Noah’s Daughter

There is a kind of book in which the clever child protagonist is destined to become a writer, the author, in fact, of the story in which the child is the protagonist. David Copperfield is such a child, but not infrequently it’s a girl. The Bible does not say that besides his three boys, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, Noah had a daughter who would have been a writer had she not lived before the invention of writing. It was several generations before scribes like Ezra set down the stories that had been told by authors like Noah’s daughter.

There are people, of course, who believe that the author was God, who (as it says in the stories) had made the people. Male and female created he them and commanded that they be fruitful and multiply, and the women conceived and bore men and, of course, women, but they, except for Eve and a couple of others, did not get to have names. Noah’s wife was called Noah’s wife, and the wives of Noah’s sons were called the wives of Noah’s sons. Noah’s daughter, we take it, was called Noah’s daughter.

“The men were off before sunup,” Noah’s wife said to the four younger women. She was looking through the tent’s opening and could see Noah, Shem, and Japheth some way down the hill, cutting lengths of gopher wood for the third of the ark’s three floors; Ham had gone to fetch the pitch with which to pitch it within and without. “I don’t know why he has to get the boys up so early.”

“Don’t you?” said Noah’s daughter. She happened to have been born with the talent to observe and to connect, along with a tendency to seesaw between self-congratulation and self-deprecation. “Father is the kind of man who thinks if anything can go wrong, it will, so when God says he is going to make a flood, Father takes to it like a duck to water.”

“Go and start the fire,” replied her mother. “When the sun stands overhead, the men will be in for their lunch.”

“Why can’t Ham’s wife do it?” said Noah’s daughter, and Ham’s wife said, “Why can’t you?”

“Because I’m in the middle of something,” Noah’s daughter said. “I’m working on a prayer—more like a memo—to God. I’m developing the argument against the flood.”

“We have been hearing about this memo every day for a week,” Shem’s wife said.

“Why do you think God needs your prayer to be so all perfect?” asked Japheth’s wife.

“Perfect is not the point. It’s that I myself don’t know what I’m saying until the right word is in the right place.”

“All right, all right!” Noah’s wife said. “One of you wash the gourds, one of you knead the dough, and someone start the fire. And you go finish your memo.”

The reason this memo was taking so fatally long had to do with her modus laborandi, over which Noah’s daughter had little control. She could never help going back to the beginning to cut any word that a sentence would be clearer, sharper, better without. It troubled her to think that she might bore the Lord who, after all, had the whole world in his hand. She was always challenging every word to hit the nail on, instead of next to, the head. And she was searching for the tone that would startle God’s attention without getting him angry. This is what she had got down on the tablets of her mind so far:

Dear God, I wonder if you have ever never asked yourself why whether the Flood might not be such a good idea might be a really bad idea might be useless not be useful.

The memo was fated not to get done that afternoon. It was one of those days when Noah’s daughter might have preferred chopping wood to words. “Maybe I need to get...