World war

World war
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A world war is a war affecting the majority of the world’s most powerful and populous nations. World wars have spanned several continents, and lasted for years. History has shown that as a world war progresses, involved nations devote more and more of their resources to the conflict, resulting in ever-escalating destruction. World wars have resulted in unparalleled devastation. Almost every nation involved has suffered deeply, and the loss of life can only be estimated.
The term has usually been applied to two conflicts of unprecedented scale that occurred during the 20th century: World War I (1914–1918), and World War II (1939–1945).

Origins of the term
The term “World War” was coined speculatively in the early 20th century, some years before the first World War broke out, probably as a literal translation of the German word ‘Weltkrieg’[1] The Oxford English Dictionary cites the first known usage as being in April 1909, in the pages of the Westminster Gazette.
It was recognized that the complex system of opposing alliances — the German Empire, Austria-Hungary, and Italy vs. the French Third Republic, the Russian Empire, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was likely to lead to a global conflict in the event of war breaking out. The fact that the powers involved had large overseas empires virtually guaranteed that a conflict would be global, as the colonies’ resources would be a crucial strategic factor. The same strategic considerations also ensured that the combatants would strike at each others’ colonies, thus spreading the fighting far more widely than in the pre-colonial era.
Prior to 1939, the European war of 1914–1918 was usually called either the World War or the Great War. Only after the start of hostilities in 1939 did the World War become commonly known as the First World War (or, initially, ‘The First Great War’). This is easily observed today when visiting the numerous First World War monuments and memorials to be found throughout the world. Such memorials, most of which were constructed in the 1920s plainly refer to the World War or Great War. Occasionally, a contemporary marker will indicate 1919 as the year the war ended (e.g., The World War, 1914–1919) which refers to the date of the Treaty of Versailles as the official end of the war rather than the Armistice in 1918 which in effect ended the actual hostilities.
The specific term First World War was actually coined during the war. German biologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel wrote this shortly after the start of the war:
” There is no doubt that the course and character of the feared “European War”…will become the first world war the full sense of the word.
Indianapolis Star September 20, 1914[2]
“
This is the first known instance of the term First World War, which previously had been dated to 1931 for the earliest usage. The term was used again near the end of the war. English journalist Charles A. Repington wrote:
” [Diary entry, September 10, 1918]: We discussed the right name of the war. I said the we called it now The War, but that this could not last. The Napoleonic War was The Great War. To call it The German War was too much flattery for the Boche. I suggested The World War as a shade better title, and finally we mutually agreed to call it The First World War in order to prevent the millennium folk from forgetting that the history of the world was the history of war.
“The First World War, 1914-1918″ (1920)[3]
“
In 1933, Simon & Schuster published a photographic history of the war, edited by playwright and war veteran Laurence Stallings, with the title The First World War. A feature-length documentary film, also written by Stallings and titled The First World War, was released in November 1934.
Three months before World War II began in Europe, Time magazine first used the term “World War I” in its issue of June 12, 1939, when comparing the last war with the upcoming war.[4]
The term “Second World War” was coined in the 1920s. In 1928, US Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg advocated his treaty “for the renunciation of war” (known as the Kellogg-Briand Pact) as being a “practical guarantee against a second world war”. The term came into widespread use as soon as the war began in 1939. Time magazine introduced the term “World War II” in the same article of June 12, 1939, in which it introduced “World War I,” three months before the start of the second war.
Other languages have also adopted the “World War” terminology; for instance, in French, the two World Wars are the Guerres Mondiales; in German, the Erste und Zweite Weltkrieg; in Russian the мировые войны; in Spanish the Guerra Mundial and so on.

