But Noah and his faithful workmen stuck to their job.They cut down the mighty cypress trees and laid the keel and built the sides and covered them with pitch,that the hold might be dry.When the third deck had been finished,a roof was built.It was made of heavy timber,to withstand the violence of the rain that was to pour down upon this wicked earth.
Then Noah and his household,his three sons and their wives,made ready for the voyage.They went into the fields and into the mountains and gathered all the animals they could find that they might have beasts for food and for sacrifices when they should return to dry land.
A whole week they hunted.And then the Ark (for so the ship was called)was full of the noise of strange creatures who did not like their cramped quarters and who bit at the bars of their cages.The fish,of course,were not taken.They could look after themselves.
On the evening of the seventh day,Noah and his family went on board.They pulled in the gang plank and closed the door.
Late that night,it began to rain.It rained for forty nights and for forty days.At the end of this time,the whole earth was covered with water,and Noah and his fellow travellers in the Ark were the only living ones to survive this terrible deluge.
Then,however,Jehovah had mercy.A violent wind swept the clouds away.Once more the rays of the sun rested upon the turbulent waves as they had done when the world was first created.
Carefully Noah opened a window and peered out.But his ship floated peacefully in the midst of an endless ocean and no land was in sight.
Noah sent out a raven,but the bird came back.Next he sent out a pigeon.Pigeons can fly longer than almost any other bird,but the poor thing could not find a single branch upon which to rest its feet,and it came back to the Ark and Noah took it and put it back into its cage.
He waited a week,and once more he set the pigeon free.It was gone all day,but in the evening,it returned with a freshly plucked olive leaf in its beak.Apparently,the waters were receding.
Another week went by before Noah released the pigeon for the third time.It did not return,and this was a good sign.Soon afterwards,a sudden bump told Noah that his vessel had struck ground.The Ark had landed on top of Mount Ararat,in the country which is now called Armenia.
The next day Noah went ashore.At once he took some stones and built an altar and killed a number of beasts and birds and made a sacrifice.And behold,the sky was bright with the colours of a mighty rainbow.It was a sign of Jehovah to his faithful servant.It was a promise of future happiness.
Then Noah and his sons,Shem,Ham and Japheth,and their wives,went forth and once more they became farmers and shepherds and lived peacefully among their children and their flocks.
But it is very doubtful whether the danger through which they had just passed had taught them a lesson.For it happened that Noah,who possessed a vineyard,had made himself a very pleasant wine,and when he had partaken thereof,more than was wise,he became drunken,and behaved after the fashion of such people.
Two of his sons felt sorry for their old father,and were quite decent about it.But the third one,called Ham,thought it a great joke and laughed loudly,and was not nice at all.
When Noah woke up from his sleep,he was exceedingly angry and he drove Ham away from his house,and the Jews believed that he went to Africa and became the first ancestor of the Negro race,for which they felt a great and most unjust contempt.
Thereafter,we don't hear much about Noah.One of his descendants,called Nimrod,achieved fame as a hunter,but the Bible does not tell what became of Shem and Japheth.
Their sons,however,did something which greatly displeased Jehovah.For a while,so it seems,they moved into the valley of the Euphrates,where afterwards the city of Babylon was built.They liked to live in this fertile region and they decided to build a very high tower which should serve as a rallying point to all the tribes of their own race.They baked bricks and they laid the foundations for a huge structure.
But Jehovah did not want them to remain for ever in one spot.The whole world had to be populated,not just one little valley.
While the people were busy as bees upon their Babylonian tower,Jehovah suddenly made them all speak different dialects.They forgot their own common tongue and a babble of voices arose on the scaffolding.
You cannot build a house when the workmen and the foremen and the architects suddenly begin to speak Chinese and Dutch and Russian and Polynesian.So the people gave up the idea of a single nation,clustered around the feet of a single tower,and within a short time they had spread to the uttermost corners of the earth.
This,in a few words,is the story of the beginning of the world.From now on,however,we shall only relate the adventures of the race men called the Jews.