“You presumably grasped that the ‘Ark’ was more than just a single ship? It was the name we gave to the whole flotilla (you could hardly expect to cram the entire animal kingdom into something a mere three hundred cubits long). It rained for forty days and forty nights? Well, naturally it didn’t- that would have been no more than a routine English summer. No, it rained for about a year and a half, by my reckoning. And the waters were upon the earth for a hundred and fifty days. Bump that up to about four years. And so on. Your species has always been hopeless about dates. I put it down to your quaint obsession with multiples of seven.”
Here, the stowaway deconstructs the assertion that Noah's floods ensued for 'forty days and forty nights." The deconstruction depicts the evident loopholes concerning when the floods transpired. The stowaway suggests that the details incorporated in the Bible reading the flood are not absolutely perfect. By criticizing the human race about its hopelessness in matters relating to dates, the stowaway implies that human memory has limitations which make it impossible to reconstruct all explicit details regarding Noah's floods.
“If his bush-shirt was often carelessly buttoned and his denim trousers occasionally stained with lobster, this was no more than corroboration of his beguiling zeal for the job. His clothes hinted, too, at the admirable democracy of learning in the modern age: you evidently did not have to be a stuffy professor in a wing-collar to understand the principles of Greek architecture.”
Franklin appeals to the audience through his simple and natural looks. Instead of dwelling on the superficial looks, he concentrates on sufficiently enlightening the audience about history. His rhetoric affirms that one’s knowledge is not dependent on external looks.
“Blame someone else, that’s always your first instinct. And if you can’t blame someone else, then start claiming the problem isn’t a problem anyway. Rewrite the rules, shift the goalposts. Some of those scholars who devote their lives to your sacred texts have even tried to prove that the Noah of the Ark wasn’t the same man as the Noah arraigned for drunkenness and indecent exposure. How could a drunkard possibly be chosen by God?”
Noah was not a flawless man, yet God deliberately favored him. The contradictions in Noah’s story prompt scholars to come up with theories alluding to the existence of two Noah’s, whereas it is specified in the Bible that it was a single Noah. Scholars' arguments are similar to red herrings which they employ to avoid accepting the reality of Noah’s character. The manifest irony of Noah’s account depicts God’s omniscient nature. Scholars would not identify God’s motivation for selecting a drunkard.