Earlier worldwide conflicts
Other examples suitable to be classified as world wars in terms of their intercontinental and intercultural scope were the Mongol Invasions leading to the Mongol Empire, which spanned Eurasia from China, Japan, and Korea to Persia, Mesopotamia, the Balkans, Hungary and Russia, and the Dutch-Portuguese War from the 1580s to the 1650s, which was fought throughout the Atlantic, Brazil, West Africa, Southern Africa, the Indian Ocean, Malaysia, India and Indonesia.
Dutch-Portuguese war, the first intercontinental resource war.
Dutch-Portuguese war, the first intercontinental resource war.
Other wars in earlier periods that saw conflict across the world have been considered world wars by some:
* the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1713)
* Seven Years’ War (1756–1763); Winston Churchill called it “the first world war” in A History of the English-Speaking Peoples
* the French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1802) and the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815).
These, however, were confined to the European powers and their colonial empires and offshoots. The Asian powers were not involved (counting in this instance the Ottoman Empire as a European power).
Prior to the late 19th century, the concept of a world war would not have had much meaning. The Asian powers of India, China and Japan did not act outside their own territory. India was an early target of the creation of trade colonies due to its strategic importance on the maritime equivalent of the Silk Road to the East Indies and China while both China and Japan were able to remain mostly isolationist until the 19th Century. The European conflicts of earlier centuries were essentially quarrels between powers which took place in fairly limited, though sometimes far-flung, theaters of conflict.
Where native inhabitants of other continents were involved, they generally participated as local auxiliaries rather than as allies of equal status, fighting in multiple theaters. For instance, in Britain’s wars against France, Native Americans assisted both European powers on their own ground rather than being shipped to continental Europe to serve as allied troops there. By contrast, during the World Wars, millions of troops from Africa, Asia, North America and Australasia served alongside the colonial powers in Europe and other theatres of war.

Characteristics of the World Wars
World Map with the participants in World War I.The Allies depicted in green, the Central Powers in orange, and neutral countries in grey.
World Map with the participants in World War I.
The Allies depicted in green, the Central Powers in orange, and neutral countries in grey.
World Map with the participants in World War II.The Allies depicted in green (those in light green entered after the attack on Pearl Harbor), the Axis Powers in blue, and neutral countries in grey.

The Allies depicted in green (those in light green entered after the attack on Pearl Harbor), the Axis Powers in blue, and neutral countries in grey.
The two World Wars of the 20th century took place on every populated continent on Earth (even to a small degree Antarctica during World War II[citation needed]), Many of the nations who fought in the First World War also fought in the Second, although not always on the same sides. Some historians have characterized the World Wars as a single “European civil war” spanning the period 1914–1945[citation needed], though this is arguably an oversimplification. It also overlooks the war in the Far East caused by Japan’s programme of territorial expansion, which started independently of events in Europe.
The World Wars were made possible, above all else, by a combination of fast communications (such as the telegraph and radio) and fast transportation (the steam ship and railroad). This enabled military action to be coordinated rapidly over a very wide area and permitted troops to be transported quickly in large numbers on a global scale.

Effects of the World Wars
The two World Wars of the 20th century caused unprecedented casualties and destruction across the theaters of conflict. The numbers killed in the wars are estimated at between 60 and 100 million people. Unlike in most previous conflicts, civilians suffered as badly as or worse than soldiers, and the distinction between combatants and civilians was often erased.
Affected States World War I World War II
Deaths 18 M 60 – 100 M
Injured 20 M 35 M
Conscripts 70 M 110 M
Battlefield Size 4 M km² 22 M km²
The outcome of the World Wars had a profound effect on the course of world history. The old European empires collapsed or were dismantled as a direct result of the wars’ crushing costs and in some cases the defeats of imperial powers. The modern international security, economic and diplomatic system was created in the aftermath of the wars. Institutions such as NATO, the United Nations and the European Union were established to “collectivise” international affairs, with the explicit aim of preventing another outbreak of general war. The wars also greatly changed the course of daily life. Technologies developed during wartime had a profound effect on peacetime life as well—for instance, jet aircraft, penicillin, nuclear energy, and electronic computers.
Since the Second World War was ended in August 1945 by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there has been a widespread and prolonged fear of a Third World War between nuclear-armed superpowers. The fact that this has not come to pass has been attributed by many to the devastating and essentially unwinnable nature of nuclear warfare, with the end result being the extermination of human life or, at the very least, the collapse of civilization.
When asked what kind of weapons would be used to fight World War III, the physicist Albert Einstein replied:[5]
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

Subsequent world wars
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Some groups define “world war” to include other far-reaching multi-national conflicts, such as the Cold War or current “War on Terrorism”. The Project for the New American Century holds both views, calling the Cold War “World War III” and the War on Terrorism “World War IV”; this was also agreed by Jean Baudrillard and Andrew J. Bacevich. However, these characterizations have attracted little support and have not been agreed upon by the majority of historians.

