In the month since Paramount Pictures released Noah, countless newspapers and websites have published essays explaining (and often debating) its fidelity to traditional Jewish texts. It’s common knowledge now that Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel based their screenplay not only on the story of Noah and the Flood as it appears in the Torah, but on the many tales and scholarly interpretations it has inspired throughout Jewish history (they also consulted with rabbis and scholars from multiple Judaic denominations). Collectively these exegeses, created by Jewish sages to explain ambiguous passages in the Torah, are referred to as midrash, originally a Hebrew word meaning “to seek out.” Written over thousands of years, midrashic texts have filled dozens of books, which makes this body of literature many times larger than the Torah itself. And you thought Peter Jackson had his hands full with Lord of the Rings.
By contrast, the movie’s stark portrayal of mankind seems rooted in a most literal interpretation of Genesis 6:5: “The Lord saw how great was man’s wickedness on earth, and how every plan devised by his mind was nothing but evil all the time.” The verse is rather frightening in its original context because it’s virtually all the Torah says about humanity during Noah’s time. Statements like these can register as towering and opaque—and indeed, Aronofsky has said in interviews that he wanted to convey the “wonder and horror” he experienced as a child when he first heard the stories in Genesis. Noah captures those feelings most successfully in its early passages, in which the hero and his family roam a desolated terrain, avoiding civilization. These scenes were shot on the crags of Iceland, vast and forbidding landscapes that evoke not only apocalyptic dread but the daunting simplicity of Old Testament prose. “In the midrash tradition the text has purposeful lacunae,” Handel told the Huffington Post. “It has questions that are posed in very few words, so the closer we read the more questions arose from it.”
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
