Enough people have now reviewed Aronofsky’s Noah and given it the thrashing it deserves. I shall not attempt to add to the righteously angry and sometimes sarc-laden disgust penned by guys like Matt Walsh and Erick Erickson and Larry Stone. I agree with them. But as we rightly denounce just how far from the biblical account Aronofsky strayed, it is important that Christians realize more than just what it is not. We must also see just what some of his ideas are, and where they come from. They are not just wacky ideas from a spaced-out brain drunk from comic books; Aronofsky’s “Noah” bears concepts and imagery taken from Jewish occultism, mysticism, and paganism.
My friend Marcus Pittman noted that in his theater, after the movie was over, someone shouted out, “What Bible was he reading?”
I’ll tell you. It was the Jewish “bible” of Kabbalah called the Zohar. It was also Jewish Talmud. It was countless works of Jewish mysticism and esotericism. Don’t take my word, let them tell you themselves:
The writers filled in the blanks by interviewing scholars, reading and re-reading the book of Genesis, and by studying commentaries from the Jewish Theological Seminary and other sources, apocryphal books, Rabbi Geoffrey W. Dennis’ “The Encyclopedia of Jewish Myth, Magic and Mysticism” and even perusing parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
A lot of people both pre- and post-opening of the film noted that Aronofsky is an “atheist” and judged the film simply on those terms. But he is not just an atheist. He is a Jewish atheist, steeped in some of the peculiar religious perversions of the apostate Jewish world. According to Jewish Journal, Aronofsky and his partner Ari Handel “were raised as Conservative Jews but now identify as atheists.”
No matter how much they read and re-read Genesis, they decided not to stick with it much. The other readings dominate the movie in profound ways, at many points, consume much of the screen time, drive the narrative, and damage the true story of Noah irreparably.
What first leaped out to me during my viewing was the glowing crystal power source which in the movie is called “Zohar.” This is the same name as the book of Jewish Kabbalah (occultism)—Zohar. It is a Hebrew word which means “brightness” or “splendor.” It is used in the Bible only once: Ezekiel 8:2. It describes the brightness of a “vision of God”:
Then I looked, and behold, a form that had the appearance of a man. Below what appeared to be his waist was fire, and above his waist was something like the appearance of brightness, like gleaming metal.
So the brightness of God himself is described with the word zohar. This is “divine fire” or “divine light.” In various traditions of paganism and non-Christian thought, human beings are considered to be a combination of earthly bodies and “sparks” of this divine light. Nearly all dualistic traditions share in this belief in some form. Humans are not merely made in God’s image and alive due to His breath of life, but actually bear little sparks of The Divine itself in them, or are even considered “little gods” themselves. This is true in many places from ancient Stoicism to modern New Ageism (which draws heavily from Jewish Kabbalah).
In Aronofsky’s Noah, there is a glowing, crystal-like mineral called zohar used as a source of power, fire, etc. The cities of Cain mined it and used it as a source of political and technological power. Noah used it for fire as well. In the waste-landscapes of the movie, there are abandoned “Zohar mines” at the outskirts of Cain’s civilizations. Little “god crystals” powered everything.
The Zohar theme is especially true in Kabbalah of the Nephilim, and this features strongly in Aronofsky’s Noah. The “rock people” everyone has rightly lampooned are laughably transparent Kabbalistic dualism. In Kabbalah, the Nephilim were originally angels made of pure light. This is how they are portrayed in Noah. But for their fall, Aronofsky wanted somehow to show them as punished. The best he could do was to have their divine spark of light “trapped” in some kind of earthly bodies—thereby perpetuating the old platonic/gnostic/dualistic idea that the body is the prison house of the soul, and that having an earthly body is somehow “punishment.” These are his words:
“The idea that something that is ethereal, angelic, divine light trapped in a corporeal body of rock gets at their essential pain,” Aronofsky said.
And ours, apparently, too.
From this we are treated to not only a comical version of the old gnostic dualism, but a confusing spectacle of lumbering, crippled rock people that look like Claymation when jaggedly limping across the landscape, but suddenly leap to Transformers-level CGI battle action when defending the Ark.
But the ridiculous spectacles and senseless plot twists have been pointed out enough. I want to stick with the Jewishness that some others have not noticed, I don’t think. Aronofsky—whose name is a derivative of the biblical name “Aaron”—said himself he was “working in the tradition of Jewish midrash.” Midrash is Jewish commentary, often story-telling, and often very tall-tales on top of that, used to make points upon biblical texts. They are not exegetical, and often anything but. They are often fanciful and even filled with paganism in attempts to “make you think” or to “explore the possibilities,” etc.
The end result of all such commentary—whether mystical, occult, or just plain secularist—is the exaltation of man and the diminishing of God. All of these traditions are expressions of humanism: man’s exaltation of himself, the image of God, to the replacement of God. It is the ultimate idolatry: the ultimate worshipping of the ultimate image. The chief product of this idolatry is the replacement of God’s Word with man’s word.
With this comes the replacement of God’s wrath with man’s wrath, and God’s mercy with man’s mercy.
