of knowledge that includes “the secret of the Ibbur.” Some say this is the secret of how to put together a combined solar and lunar calendar”; others that it’s the secret of how “Great Souls” can temporarily merge with and light up worthy mortals in the furtherance of a great end.37
A prodigy of prodigies, Noah must have been a young man of overwhelming charisma and an old man of prodigious presence. Nonetheless, the Flood trip seems to have exhausted him, and once in the new world he has that episode of drunkenness about which so much has been written.
But Noah gets his second wind and advances down the slopes of Mount Ararat with his family to undertake the extraordinary task of repopulating the world. There were few thinkers in the seventeenth century who did not believe that Noah had actually done this, and a good many of them tried to figure out the various permutations and combinations of sons and grandsons and great-grandsons that would do the trick. (See chapter 12, “Deconstructing Time.”)
And then Noah dies—perhaps. From here on the Noah story goes off in two different directions. The first would have interested Newton not at all; the second would have engaged him deeply. In the first story, God confers immortality upon Noah. This may be an echo of the Gilgamesh flood story, where the gods reward the Sumerian Noah Utnapastim by making him immortal.
But Noah doesn’t take easily to his immortality. He wanders through the world like the Wandering Jew, forlorn and alone, perhaps noting with growing sadness as the centuries go by that mankind is backsliding once again, building up to a new crisis of sin and painful redemption. (Some scholars believe he is the mysterious white-bearded old man who appears briefly in the “Pardoner’s Tale” of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.*30)
In the second version of Noah’s post-ark existence he becomes more than immortal; he beomes the father of the gods and, later on, he becomes a planet.
When Noah and his family came down from the mountain to begin the task of repopulating the world, we can only assume that they were surrounded by the din and splattering mud of thousands of galloping animals while myriad flocks of screeching birds swept overhead and crawling creatures slithered between their legs as the living cargo that Noah had brought with him on the ark enthusiastically began its own work of repopulation.
But we mustn’t make fun of this first family of refugees, because, for Newton and his contemporaries, to witness the descent of Noah and his family from the heights of Ararat was to witness the birth of the gods. This first family of the post-Flood era was a kind of template, the proto-pantheon or Ur-pantheon of all the pantheons of gods that would one day come to populate the universe of polytheism.
Richard Westfall explains:
Common characteristics distinguished the corresponding gods of all ancient peoples. All peoples worshiped one god whom they took to be the ancestor of the rest. They described him as an old and morose man and associated him with time and with the sea. Clearly, Noah furnished the original model of the god called (among other names) Saturn and Janus. Like Noah, Saturn had three sons. Every people had a god whom they depicted as a mature man, the god they held most in honor. They had translated Ham into Zeus, Jupiter, Hammon, and others. All worshiped a voluptuous woman variously named Aphrodite, Venus, Astarte, et alia, originally a daughter of Ham. The histories of the gods of one people frequently became confused with those of another, and people invented fables which confounded the origins of the gods by claiming the gods of others for their own.38
We find ourselves in the realm of euhemerism. Euhemerus (331–251 BC) was a Greek mythographer, probably born in Sicily, who, one day while sojourning as a guest at the palace of King Cassander of Macedonia, had a eureka idea. He had been thinking about Alexander the Great (356–324 BC), who had conquered most of the known world by the time he was thirty and thereafter had insisted on being worshipped as a god. So prodigious were Alexander’s accomplishments that his soldiers acquiesced. Soon many of his subjects were worshipping him as a god. This didn’t end with Alexander’s death.
But of course Alexander the Great was not a god, mused Euhemerus. Then his eyes wandered over the many marble statues of gods like Aphrodite and Hermes and Zeus that bedecked the niches of the walls of Cassander’s palace and the idea occurred to him: Were they too never gods? Were they merely mortal men and women who were deified because they had done good service to their country?
