Empire has the latest on Darren Aronofsky’s Noah Film, scheduled for release in 2014:
Written by John Logan (Gladiator, The Aviator, Hugo and many more) and Aronofsky himself, it’s not a traditional retelling of the age-old bible story but a radical reimagining, complete with giant angels called ‘Watchers’.
Russell Crowe as Noah
Along with Russell Crowe as Noah, Jennifer Connelly will play Noah’s wife, Naameh, Douglas Booth and Logan Lerman play Noah’s sons, Shem and Ham (not sure what happened to Japeth), Emma Watson plays a close friend of Shem’s, Ila, Anthony Hopkins plays Noah’s grandfather Methuselah, and Ray Winstone plays “an as-yet unnamed character who acts as Noah’s enemy”.
The “Watchers”, as fans of Remnant of Giants will well know, is the name of the angels who descend from heaven to earth in 1 Enoch 6ff (that is, in The Book of Watchers) – one of the earliest “retellings” of a curious episode which is narrated immediately before the story of the Flood in Genesis 6.
According to the biblical chronology in the Hebrew Masoretic Text of the Bible, Methusaleh died in the year preceding the Flood, some 99 years after Yahweh told Noah to build an ark. The Masoretic Text dates Methusaleh’s death to 1656 Anno Mundi and the Flood to 1657 Anno Mundi. Things get more confusing in some Septuagint versions of the Bible, where according to the chronology, Methusaleh survives some 17 years after the Flood.
The name of Noah’s wife doesn’t appear in the Bible, and neither do the names of the wives of Ham, Shem, and Japeth. But “Naamah”, identified as the daughter of Lamech and sister of Tubal-Cain, is the name given to the wife of Noah in Genesis Rabbah (בראשית רבה), traditionally dated to the third century AD. In the much earlier, 2nd century BC book of Jubilees (ספר היובלים), Noah’s wife is called “Emzara”, and she is identified as the daughter of Rake’el, son of Methusaleh (Jub. 4.33). The name “Emzara” also appears in a text from Qumran which retells the book of Genesis, 1QApGen (6.7).
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Deane,
Never mind about Japeth, why, oh why is Ham being player by a white actor? How can we justify slavery without reference to the ‘Curse of Ham’, that ‘burnt’, lascivious son of Noah?
Eric
Ham is being played by Jewish actor Logan Lerman. Wouldn’t a Jew be the best choice for a role in a Biblical movie? Lerman’s people wrote the Old Testament, so there you go.
No. Genesis 6-9 is set rather before any Jews came on the scene in the biblical narrative. As the story goes, Noah and his three sons and three daughters-in-law are the ancestors of every group of people. According to the so-called “Table of Nations” in Genesis 10, Noah’s son Japheth was the ancestor of peoples to the north of the Levant, Ham was the ancestor of peoples from Africa and Canaan, and Shem was the ancestor of the Semites and people around Mesopotamia. Much later on in the reception history of this myth, some people interpreted Gen. 9.22 and 10.6 as cursing Africans with black skin, and used these texts to justify Anglo-American slavery. See, for example, The Curse of Ham in the Early Modern Period by David Mark Whitford.
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