A ramp goes down from our couch to the floor. God has brought a Flood upon our house, and we all have to climb up the ramp onto the Ark, together with all the imaginary animals, to escape from it. Our son Joseph has Noah’s Ark jigsaws, pop-up books, and was given a cloth Noah’s Ark as a baby, which he carried everywhere. Noah’s Ark is a pervasive cultural object, and one largely detached from its biblical moorings. It has entered a different canon, along with Winnie the Pooh, Peter Rabbit, Franklin the Turtle, Mother Goose, Thomas the Tank Engine, Curious George. How many children know that it comes from the Bible? It may be contextualized in a Children’s Bible, and reproduce or adapt a conventional translation; it may lose virtually all its sacred and biblical associations, except for the trained ear, as in Brian Wildsmith’s Professor Noah’s Spaceship or in M.B. Goffstein’s My Noah’s Ark, in which a ninety year old woman recalls the Ark her father made her, and which sustains her through the years. The proliferation of Noah stories - there must be thousands - testifies to a cultural currency and fluidity, that recalls that from which the biblical flood story arose. In each case, the Noah story will participate in an oeuvre of a particular illustrator or narrator, such as Peter Spier, Tomie de Paola, Nonny Hogrogian, or the Petershams, with their recognizable style and imaginative world. Parents too, or any adult, may enjoy and understand versions of the story on different levels: for instance, Peter Spier’s wonderful illustrations, or the dark, humorous, sentimental and profound tales of Marc Gellman’s Does God have a Big Toe? There is the artist’s pleasure, and the communication of his or her creativity. The transformation of the Flood narrative, from a foundational text of human and biblical insecurity into a child’s plaything, a celebration of animals and of language - as in the many Noah’s Ark animal and alphabet poems - and of human control, replicates its history in Midrash and miracle play. As Kathy Piehl says, animal books, toys and pets are among a child’s first sensual and literary experiences; the story enacts the possibility of survival against odds, against the ultimacy of death. A Noah’s Ark may be a "transitional object," a safe place in which to experience and overcome the terrors and possibilities of the world. Robert Coles points out that children are mirrors of ourselves, in whom we project our hopes for the future. In reading a Noah’s Ark book to our child, we may go back to that safe place, and express our own desire, for the sustenance of story, for a good world

Ruth Bottigheimer, in her wonderful book The Bible for Children, shows that, for all their aspiration to timelessness, to the reproduction of sacred texts, Children’s Bibles are as culturally and temporally conditioned as any other literature. She studies them in relation to class, gender, and confessional values, and historical processes. For instance, the character of God is progressively ameliorated: from the vengeful judge he becomes the all-loving Father (pp.62-63). The openness of the biblical stories is exploited in Children’s Bibles, to produce often opposed readings. The study of Children’s Bibles, Bottigheimer claims, like that of the Bible itself, is a work of careful juxtaposition, "so that commonalities and contrasts become visible" (p.57). Especially in the last twenty or thirty years, children’s versions of biblical narratives have been informed by critical perspectives, such as those of feminism and multiculturalism. Thus the study of Children’s Bibles, and the Flood Story in particular, will show much greater diversity now than at any time in the past.

Many, of course, are, or purport to be, straight and quasi-authoritative retellings of the biblical narrative: The Golden Children’s Bible, The Reader’s Digest Bible for Children, Bible Stories for Children, The All-Colour Book of Bible Stories, The Illustrated Children’s Bible, etc. Some - Tomie de Paola, Pauline Baynes - reproduce conventional translations; Lore Segal and Leonard Baskin write their own, using Buber/Rosenzweig and Luther as models; The Golden Children’s Bible, while generally faithful, makes a few concessions to their readers’ potential scepticism (Noah is only of "a very great age" instead of being 600). Complications, like the seven pairs of clean animals, are generally edited out; some versions omit the raven; nearly everyone ignores Noah’s embarrassing drunkenness, subject of an earlier exegetical and moralistic tradition, as Bottigheimer shows (103-114). The Living Bible tells that on the very night of the exit from the Ark Noah got extremely drunk (presumably he had some stashed away) and his sons had to put him to bed, perpetuating the tradition of the comic Noah. In the context this substantiates God’s belated discovery of human frailty. "And he was the one good man!" it concludes. Anne de Vries develops the episode into an independent narrative, combining the motifs of the demon drink and filial disrespect that informed the earlier tradition. Peter Spier has Noah peacefully cultivating his vineyard, before and after the Flood. Noah’s Wife by Marty Rhodes Figley, substitutes cucumbers.