“War on Terrorism” as a world war
The term “World War IV” is occasionally used in the United States political and policy debates that continue in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks. As long ago as 1992, Count de Marenches, the former head of French intelligence, wrote a book[6] alleging that a “fourth world war”, of terrorism versus civilization, was taking place. As a designation for the post-9/11 war on terrorism, its use was first proposed by Eliot A. Cohen in his opinion piece written for the Wall Street Journal opinion page on November 20, 2001 titled, “World War IV: Let’s call this conflict what it is.” A core quotation from his thesis is
The Cold War was World War III, which reminds us that not all global conflicts entail the movement of multimillion-man armies, or conventional front lines on a map. The analogy with the Cold War does, however, suggest some key features of that conflict: that it is, in fact, global; that it will involve a mixture of violent and nonviolent efforts; that it will require mobilization of skill, expertise and resources, if not of vast numbers of soldiers; that it may go on for a long time; and that it has ideological roots.
On November 16, 2002, James Woolsey, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, gave a speech at Restoration Weekend, sponsored by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, titled “World War IV”,[7] in which he outlines the entire rationale for fighting World War IV. In the most provocative portion of his speech, he says
But, I would say this. Both to the terrorists and to the pathological predators such as Saddam Hussein and to the autocrats as well, the barbarics, the Saudi royal family. They have to realize that now for the fourth time in 100 years, we’ve been awakened and this country is on the march. We didn’t choose this fight, but we’re in it. And being on the march, there’s only one way we’re going to be able to win it. It’s the way we won World War I fighting for Wilson’s 14 points. The way we won World War II fighting for Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s Atlantic Charter and the way we won World War III fighting for the noble ideas I think best expressed by President Reagan, but also very importantly at the beginning by President Truman, that this was not a war of us against them. It was not a war of countries. It was a war of freedom against tyranny. We have to convince the people of the Middle East that we are on their side, as we convinced Lech Wałęsa and Václav Havel and Andrei Sakharov that we were on their side.
Cohen was one of the first publicly to single out Iraq as the second battlefield after Afghanistan in his version of World War IV. On December 23, 2001 he then wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “War with Iraq will have its perils. Some are likely to be illusory: the Arab ’street,’ for example, which never quite rises as promised. Others may be quite real, to include the use of chemical and biological weapons. Should the U.S. fail to take the challenge, sooner or later it is sure to find Iraqi terror on its doorstep. It may have already. Should the U.S. rise to the occasion, however, it may begin a transformation of the Middle East that could provide many benefits to the populations of an unfree region. That will, in the end, make us infinitely more secure at home.”[8]
Following Cohen’s lead, Norman Podhoretz wrote an article for Commentary magazine titled, “How to win World War IV” (Norman Podhoretz) in February, 2002. Podhoretz was not as certain as Cohen about specific tactics: “Yet whether or not Iraq becomes the second front in the war against terrorism, one thing is certain: there can be no victory in this war if it ends with Saddam Hussein still in power.” He agrees fully with Cohen’s overall thesis, though: “In my opinion, by raising the possibility of a transformation of the Middle East, Cohen cuts to the heart of the matter. The real enemy in this war, Cohen argues — as Daniel Pipes has also so persistently and authoritatively done at greater length — is not the generalized abstraction ‘terrorism,’ but rather ‘militant Islam.’”
A documentary film titled “World War IV: A Letter! to the President” was released in 2007 by former Governor George Bush’s Governor’s Circle member, Don A. Craven Jr. The film is a conservative critique of the strategic wisdom of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, and suggests that the war could escalate, and historically be viewed as the opening salvo of “World War IV”, rather than stabilizing the region–a principal casus belli justifying the invasion.
Another faction of conservatives, led by Newt Gingrich, do not consider the Cold War a world war, preferring to call the War on Terrorism the third world war rather than the fourth.

