When I saw this tableau, created by local school-children in Hertford, I rushed back to the van to get my tripod. We’re familiar with the story of Noah: all the animals going into the ark, two-by-two (though taking those woodpeckers, in a timber-built boat, was probably a mistake). This is, of course, the moment that the children have captured in their tableau, rather than what happened next.
The sign on the right asks a question. Noah has three sons: can you name them? There are more pressing questions that I could ask. Where, for example, was desert-dwelling Noah able to source a pair of penguins (bottom pic, far right, beneath a member of Noah's family who appears to have been lynched)). And, even more importantly, why did God decide to destroy his creation, in its entirety, apart from one family?
It was only after the flood that an omniscient God realised that he had killed the wicked, but not wickedness itself, so drowning almost everyone in the world achieved nothing. God promised Noah that he would never pull this stunt again: a promise which came too late for those whose bloated bodies littered the postdiluvian landscape (and which - surprise, surprise - appear nowhere in the children's tableau)...
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