by
Damien Mackey
Here I just want to pick up that point as raised above by a reader (letter of 15/01/11): “I always read Catherine Emmerich with some suspicion as there are too many discrepancies with the Bible (e.g. the number of people in the [Ark])...”.
Indeed, whereas the Bible (Old and New Testaments alike) seems to be perfectly clear that the number of persons aboard the vessel was eight, the German mystic - though quite aware of this - was however emphatic that she had seen many more persons than this on board, over one hundred people in the ark. Here is what she has claimed on the matter (The Life of Jesus Christ and Biblical Revelations, “Noe and His Posterity”):
There were over one hundred people in the ark, and they were necessary to give daily food to the animals and to clean after them. I must say, for I always see it so, that Sem’s, Cham’s [Ham’s] and Japhet’s children all went into the ark. There were many little boys and girls in it, in fact all of Noe’s [Noah’s] family that were good. Holy Scripture mentions only three of Adam’s children, Cain, Abel, and Seth; and yet I see many others among them, and I always see them in pairs, boys and girls. And so, too, in I Peter 3:20, only eight souls are mentioned as saved in the ark; viz., the four ancestral couples by whom, after the Deluge, the earth was to be peopled.
We might recall from a previous MATRIX that Blessed Anne Catherine had also apparently contradicted the literal meaning of the Book of Job, by saying that the holy man’s trials were not in immediate succession, but were separated, the one from the other, by some years. Traditionally (e.g. St. Thomas Aquinas) it has been considered that the repetitive verse: “While he was still speaking, another [messenger] came and said ...” (Job 1:16, 17, 18), was meant to be taken literally. But what Anne Catherine has said is, I think, by far the more reasonable. [Though the people of Japan at present might argue and insist that three-fold disasters can occur in very quick succession: earthquake and aftershocks; tsunami; and radiation leaks]. What do our readers say?
The Hebrew of: “While he was still speaking, another came and said ...” (NRSV Catholic Edition) is (transliterated) ‘od zeh medabbayr vezeh ba vayyomar ..., which does have a continuous sense of while this was still spoken (reported), and so can probably correspond, basically, to Anne Catherine’s sense as thus explained by her:
Although in the Book of Job this narrative is given very differently, yet many of Job’s own words are therein recorded. I think I could distinguish them all. Where ... the servants came quickly one after another to Job with news of his losses, it must be remarked that the words: “As he still spoke of it,” signify, “And while the last calamity was not yet effaced from the mind of men”, etc.
This may be especially so since zeh, the subject of the Hebrew verb medabbayr (a piel active participle), often means just ‘this’ and is not necessarily therefore masculine (e.g. referring to Job’s male messenger, “he”).
Now, similarly, I think that there are also strong, common-sensed-based reasons to think that Anne Catherine’s interpretation of the biblical ‘eight’, backed by her unique visions, is also the more likely; that these are to be considered the eight ancestral people, her four ancestral couples, from whom all humanity arose, including those many younger ones aboard the Ark. It is difficult to imagine that all of the children of the world were then so corrupt as to need to be wiped out. We recall that one of the reasons why God had spared Nineveh was because of the many children therein (at least according to some translations of Jonah 4:11). There are also the practical reasons of the need for many hands on deck in such a large vessel laden with so many animals, to which Anne Catherine (of farming background) refers.
That ‘creationist’ image of a ‘Queen Mary’-sized vessel with every single animal type aboard (sometimes including dinosaurs), and with only eight persons to feed and care for them and to clean up the appalling mess - a scenario that has delighted Professor Ian Plimer (Telling Lies For God), and justifiably so, I think - is nothing like the image that Anne Catherine portrays (far closer to Plimer’s own reconstruction of the Flood & Ark, incidentally). Genetics should be able to seal the matter scientifically.
This view of many more than eight on board also answers the query of one MATRIX reader who has wondered how a mere eight persons, living as recently as the early 3rd millennium BC, could manage to have generated the millions of beings who arose in the world not that very long afterwards. Readers’ opinions are also invited on this!
How does the Ice Age fit into biblical history?
Taken from “Dancing From Genesis” blog:
How does the Ice Age fit into biblical history? It fits very nicely, since the fountains of the deep of Noah’s Flood, which caused a much warmer-than-today ocean in the Flood’s aftermath, is the only way one can explain the cause of the Ice Age, afterall, greater evaporation is needed for the dense cloudcover for an Ice Age, and geothermally heated ocean water at that, because global warming of the ocean’s surface would cause more evaporation for more clouds, but those clouds would cool any global warming back down, a negative feedback mechanism, so the Ice Age, necessarily, was caused by geothermally heated ocean water, obviously from Noah’s Flood (see the free ebook download of my first book Old Earth? Why Not!)
And this Ice Age in the 2300 B.C. until 1500 B.C. timeframe is corroborated by hundreds of bronze age megalithic ruins which were submerged when the Ice Age ended (see category Submerged Ancient Ruins), and by the fact that there was a huge drying to desert in the middle latitudes, beginning circa 1500 B.C., which now leaves ruins of sophisticated bronze age cities in the middle of seas of desert sand, cities obviously built during the Ice Age, when it rained much more in the Middle East, Egypt, and other middle latitude regions, while the ice age snowfall in the extreme latitudes and high elevations raged on from that dense cloudcover caused by the warmer ocean in the aftermath of Noah’s Flood.