Competition between financial powers as a world war
Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation asserts that the Fourth World War is being conducted “between major financial centres” over the world’s resources. Like Cohen, he sees the Cold War as World War III. [9]

References
1. ^ Online Etymology Dictionary entry for World War
2. ^ “The Yale Book of Quotations” (2006) Yale University Press, edited by Fred R. Shapiro
3. ^ “The Yale Book of Quotations” (2006) Yale University Press, edited by Fred R. Shapiro
4. ^ “War Machines”, Time, June 12, 1939.
5. ^ How Einstein changed culture. MSNBC (2005-04-18).
6. ^ ISBN 978-0688092184
7. ^ R. James Woolsey. “World War IV”. FrontPageMagazine.com, 2002-11-22. Accessed 2008-05-01.
8. ^ Eliot A. Cohen. “Iraq Can’t Resist Us”. OpinionJournal.com, December 23, 2001. Accessed May 1, 2008.
9. ^ The fourth world war has begun, Le Monde diplomatique, september 1997

Noah

Noah
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Noah (or Noe, Noach; Hebrew: נוֹחַ or נֹחַ, Standard Nóaḥ Tiberian Nōªḥ ; Nūḥ ;Arabic: نوح ; “Rest”[1] ) was, according to the Bible, the tenth and last of the antediluvian Patriarchs. His story is contained in the book of Genesis, chapters 5-9. Noah saves his family and all animals in groups of two or seven from God’s Deluge. He receives a covenant from God, and his sons repopulate the earth.
While the Deluge and Noah’s Ark are the best-known elements of the account of Noah, he is also mentioned as the “first husbandman” and the inventor of wine, as well as in an episode of his drunkenness and the subsequent Curse of Ham. The account of Noah was the subject of much elaboration in the later Abrahamic traditions, and was immensely influential in Western culture. Jewish thinkers have debated the extent of Noah’s righteousness, Christians have likened the Christian Church to Noah’s ark, and in Islam he is revered as a prophet of God.

Summary
According to chapters 5–9 of the book of Genesis, Noah was the son of Lamech, and the ninth generation after Adam. “And Lamech called his name Noah, saying, “Out of the ground which the Lord has cursed this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the toil of our hands.” From Noah’s sons, Shem, Japheth and Ham, all the peoples of the world would be descended.[2]
When Noah was six hundred years old, God, seeing man’s wickedness which had become abundant in the earth, was saddened, and decided to send a great deluge to destroy disobedient mankind. But He saw that Noah was a righteous man, and instructed him to build an ark and gather himself and his family.[3] And God said to Noah, “Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female.”[4] And so the Flood came, and all life was extinguished, except for those who were with Noah, “and the waters prevailed upon the earth for one-hundred and fifty days”[5] until the Ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. There Noah built an altar to God (the first altar mentioned in the Bible) and made an offering. “And when the Lord smelled the pleasing odour, the Lord said in his heart, ‘I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done. While the earth remains, seed-time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease’.”[6]
Then God made a covenant: Noah and his descendants would henceforth be free to eat meat (“every moving thing that lives shall be food for you, and as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything”), and the animals would fear man; and in return, man was forbidden to eat “flesh with its life, that is, its blood.” And God forbade murder, and gave a commandment: “Be fruitful and multiply, bring forth abundantly on the earth and multiply in it.” And as a sign of His covenant, He set the rainbow in the sky, “the sign of the covenant which I have established between me and all flesh that is upon the earth.”[7]
After the Flood, “Noah was the first tiller of the soil. He planted a vineyard; and he drank of the wine, and became drunk, and lay uncovered in his tent.” Noah’s son Ham saw his father naked and informed his brothers, who covered Noah while averting their eyes. Noah awoke and cursed Ham’s son Canaan with eternal slavery, while giving his blessing to Shem and Japheth: “Blessed by the Lord my God be Shem; and let Canaan be his slave. God enlarge Japheth, and let him dwell in the tents of Shem; and let Canaan be his slave.”[8]
Noah died 350 years after the Flood, at the age of 950,[9] the last of the immensely long-lived antediluvian Patriarchs. The maximum human lifespan, as depicted by the Bible, diminishes rapidly thereafter, from as much as 900 years to the 120 years of Moses within just a few generations. Another few generations later, lifespans were reported to be less than 100 years on average.

