A side from the stories of Noah and Jonah, two chapters of Ezekiel, and a handful of passages in the Psalms and Job, sailors receive very little notice in the Old Testament. But in The Children of Noah: Jewish Seafaring in Ancient Times, Raphael Patai contends that sea travel was no rarity for the Children of Israel. Rather, once they gained access to the coast, the Hebrews “learned to use the sea as a path to other lands in a manner no different from that of other circum-Mediterranean cultures.”
Raphael Patai, who died in 1996, was an anthropologist, a Talmudic scholar, and an ordained rabbi who wrote more than thirty books — large, definitive studies with such titles as Man and Temple in Ancient Jewish Myth and Ritual, The Kingdom of Fordan, The Messiah Texts, and The Jewish Alchemists. In Gates to the Old City he compiled a major compendium of Jewish legends, while his Hebrew Goddess, a scholarly investigation of the persistence of the mother goddess in Talmudic and cabalistic guises, informed Robert Graves’s more widely known study, The White Goddess. (Graves and Patai subsequently collaborated on a book about Hebrew myths.)
Unlike much scholarship, Raphael Patai’s books are modest, at least in demeanor, putting the material of their subject ahead of ideas about that material. Patai’s method of asking how things were actually done is thoroughly Talmudic, but his technique of seeking answers from outside Israel is not so usual. In his chapter on boatbuilding in The Children of Noah, for example, he remarks that the practice of shading the cockpit of a vessel with a wattle canopy survives to this day in southeast Asia.
Patai’s work always turns on the idea that Jews — the People Apart — never succeeded in living entirely apart. Israel’s laws, rituals, kinship systems, and trade practices are not unrelated to those of surrounding nations.
Rejecting the incomplete historical picture of ancient Jews as a land-locked people, The Children of Noah assembles data from a wide variety of Near Eastern, Jewish, and Hellenic sources. In the ancient Babylonian epic Gilgamesh, for example, the god Ea gives Utnapishtim directions to build a boat in the shape of a huge cube, 120 cubits — at approximately a foot and a half to the cubit — in each direction. In Chapter Six of Genesis, Noah also receives instruction from the divine architect:
Make thee an Ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the Ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch. And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the Ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits. A window shalt thou make to the Ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above; and the door of the Ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it.
Scripture readers have always wondered what the Ark actually looked like. The 1560 Geneva Bible included a line engraving of Noah’s flood, complete with rain pouring from the clouds and the rising sea filled with the supplicating arms of the drowning. The engraving shows the Ark itself as a three-story rectangle — more bargelike than the great Babylonian cube and not so shipshape as the Ark shown in the immensely popular 1942 children’s version, Picture Stories from the Bible, where it looks like a double-ended dory with a deal cabin plonked on deck.
Patai reasons that the ratio between height, length, and width of Noah’s Ark corresponds to ancient war galleys. He reproduces pictures of a Roman galley from a relief in the Vatican, a sailing ship on a Hebrew seal from around the seventh century, a sketch of a ship from catacombs near Haifa, and a sketch of a ship from a city southwest of Jerusalem in the third century. While admitting that the dimensions of the biblical Ark — 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, 45 feet high — may have been exaggerated in order to be equal to its task of transporting all those animals, Patai notes that Utnapishtim’s ark was reported by Berosus, a Babylonian historian, to be a hundred yards long and four hundred yards wide.
It’s not everyone who can spend a lifetime with the kinds of questions Patai asks. What is gopher wood? — Lebanese cedar, he tells us. Pitch? — Bitumen. What was the window (tzohar) in the Ark? (A question that baffled the rabbis, who thought it might be an illuminating pearl hung in the Ark.) What about the animals’ manure? Accommodations? Navigation?
But almost everyone will find fascinating the answers Patai provides. Noah’s dove, sent three times to find dry land after the rain stopped, does the work assigned to a dove, a swallow, and a raven in Gilgamesh. Patai records that ancient Hindu merchants similarly used “shore-sighting birds” to locate land on overseas voyages. So did the sailors of first-century Ceylon, according to Pliny, because they were not able to steer by the stars.
As in any work that is at heart a catalogue, this book affords most pleasure in the details. Patai finds information on ships’ crews in Isaiah, Proverbs, and the New Testament’s Acts of the Apostles. Maritime trade practices are adduced from verses in the Torah and the Book of Judges. Life on the high seas is depicted in a Talmudic commentary on First Kings. A slight hint of naval warfare appears in biblical sources, but Josephus gives a close account of the catastrophic encounter between the Jewish fleet and Vespasian’s navy.
A chapter on laws of the sea and rivers details commercial arrangements as well as efforts to adapt Jewish ritual requirements to the sailor’s life. Another chapter collects every mention of ships and the sea in the Old Testament and the Talmud — all the way down to such minor similes as, “Much Torah did I learn, and yet I did not subtract from [the learning of] my masters even as much as a dog licking from the sea,” and “The beauty of the waves was deemed of a higher order than that of golden decorations.”
In a chapter of sea legends and sailors’ tales, Patai recalls the biblical stories of the sea resisting the creation, of Leviathan and other sea monsters. In the Talmud’s account, the sea spares the righteous, gives and takes, threatens and punishes, converts idolaters, all in a spirit easily recognized from folk tales.
The penultimate chapter outlining Red Sea and Mediterranean ports serves as an antiquarian’s Baedeker, locating and describing the places alluded to in Biblical, Hellenic, and Talmudic sources. Patai’s last chapter takes up Lake Kinneret — also known as Lake Gennesareth, the Sea of Galilee, and the Sea of Tiberias. Israel’s only major freshwater lake figures large in the Gospels. It is mentioned in Numbers and Deuteronomy, and is the site of three fortified cities named in Joshua: Hammath (called Emmaus by Josephus), Rakkath (identified with Tiberias or Sephoris), and Kinneret (in Roman times rebuilt as Gennesareth).
The chapter concludes with a photograph of a fishing boat from the beginning of the Christian era found in the mud of Lake Kinneret. The craft had been constructed of cedar planks joined by mortise and tenon, nailed to ribs made from naturally curved oak branches. As an emblem of Raphael Patai’s last word on any subject, it fits: practical rather than theoretical, empirical rather than imperious, durable rather than glamorous — yet for all that a vessel with spirit, a freighter of mysteries.
A poet living in Patchogue, New York, Laurance Wieder is co-founder of Chap-books for Learning.
