Noah? Ah, no.
by Jeremy Brock
I haven’t seen the recent Noah movie, and am not inclined to waste either the money or the time required to do so. (Yes, it will eventually come out on video, but hey, there are always clothes, or for that matter cats, to wash.) In general, getting me to take time out for any film requires some serious incentive. In particular, everything I’ve heard about this one so far–mostly that Hollywood loves it, Evangelical Christians hate it, and theologically Conservative Jews aren’t thrilled with it either–has been entirely predictable and at least somewhat consistent with my own pre-release guesswork: namely, that this was going to be a tedious intellectual wank full of industry in-jokes and sly references to the sorts of obscure, hallucinogenically enhanced literary twaddle usually reserved for upper-caste adolescents whose parents pay at least forty grand a year so the brats can (pretend to?) read it in All The Right Universities.
(Aside: Wow. If that isn’t the Run-on Sentence From Sheol, it’s the closest I’ve come to it in a while.)
Anyway, it seems I was only half right. In fact the sly references in Noah were to material that’s at least somewhat available to anyone with loads of time on their hands and two or three neurons to rub together.
Like, f’rinstance, Madonna.
Yep, here comes a Calvinist scholar1 to dissect the Noah flick, and he says it’s Kabbalah to the core. His analysis looks legit. It’s a long-ish read but worth the effort, particularly for people who’ve watched the film and come away scratching their heads and muttering ‘Where the [EXPLETIVE] was that in the Bible?’.
Disclaimer: Not responsible for spontaneous head explosions.
[1] Obligatory clarification: I’m making an assumption that Dr. Mattson is a Calvinist, based on his credentials. I don’t do Calvinism myself, but their academic types are often the go-to guys for scholarly discourse in the Evangelical world–sort of like Jesuits but with less spin and no Pope. And no, I won’t participate in an amateur theological fencepost-spraying contest, here or anywhere. I’ve never seen one of those do more good than harm.
Raised by Badgers 
It seems inevitable that any movie about theology is going to send someone’s BP spiking. The Qabalah angle, though, is a new one on me. (I did not read the article, because I’m more interested in what you have to say than the actual movie and what it might mean.) I’ve always taken the Noah story for a matter of faith, in that: it being scientifically implausible, belief in it is a matter of personal faith, or lack thereof. That’s what anyone’s faith does, after all: believe in what cannot be proven.