Jewish perspectives
The righteousness of Noah is the subject of much discussion among the rabbis.[10] The description of Noah as “righteous in his generation” implied to some that his perfection was only relative: In his generation of wicked people, he could be considered righteous, but in the generation of a tzadik like Abraham, he would not be considered so righteous. They point out that Noah did not pray to God on behalf of those about to be destroyed, as Abraham prayed for the wicked of Sodom and Gomorrah. In fact, Noah is never seen to speak; he simply listens to God and acts on his orders. This led such commentators to offer the figure of Noah as “the man in a fur coat,” who ensured his own comfort while ignoring his neighbour. Others, such as the medieval commentator Rashi, held on the contrary that the building of the Ark was stretched over 120 years, deliberately in order to give sinners time to repent.

Christian perspectives
The Drunkenness of Noah, Michelangelo Buonarroti, ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the Vatican, Rome, 1509. Michelangelo shows Noah drunk before his sons, and simultaneously, in the background, Noah planting his vineyard.
The Drunkenness of Noah, Michelangelo Buonarroti, ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the Vatican, Rome, 1509. Michelangelo shows Noah drunk before his sons, and simultaneously, in the background, Noah planting his vineyard.
To the early Christians, the flood was a common analogy to the coming final judgment. In the gospel of Luke 17:26 Jesus is quoted as saying, “Just as it was in the days of Noah, so too it will be in the days of the Son of Man.” Therefore suggesting that the second coming would occur in much the same way as the flood, where a quick and unexpected separation between the saved and condemned would arise. Noah represented those who would be saved and those who drowned were those who did not believe.
Noah is called a “preacher of righteousness” in 2 Peter 2:5, and the First Epistle of Peter equates the saving power of baptism with the Ark saving those who were in it. In later Christian thought, the Ark came to be equated with the Church: salvation was to be found only within Christ and his Lordship. St Augustine of Hippo (354-430), demonstrated in The City of God that the dimensions of the Ark corresponded to the dimensions of the human body, which corresponds to the body of Christ; the equation of Ark and Church is still found in the Anglican rite of baptism, which asks God, “who of thy great mercy didst save Noah,” to receive into the Church the infant about to be baptised.
Noah’s three sons were generally interpreted in medieval Christianity as the founders of the populations of the three known continents, Japheth/Europe, Shem/Asia, and Ham/Africa, although a rarer variation held that they represented the three classes of medieval society – the priests (Shem), the warriors (Japheth), and the peasants (Ham). In the 18th and 19th centuries the view that Ham’s sons in general had been literally “blackened” by sin came to provide a religious justification for slavery.

Gnostic literature
The Apocryphon of John reports that the chief archon caused the flood because he desired to destroy the world he had made, but the First Thought informed Noah of the chief archon’s plans, and Noah informed the remainder of humanity. Unlike the account of Genesis, not only are Noah’s family saved, but many others also heed Noah’s call. There is no ark in this account; instead Noah and the others hide in a “luminous cloud”.

Islamic perspectives
Noah is a prophet in the Qur’an. References to نوح Nūḥ, the Arabic form of Noah, are scattered throughout the Qur’an, but no single narrative account of the entire Deluge is given. The references in the Qur’an are consistent with Genesis, and Islamic tradition generally follows the Genesis account, with one important exception: In the Bible, the deluge is a world-wide event, while in the Qur’an, it directs to a regional event, affecting only the “people of Noah”. The Qur’an emphasizes Noah’s preaching of the monotheism of God, and the ridicule heaped on him by idolators. Noah upon the instruction of God is said to have preached for many years, with only 83 people willing to submit to God, and that eventually brought the wrath of God on the unbelievers.
Below are some verses from Quran about Noah:
“ We sent Noah to his people: He said, “O my people! worship God! Ye have no other god but Him. Will ye not fear (Him)?” ”
“ The chiefs of the Unbelievers among his people said: “He is no more than a man like yourselves: his wish is to assert his superiority over you: if God had wished (to send messengers), He could have sent down angels; never did we hear such a thing (as he says), among our ancestors of old.” ”
“ (And some said): “He is only a man possessed: wait (and have patience) with him for a time.” ”
“ (Noah) said: “O my Lord! help me: for that they accuse me of falsehood!” ”
God later instructed Noah to build the ark:
“ Build the ship under Our eyes and by Our inspiration, and speak not unto Me on behalf of those who do wrong. Lo! they will be drowned.[11][12] ”
The Qur’anic account contains a detail not included in the Biblical account: a reference to another son who chose not to enter the ark:
“ And it sailed with them amid waves like mountains, and Noah cried unto his son – and he was standing aloof – O my son! Come ride with us, and be not with the disbelievers. ”
“ He said: I shall betake me to some mountain that will save me from the water. (Noah) said: This day there is none that saveth from the commandment of God save him on whom He hath had mercy. And the wave came in between them, so he was among the drowned.[13] ”
The Qur’anic account does not include several details of the Genesis account, including the account of Noah’s drunkenness.