This idea wasn’t new in the fourth century BC. But Euhemerus decided to take possession of it. He wrote a book, The Sacred Scripture, in which the narrator stumbles on an unknown temple on an imaginary island called Panchaea. He enters and sees before him a golden pillar inscribed with a registry of the births and deaths of the gods, including Zeus, who is listed as king of Crete. The narrator has discovered that the gods were once mere human beings. He leaves Panchaea to take this knowledge to the world.
Most readers thought The Sacred Scripture was fact, not fiction. Euhemerus had managed to popularize his idea, and it was dubbed euhemerism. Two thousand years later, it was the lens through which Newton and his colleagues viewed both mythical personages and mythical places.*31
Newton assembled numerous references to Noah as the god Saturn.
He wrote:
Saturn because of his great age is made the God of time. He was accounted the author of husbandry [cultivation of plants or livestock/farming/agriculture] and in token thereof carries a scythe. Drunkenness was attributed to him and in memory thereof the Saturnalia were instituted. He was painted by the Egyptians with eyes before and behind [an allusion to Noah’s looking backward to the antediluvian age and forward to the post-Flood age] and reputed the justest of men and the father of truth. And in all these respects he agrees accurately with Noah.39
And in another text:
. . . The Egyptians passed down the tradition that the most ancient of the Gods reigned for a space of one thousand two hundred years and the later ones not less than three hundred years. And such longevity only Noah with his sons and grandsons achieved. Saturn and Rhea with the other Gods of that time are said by Philosophers and Poets to have sprung from Ocean. That is why the Egyptians also depicted their Gods in a boat on the waters. †440
Not only did Noah become the god Saturn, but he also became the god Janus, and Janus and Saturn sometimes became one and the same god. Janus was the Roman god of beginnings and endings, arrivals and departures, transitions, gates, doors, doorways, and passages. Janua is the Latin word for “door,” and janitor is the Latin word for “doorkeeper” (hence our word janitor). Open a door and observe the two doorknobs: one faces out and the other faces in. Newton believed the peoples of the ancient world associated this backward- and forward-looking god with Noah standing on Mount Ararat. He noted that “a coin was struck in Italy a
t one time with the double face of Janus on one side and a ship on the other. These things clearly refer to the flood.”41
Moreover, Janus
was depicted by the Egyptians with eyes before and behind, as if he had seen both before the flood and after. . . . Saturn was the God of time; and in the Orphic writings he is called “father of all” and “ruler of created things” and his wife Rhea is “Mother of gods and mortal men.” . . . Janus too was God of the year and of time and . . . he is called the Sower of things and the source of the Gods; and he was depicted with two faces. All this can be understood only of Noah, a man long-lived beyond all men, and father of all mortals.42
It would be several generations before the pantheons of gods evolve from Noah’s family. First, Noah’s sons had to spread out from Mount Ararat, each bearing a portion of the sacred fire and each founding a different nation. They then established the religion of the prytaneum in their nations and practiced the seven Noachic precepts.
Noah’s son Shem had originally founded Assyria, then been driven out by his nephew Nimrod. He had ruled areas bordering Egypt. Shem’s son Cush founded Egypt, and continued his grandfather’s worship of the Noachic God whom Newton described as “all eye, all ear, all brain, all arm, all power to perceive, to understand, and to act; but in a manner not at all human, in a manner not at all corporeal.”
Not long after Cush founded Egypt, an event took place that looms large in Newton’s history of the corruption of the soul of man suddenly and that registers a seismic shock in the religious consciousness of mankind. This was the birth of that form of idolatry called polytheism. It seems that it’s difficult for mankind to worship something that it can’t see or hear or smell or taste or touch. The ancient Egyptians began to take the symbols of religion for the substance. Newton writes: “The frame of the heavens consisting of Sun, Moon and Stars being represented in the Prytanea as the real temple of the Deity, men were led by degrees to pay a veneration to these sensible objects, and began at length to worship them as the visible seals of divinity.”43
The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton Page 22
