A rainbow in today’s Top 200 Photo

photo #19 is:

Until I went to the Grand Canyon and saw an awesome rainbow there, this was the only photograph I had of a rainbow. I was going to a work breakfast when I was working at P&G and when I got out of my car it was there. I decided to photograph it before going inside. It languished mostly unseen until I posted it to a photography related forum. Then it shot up to 200 views in one day (from <50). Now it has 1239 views.

Those of us raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition learned that rainbows are a sign from God that he’ll never destroy the Earth by a flood again. Which seems like a suspiciously specific assurance. Taking the story as true, I wonder if any member of Noah’s family thought that through and said, “waitaminute!”

As I learned while reading Snow Crash, The Epic of Gilgamesh seems to contain a lot of stories from the part of the Old Testament that’s so old we don’t know if it happened. (I think historians know for sure that King David was real. I’m not sure if they’re willing to go back to Moses or even further to Abraham) Think of The Epic as the Old Testament remixed with Greek culture (in that there are superhumans and gods). That also has the rainbow serve as a promise not to destroy humanity via flood again.

Some of the Arabic and Indian mythologies have the rainbow serve as the bow of some god. Of course, there’s the Irish myth of the end of the rainbow housing the leprechaun’s gold.