Contemporary academic perspectives
According to the documentary hypothesis, the first five books of the Bible, including Genesis, were collated during the 5th century BC from four main sources, which themselves date from no earlier than the 10th century BC. Two of these, the Jahwist, composed in the 10th century BC, and the Priestly source, from the late 7th century BC, make up the chapters of Genesis which concern Noah. The attempt by the 5th century editor to accommodate two independent and sometimes conflicting sources accounts for the confusion over such matters as how many pairs of animals Noah took, and how long the flood lasted.
More broadly, Genesis seems to contain two accounts concerning Noah, the first making him the hero of the Flood, the second representing him as a husbandman who planted a vineyard. This has led some scholars to believe that Noah was originally the inventor of wine, in keeping with the statement at Genesis 5:29 that Lamech “called his name Noah, saying, ‘Out of the ground which the Lord has cursed this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the toil of our hands.’”[14]
The “Curse of Ham” has given rise to much discussion, but seems to express a hope on the part of the 6th century BC compilers of the Torah that the Medes (Japhet) would join with the Jews (Shem) in restoring Jewish rule in the land of Canaan: “Blessed by the Lord my God be Shem, and let Canaan be his slave. God enlarge Japheth, and let him dwell in the tents of Shem, and let Canaan be his slave.”

Mythological connections
Noah’s great grandfather Enoch is the beginning of a web of similarities between the story of Noah and older Mesopotamian myths. According to Genesis 5:24, at the end of his 365 years Enoch “walked with God, and was not, for God took him” – the only one of the ten pre-Flood Patriarchs not reported to have died. Where did Enoch go when God took him? In a late Apocryphal tradition, Methuselah is reported to have visited Enoch at the end of the Earth, where he dwelt with the angels, immortal. The details bring to mind Utnapishtim, a figure from the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh – the hero Gilgamesh, after long and arduous travel, finds Utnapishtim living in the paradise of Dilmun at the end of the Earth, where he has been granted eternal life by the gods. (Gilgamesh’s reason for seeking out Utnapishtim, incidentally, is to learn the secret of immortality – like Methuselah, he comes close to the gift but fails to achieve it). Utnapishtim then tells how he survived a great flood, and how he was afterwards granted immortality by the gods. It has been suggested that the Flood story may originally have belonged to Enoch.[14]
Lamech’s statement that Noah will be named “rest” because “out of the ground which the Lord has cursed this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the toil of our hands,” has another faint parallel in Babylonian mythology: the gods grew tired of working, digging the channels of the rivers, and so the god Enki created man from clay and blood and spit to do the work for them. Enki fell in love with his creation, and later warned Utnapishtim that the other gods planned to send a flood to destroy all life, and advised him on how to construct his ark.
Noah is also often compared to Deucalion, the son of Prometheus and Pronoia in Greek mythology. Like Noah, Deucalion is a wine maker or wine seller; he is forewarned of the flood (this time by Zeus); he builds an ark and staffs it with creatures – and when he completes his voyage, gives thanks and takes advice from the Gods on how to repopulate the Earth. This and some other examples of apparent comparison between Greek myths and the “key characters” in the Old Testament/Torah have led recent Biblical scholars, particularly those commenting on the Documentary hypothesis to conclude a Hellenistic influence in the composition of the earlier portions of the Hebrew Bible.