In his acclaimed lithograph, “The Deluge,” the French artist and engraver Gustave Doré (1832-1883) imagines a scene from the Flood. Taking refuge atop a protruding rock, a mother tigress shelters her kits from the raging waters, while four human children are precariously balanced beside her. From below, two figures who are half submerged in the waves reach up toward the rock, straining to touch one of the children, who looks poised to fall into the water. In the foreground, a sunken man lifts a smaller body out of the waves; that figure no longer struggles, perhaps already drowned. Birds fly overhead, a serene counterpoint to the pathos below.
An image drawn from Doré’s acclaimed illustration of the English Bible (1866), “The Deluge” portrays the agonies of the Flood. While Doré himself was not Jewish, examining his lithograph alongside ancient Jewish sources reveals a striking shared engagement with the affective dimensions of divine destruction, a willingness to grapple with violence and loss. In Bavli Sanhedrin 108b, the Babylonian Talmud’s longest discussion of the flood, the rabbis grapple forthrightly with human and animal pain. Consider the raven, the bird that Noah first sends out to scout the land to see if the flood waters have subsided. It is a dangerous assignment. In the Talmud’s telling, the raven protests. While seven pairs of kosher animal species were present on the ark, the raven was one of a single pair. “If the prince of heat or the prince of cold strikes me,” the raven asks, “will not the world be lacking a creature?” This is, according to the Talmud, an irrefutable argument. Noah has failed to protect the raven from danger, to guard against the threat of extinction.
While the biblical text imagines Noah as a “righteous man” who “found favor with God” (Genesis 6:9), Jewish tradition offers a more ambivalent, even critical portrait. A passage in the Zohar (Midrash ha-ne’elam) imagines Noah emerging from the ark, weeping when he sees the devastation of the flood. When Noah asks God why God had no compassion on the creatures, God responds, “Now you plead on their behalf? I lingered with you and spoke to you at length so that you would ask for mercy for the world. But as soon as you heard that you would be safe in the ark, the evil of the world did not touch your heart. You built the ark and saved yourself.”
While generations of writers and artists have been captivated by the ark and the survivors, my heart is with the lost and left behind, the ones who drowned. I find in Doré’s image a haunting reminder of the violence that reigns outside that tiny floating sanctuary—as well as a call to strive not simply for personal sanctuary, but for a world where all of us survive.