Midrashic elaboration is often transferred to the illustrations, some of which emphasise the realism of the narrative, while others diffuse it. Tomie dePaola, for instance, strives towards an iconographic and typological effect. While the text, taken from the NIV, reinforces the sacrosanct particularity of the story, the illustrations suggest that it is timeless and ethereal, for instance through the elimination of perspective. The final epiphany frames Noah and his family in an ecclesiastical setting, perhaps a basilica, with medieval (Romanesque?) overtones; the rainbow forms the cupola, separated from the family by a frieze of arches, under which they are enclosed in an alcove or niche, just as icons often provide saints with architectural background. The family itself schematically constitutes a sacred tableau. Noah’s arms are outstretched, presumably in blessing, while he is flanked by two boys holding olive sprigs, like YHWH in Zech.4. The grouping of the figures, the positioning of hands, the doleful expression of the woman on the right, the dove held by Mrs.Noah on the left, compound the iconographic association: it could be a saint with donors, or the women at the cross. A hand from heaven indicates the rainbow, while leading back metonymically to the invisible deity, again reminiscent of medieval convention. A composition of two cats and two kittens stares out from the left hand corner, communicating domesticity, and perhaps a sense of mystery and grace. On the entrance to the Ark, Mrs. Noah is foregrounded with the same two cats, but without the kittens. The cats may represent the continuity of life, as well as proliferation in the Ark, but they also serve as emblems for Mrs. Noah, evocative of the wifely domain of home and kitchen.

On the other hand, The Reader’s Digest Bible for Children, and, more luridly, The Golden Children’s Bible depict the horror of the scene. Pauline Baynes’ exquisite pictures communicate the beauty of the destroyed world in minute detail; in this illustration a giant frame-breaking fish is about to devour a corpse. Peter Spier relies on stillness, as in this sequence; on the previous page, the animals crowd around the Ark,while the waters gradually rise round them. Heinz Janisch and Lisbeth Zwerger’s Noah’s Ark uses a spare surrealism: people stagger round under huge wind-blown umbrellas, a unicorn prances, hybrid creatures abound, among their eery reflections; in a later picture, lugubrious giant fish swim through windows. Other versions will avoid drawing attention to the annihilation, probably as too frightening. Similarly, the wickedness of humanity evokes a variety of responses; most Children’s Bibles have difficulty imagining evil that would justifying wiping out the earth. For the hugely successful Anne DeVries the unforgiveable sin is laughter: "They laughed and laughed and laughed ... They laughed at God! ... God doesn’t allow men to laugh at Him." The Living Bible illustrates "evil you can hardly imagine" with a portly Mycenean looking lady playing a harp to a grinning man with a wine beaker. Pauline Baynes barely indicates the evil with a sketch of a fight and what could be either sex or rape. Peter Spier alone, as usual, communicates utter horror with complete candour: an army leaving a burning city, devastated fields, slaughtered cattle.

Some versions paraphrase the biblical text, to explore the depths of the narrative, to ask its questions, to bring it to life, or to introduce a particular twist. Bach and Exum, for instance, draw attention to Noah’s silence, through repeating three times that he did not respond; in fact, neither he nor any other human character says a word throughout the narrative. Scholem Asch, in his collection In the Beginning, draws on Midrash for much of his detail, for instance the jewel that illumined the Ark or Noah’s objection that he is not a hunter. Asch’s Noah is much wryer and more bad-tempered than those in most conventionally pious readings, and certainly than Bach and Exum’s Noah. When his contemporaries mock him, he says to himself, "Laugh all you wish; I know what I know." Driven to distraction on the Ark, he curses, scolds and strikes the animals. The animals themselves spend their time spreading scandal. The shtetl has come to the Ark; the Ark is the shtetl. And like the shtetl, it is not a benign world, but it does have vitality. And it is this world which is redeemed.

In a class by itself is Judith Kerr’s How Mrs. Monkey Missed the Ark. It is utterly innocent. There is no evil, no divine culpability for the Flood, there are no corpses. The canonical text makes its presence felt through small details, like a dove with an olive leaf in a bottom right hand corner, and the rainbow on which Mrs. Monkey slides to earth. The adult (and child?) reader is aware of the real story, hovering in the back of the mind, but can ignore it for the time being. The animals, smiling, are just boarding the Ark, and the first raindrops are falling, when Mrs. Monkey decides she just has to get a nice bag of fruit for the voyage. It all takes longer than expected, and she is stranded. God is worried. So are the animals and Noah, but not Mr. Monkey. God sends a dolphin, who does everything save take Mrs. Monkey back to the Ark. She jumps to an orange branch, and sinks to a submarine fig tree. The fish love figs. Mrs. Monkey has her nice bag of fruit now, and swims to the surface. No dolphin, no branch. God sends a big white bird, who flies with Mrs. Monkey in the sun for days and days until they see the Ark on Mt. Ararat through a hole in the clouds. But sadly the fruit has dried to pips and skins, which miraculously coalesce into one big seed. From it grows a tree bearing all the fruits Mrs. Monkey collected, bananas, dates, oranges and figs, and all the animals feast on it. The book ends with an elephant helping Mr. and Mrs. Noah build their house, while the animals peacefully have their young.

