Forty Days: Neima's Ark, Book One PDF
Preview Forty Days: Neima's Ark, Book One
FORTY DAYS Neima’s Ark: Book One by Stephanie Parent Copyright © 2013 by Stephanie Parent Image copyright © 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. Table of Contents Author’s Note 4 Noah and His Descendants 6 Part One: Before the Rain 7 Chapter One 7 Chapter Two 1 Chapter Three 9 Chapter Four 1 Chapter Five 1 Part Two: The Flood 1 Chapter Six 2 Chapter Seven 1 Chapter Eight 1 Chapter Nine 1 Chapter Ten 1 A Note on Capitalization 1 Acknowledgments 1 About the Author 1 Author’s Note 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. Noah and His Descendants Nemzar Noah Nahala Shem Zeda Ham Arisi Japheth Neima Kenaan Shai Part One: Before the Rain The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord regretted that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him to his Heart. So the Lord said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.” --Genesis 6:5-7 Chapter One My grandfather is a madman, and the entire village knows it. We’ve watched the skeleton of his madness rise from the ground, bones and joints of wood fastened together until they’ve grown higher than the tallest cedar tree in our valley and longer than all the cottages of our village placed end to end. As each gap in the skeleton is filled with more wood, we’ve watched his insanity gain flesh, becoming a solid, hulking beast that looms above us. It is an ark, two sides sloping down to a rounded base, like the coracles that carry fishermen down the river bordering our village. But my grandfather Noah’s ark is broader than the river at its widest point, even when the waters swell at the height of the rainy season, and I cannot imagine a body of water large enough to hold it aloft. We watch the sun rise over the ark’s peaked roof every morning, and now, as I carry a basket of soiled laundry to the river, I watch the ark grow larger before me. It sits on the far side of the river, just outside the village border, where the
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