Forty Days: Neima's Ark, Book One

FORTY DAYS

Neima’s Ark: Book
One

by

Stephanie Parent

C
opyright © 2013 by Stephanie Parent

Image c
opyright © 2013 by Najla Qamber Designs

All rights reserved. This
book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any
manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the
publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book
review.

This book is a work of
fiction and any resemblance to any person, living or dead, any
place, events or occurrences, is strictly coincidental. The
characters and story lines are created from the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously.

Many cultural traditions include a
flood myth in which a deity or deities send a great flood to
destroy the earth and all humankind; the biblical story of Noah and
the Ark is one of the most famous of these stories. While the tale
of Noah’s Ark is, at its heart, a metaphorical one, I have chosen
to retell the story as realistically as possible.

Most biblical scholars agree that the
flood would have taken place around 2300 BCE, during the Early
Bronze Age. While there is less agreement about the location of
Noah and his family prior to the flood, I have chosen to set the
story in what is now Turkey—specifically, the region of Turkey
known as Eastern Anatolia—for two reasons. First, according to the
Bible, the Ark came to rest on the “mountains of Ararat,” which
many scholars believe to refer to Mount Ararat, a dormant volcanic
cone located in Eastern Anatolia. In addition, two of the rivers
described in the Bible as flowing out of Eden, the Tigris and
Euphrates, have their source in Eastern Anatolia. Therefore, it’s
reasonable to assume that some of Adam and Eve’s descendants,
including Noah, might have settled in the region.

In my story, both Noah and his son
Shem are bronze smiths; as bronze tools were essential to the
people’s livelihood during the Bronze Age, Noah and Shem’s
profession would have earned them a powerful status in their
village. Readers may also be interested to learn that early bronze
smiths worked with an alloy of copper and arsenic rather than
copper and tin, and over time, many smiths developed arsenic
poisoning. Arsenic poisoning can cause both physical tremors like
the ones Noah experiences in his hands, and mental confusion and
delirium.

Readers might also wonder why Noah and
his family don’t observe Jewish traditions such as honoring the
Sabbath and following kosher dietary laws. Most religious scholars
date the origin of Judaism to around 1800 BCE, when Abraham
denounced the worship of idols; a more organized version of Judaism
developed around 1300 BCE, when Moses received the Ten
Commandments. My heroine Neima and the rest of her village, living
around 2300 BCE, would most likely have practiced some form of
multi-god and goddess worship. Archaeological excavations of Bronze
Age Turkish sites such as Alacahӧyϋk have uncovered goddess figures
and deer and bull figurines that may have represented deities.
Noah’s conviction that only one God existed would probably have
seemed strange and unseemly to Neima and her family. Overall, as I
was most interested in the human relationships behind the flood
story, I chose not to focus on Neima’s and the other villagers’
religious beliefs before the flood arrived.

Readers may also have questions about
the animal species that are and aren’t present on the ark. Working
on the assumption that Noah would have believed the animals he knew
of to comprise all the species in the world—or at least the only
ones he could reasonably get hold of—I chose to include only
animals native to Turkey on the ark. As a result there are no
African animals such as zebras, giraffes, hippos, rhinos, and
monkeys on my version of the ark. A more well-traveled trader, like
the one Neima befriends, might have seen the rhinoceroses and
monkeys he describes to her in India or even Africa. And to answer
the many horse, dog and cat-loving readers who might be wondering
why those animals aren’t on the ark: while these animals may have
been domesticated prior to or during the Bronze Age in various
parts of the world, I could find no definitive evidence that they
existed in Turkey around 2300 BCE, so I chose not to include them.
Smaller wildcats such as the lynx, however, do appear on the ark in
my novel.

While I’ve done my best to
root my novel within a realistic historical framework,
Neima’s Ark
is
ultimately a work of imagination. All errors are my own.

Nemzar

Noah

Nahala

Shem

Zeda

Ham

Arisi

Japheth

Neima

Kenaan

Shai