One of Aronofsky’s Midrash moments had the potential to be profound. Noah has a crisis of faith while on the boat. He realizes even he is not worthy to live. Theologically, but for the pure grace of God, this was true. And since the Bible says nothing about Noah’s thoughts during the year-long Ark encounter, it is at least a question worth considering.
In Aronofsky’s version, Noah’s crisis of faith leads to bad theology: there shall be no mankind in the new creation. This is not from Kabbalah so much, I admit. It is from Agenda 21. But that’s another story. So, Noah decides the female daughters soon-to-be-born to Shem’s wife shall be killed. He spends nine months in a dogmatic stubbornness, stomping around, yelling, throwing stuff, and giving Shem’s wife the stinkeye.
As the little judgment day arrives, Noah is distracted briefly by his son Ham, who lures him into a coup attempt led by Tubal-Cain, who had hidden on the Ark and turned Ham against Noah.
It is here that the influences—perhaps subconscious—of two other Jewish humanists and likely Kabbalists emerge. These two are Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler, two powerful forces of humanistic psychology. The modernistic-humanistic psychological influences appear in portraying Ham as a classic “middle child”—complete with brooding jealousy over the favored positions of his older and younger brothers, including Shem’s having a wife. This attitude breeds self-pity and rebellion.
Then, once easily manipulated by Tubal-Cain, and angry with his father over several conflicts, Ham goes full-Freud and embraces the Oedipus complex. But at the last moment, with no explanation, Ham can’t bring himself to thrust the knife into his father, and instead kills Tubal-Cain.
Noah himself goes through bouts where Russell Crowe forgets he’s gentle vegan Noah, and plays Maximus Meridius until the fight is over. But here he leaps up and immediately returns to his infanticidal dogma. There he stands atop the Ark about to thrust a nine-inch knife blade into the forehead of a newborn, filled with fanatic, deluded, anti-human dogma, but just like Ham, inexplicably, at the last moment can’t bring himself to do it.
While I am obviously glad he didn’t, the story makes no sense like this—unless you see the God-diminishing humanism driving it. Noah is convinced for nine months that God’s Word is for all humanity to die. He is convinced this whole period that it is God’s will for these babies to die. Then at the last moment he can’t bring himself to do it. It’s a good thing Noah was Maximus and not Margaret Sanger.
Later in the movie, he says why: because when he looked at those babies, he couldn’t find anything in his heart but “love.” Shem’s wife then informs him that this was why God chose Noah: because God knew Noah would make the right choice.
Apparently, this is despite God’s will in which Noah was so convinced. Translation—and it is a translation that defines all of humanism, and infuses much of Christianity as well, particularly in regard to God’s Law—Noah is more merciful than God. And worse, God needs us to show mercy where He cannot.
All this wrangling with God, but of course, Aronofsky doesn’t even believe in God. For him and his partner, “God” is a literary construct used to explore the human condition. And thus, in the end, we find that all we have is our choices and our values and our mercy. And that’s what drives this apostate Jewish tradition, and what drives Aronofsky’s Noah.
And while they say they intended to stick to the text, they do with it what so many Talmudic, Kabbalistic, and/or Hasidic mystic Jews do: twist, torture, and turn the text a thousand ways but what it plainly says.
And the heart of this rebellion, Jewish or not, is humanism. We need to wake up to how deeply satanic and dangerous all these branches of humanism really are, and yet also how subtly they masquerade as profound religion and science in our age, deceiving many.
For all of the dark portrayal of Cainite civilization Aronofsky achieved, his own production Noah is of the same seed. And really, his portrayal is therefore flawed. The bad guys in the film are openly rogue: murderers, plunderers, robbers, rapists. But the truth is that the “violence” of that era was much more subtle and covered with masks of redemption and prosperity. They were not filthy barbarians: they were leftists and liberals. They were neoconservatives and establishment types. They were humanists of all stripes. They were respectable as leaders, governors, professors, rabbis, businessmen, captains of industry, actors, artists, musicians, directors, and Hollywood celebrities. They were slick, subtle, talented, rich, famous, persuasive, and beloved by many. And the satanic seed of Cain is no different today.
Finally, Aronofsky’s midrash sticks very closely to the text in one particular area. It departs in the wildest and even most blasphemous ways imaginable on important and clear points in the text, but on this one it would not budge. Indeed, Aronofsky not only was faithful to it, but highlighted it, and did so over and over. Here is the one biblical point Aronofsky wanted everyone to get:
Ham is the bad guy. Ham is jealous. Ham is corrupt. Ham is equivocal. Ham is impetuous. Ham is the outcast, the loner, the rebel. Ham is the bad guy.
Now that is biblical. It is true. And it is a peculiar point to highlight and drive home constantly while trampling nearly all others. Peculiar, for it is the driving biblical justification for the Israelite genocides of the Canaanites. It is Ham’s rebellion for which his child, Canaan, is cursed. And it is Canaan’s children whom the Israelites later have to destroy utterly when taking the land as their possession.
For all the biblical points which Aronofsky and Handel flagrantly and cavalierly tossed aside and rewrote based on Kabbalah, Gnosticism, and comic books, one wonders why they so strenuously kept this one so simple and literal, and yet so prominent in the narrative. Wonder.
Wonder.