Category: Jewish

Flood lament from 1784

The winter of 1783/1784 was extremely cold in central Europe. When the unusually large amount of snow and ice melted in the spring, many German cities witnessed severe floods. These flood events are now considered one of the most severe natural disasters in continental Europe in the early modern period.

The scribe of the Jewish community of the city Bonn, a man named Simon of Copenhagen, wrote an extensive and lively report titled “Flood Lament” (Sipur Bechi Neharot). The text was printed in original Hebrew in Amsterdam the same year, 1784. It starts with the following exclamation:

“Hear me brothers and my people. Open your ears and listen to my words. These were days when my hair turned white and I was made better.”

Unfortunately I could only find an excerpt of a German translation of the text. I translated it roughly into English, using DeepL.

“It was January 25, 1784, and there was a heavy frost. People began to cross the Rhine on foot and with carts. You could walk across the river to our cemetery and bury the dead. That was a great miracle. God was merciful, he let the people cross and the water didn’t hit the people, he didn’t want to wipe them out. It stayed that way until well into February.

Then the feast of Purim approached, and suddenly a month of joy turned into a month of mourning. The Souls of the people were broken and their hearts melted. Everything became rigid.

After 31 days of heavy frost, the ice suddenly split and swallowed everything on it. God’s will was difficult to understand. Many did not come back and the water threatened to kill us all. At first the water stood in our alley up to our ankles, then up to our knees, then up to our hips. People could no longer get out of the houses, it was a curse.

The water was endless, wave followed wave. It became the sea and rushed like the sea. Nobody could leave the house. In the morning, the water rose even higher and people had to retreat to the upper floor of the house or the roof. Not a soul had any peace. Many brothers rescued small children. People jumped from roof to roof to save themselves. They tried to reach the other side of the street. You could no longer put your feet on the ground because you could no longer see it.

Everyone screamed for help. Our community pleaded with the Court to send barges to take the inhabitants to dry places. God heard them cry out and sent help.”

I found the German text on the extensive website of the Brückenhofmuseum in Königswinter (North-Rine Westpahlia).

A covenant to keep the forces of chaos at bay

The book of Jeremiah in the Hebrew Testament discusses at large an ecological crisis around 600 BCE in the so called “Fertile Crescent” (a region encompassing today’s southern Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, Egypt, and parts of Turkey and Iran). According to Michael S. Northcott in his book “A moral Climate” the crisis was brought about by agricultural over-exploitation of the land. The book of Jeremiah can thus be regarded as another climate narrative. The peoples of the Fertile Crescent were river peoples, their culture thrived on the waters of three rivers: Euphrat, Tigris and Nile. The ocean on the other hand was “seen as the primeval source of chaos, and this perhaps presents a cultural memory of prehistory in which the oceans had covered far more of the land than they have since the end of the last ice age,” writes Northcott. “For Jeremiah, the covenant that Yahweh made with the Israelites after their release from slavery in Egypt was therefore a cosmic covenant in which human work on creation ought to recognise the sustaining creative powers of the Lord of the earth in keeping the forces of chaos at bay:

Do you not fear me? says the Lord;
Do you not tremble before me?
I placed the sand as a boundary before the sea,
a perpetual barrier which it can not pass;
though the waves toss, they can not prevail,
though they roar, they can not pass over it.
[Jeremiah 5:22]”

In this passage from the ancient text, the sand on the beach is seen as the creative invention of the deity to keep the ocean where it belongs and the land with it’s human habitats where it belongs. It’s part of a greater deal, so to speak. In 600 BCE the ocean did not rise over the beach. In the present however, humans have not only begun to destroy beaches worldwide by extracitivist exploitation, the seas also rise. How do we then read the current situation from a Jewish, Old Testament perspective?

Frazer: The flood myth

It might be time for a clarification. Since flood myths play quite a big role in cristian creationist ideology and since there is a lot of material online on the subject hosted on creatonist propaganda websites, I feel I need to distance myself from the creationist idoelogy once and for all. I am arguing in this blog that mythology and folklore are aesthetic reflections of natural events like tsunamis, high tides or other extreme weather phenomena. In othe words, most myths are most likely creative renditions of lived experience. This does however not mean that myths are true or – for that matter – that the bible is right. In fact I am opposed to any creationist ideology, particularly of the US-American Christian ultra-right, and fundamentally opposed to the idea of founding ethical codes of conduct on religious authority.

Having said that much, here is an online source of a chapter from Sir James George Frazer‘s book “Folk-Lore in the Old Testament” from 1918. (On a creationist website…)

The Scotish scientist Frazer is one of the founding fathers of anthropology and his study “The Golden Bough” (1928) became one of the most influential and popular texts in anthropology.

This is the section from “Folk-Lore in the Old Testament” on the flood myth. In it he gives a very detailed account of several flood myths from all continents:

https://creationism.org/books/FrazerFolkloreOT/FrazerFolkloreOT_4.htm