Noah's Ark
According to the Book of Genesis in the Bible, things went on more
or less peacefully for a long time after Cain and
Abel, and Seth's children and grandchildren populated the earth
so that there were people all over the place. But these people got to
be bad, and did not live the way God wanted them to, and so He decided
to kill them all. But there was one good man, Noah, and so God decided
to save him and just kill all the others. He told Noah to build an enormous
boat, and inside it put his stuff and two of each kind of animal,
a girl one and a boy one, and then he and his wife and his sons and
their wives should all get in. So Noah did that, and then God sent a
huge flood which wiped out every person on earth except Noah and his
family, and all the houses and animals and everything as well. It rained
for forty days! That's more than a month!
When the flood was over, Noah and his wife and his sons and their wives
got out of the boat and began a new society that would listen more to
what God wanted. God set a rainbow in the sky as a sign that he would
never send such a flood again.
Though here is a story that didn't make it into the Child's Bible: after Noah got off the Ark, he planted grapes, and when the grapes were finally ripe (which must have been years later), he made wine with some of them, and he got drunk. He went into his tent and he fell asleep on his bed, naked and drunk.
When his youngest son Ham came to get him, he found him there, and he went and told his brothers that Dad was drunk and naked, but Noah's older sons were sorry for Noah and covered him up, walking backwards so they wouldn't see their dad naked, which God said was the right thing to do (Genesis 9).
Most ancient cultures have a story about a big flood. Compare the Sumerian story and the Greek story. Archaeology suggests that there really was some sort of terrible flood in Mesopotamia about this time (say about 3000 BC), though not as big as the story says.
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(a project)
The part about Noah getting drunk is another example of the fights between nomads and farmers: wine is something only farmers have, so mainly farmers drink it. You have to be settled somewhere to grow grapes for wine, and it takes years between when you plant the grapevines and when they yield any decent grapes. So nomads, like the Jews, tend to think of wine as an evil farmer's thing, which gets decent people in trouble.
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