Contrast this with Marc Gellman’s "Noah’s Friends" in Does God Have a Big Toe?, and Gary Schmidt’s "Noah by the Window of the Ark." Gellman is very funny (Noah suggests to his friend Jehaz that he take up swimming lessons) and profoundly moving, when Noah laments the destruction of his world, but it’s kitsch. By that I mean it is too easy. The Flood may be God’s tears - so the story concludes - but are they crocodile tears? Noah may be sorry, but that isn’t enough to exculpate him. Gary Schmidt’s Noah is entirely serious, a brilliantly written adult story in a child’s disguise. "Mrs. Monkey" is a child’s story, without the interventionist, earnest voice of adult retellings, without overt ideological, feminist or ecological, agendas. The child, of course, is Mrs. Monkey; animals in children’s stories often are displaced children. But she is also adult, "Mrs." Monkey, with all its connotations of bourgeois and indeed patriarchal respectability. The child blends with the adult; the adult reader can take on a child persona, and vice versa. Children are often called little monkeys; monkeys, perhaps more than any other animals, have child characteristics, in fable and children’s literature. The figure of Mrs. Monkey richly exploits the stereotype: she is agile (look how she holds her umbrella through thick and thin), resourceful, adventurous, loves fruit, and expressive. She also conforms to the gender and domestic function of food-maker and provider: she says at one point: "Mr. Monkey will wonder where I am ... and I haven’t even got him a nice fruity mixture to eat." But she is a Mrs. Monkey free from Mr. Monkey, for the whole of the voyage. Mr. Monkey’s only role is to express confidence in her. Indeed, all the couples (Mr. and Mrs. Giraffe, Mr. and Mrs. Lion etc.) seem to get on very well together. At the beginning of the story it is Mrs. Noah who has the hammer.

Identification with Mrs. Monkey is complemented by the child-angels, who are the principal facilitators of the action. The angels bring the dolphin and the white bird, they show God where she is, they hush the storm so that God can see, and hold bowls to catch the raindrops. The angels are benign and explicitly children, and they seem to have fun bouncing around in the storm, saying Shush to the lightning, sleeping on clouds. God as the supreme paternal figure, the head of the hierarchy, has lost all his dominance; he has to be shown where Mrs. Monkey is, and is by turns worried, sollicitous and gratified. With his long white beard, his mild dignified face, he conforms to a grandfatherly stereotype, of an adult world that is complicitous with that of children. Even his decision to send Mrs. Monkey something that swims seems to be anticipated by the angels carrying the dolphin.

We have several overlapping displacements: from the Ark to the world outside it, from Noah to an animal, from male to female, from adult (God) to child or child-angel. The displacements suggest a counter-story, a point of vantage from which to look at the original story, but also untouched by it. Even the helper-figures, the dolphin and the white bird, evoke mythological expectations - Amphitryon, the stork who carries babies, the pelican who devours them - which are disappointed or neutralized, left just outside the realm of the story. The dolphin proves merely playful, another child figure.

The monkey discovers a wonderful world, and certainly has a much more exciting time than the animals on the Ark, most of whom look very seasick. It is an inverted world: "The trees hardly moved. Fish flew through their branches instead of birds." Crayfish, crabs, seahorses, and multicoloured fish float among leaves and figs, half seen in the green water. Much of the pleasure comes from the beauty of the illustrations, the arabesques of the trees, pointillesque details, that distract us from the story, from figurative interpretation. The story is subsumed in a different kind of fantasy, or let us say wonder.

The main plot is completed with Mrs. Monkey’s return to earth, and the miraculous tree, on which all the fruit in Mrs. Monkey’s bag grow, may seem de trop. It echoes the tree of knowledge or or life in the garden of Eden, Ezekiel’s paradisal tree which nourishes all the animals, and, most proximately, reverses the story of the Tower of Babel. In the context, however, it preserves the memory of Mrs. Monkey’s search and the world of the Flood. In the bible, the exit from the Ark is followed by immediate disintegration: terror is established between human beings and animals, violence is acknowledged and regulated, Noah gets drunk. Here harmony is maintained, against our knowledge and the canonical story, at least until the last page.