QI: The Book of General Ignorance - the Noticeably Stouter Edition (47 page)

Either thirteen, nineteen or 613.

A careful reading of the ‘Ten Commandments’ (as set down twice in the Bible, in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5) makes it quite clear that there are actually more than ten of them. Here’s a count based on the list in Exodus:

There follow another six of your neighbour’s possessions thou shalt not covet, including oxen, asses, maidservants, etc., which could arguably be interpreted as separate commandments in their own right.

But it doesn’t stop there. After the first nineteen imperatives, the list goes on for another three pages, including: ‘If an ox gore a man or a woman, that they die, then the ox shall surely be stoned.’ ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’ ‘Three times thou shalt keep a feast unto me in the year.’ ‘Thou shalt not oppress a stranger.’ ‘Whosoever lieth with a beast shall surely be put to death.’

The opening books of the Bible are called the Five Books of Moses (Pentateuch in Greek). In Judaism, they are called the Torah (or ‘Teaching’). The third in the series is the twenty-seven-chapter Book of Leviticus. Here the Lord God really gets into his stride, issuing commandments on every conceivable subject, forbidding the eating of camels, hares, eagles, vultures, cuckoos, swans, weasels, tortoises and bats and specifying the death penalty for homosexuals, wizards and adulterers. ‘Do not prostitute thy daughter,’ He commands. ‘Thou shalt not multiply horses.’ ‘Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy father’s wife’s daughter.’ ‘Neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard.’ According to Orthodox Judaism, there are a total of 613 commandments in the Bible, breaking down into 248 ‘thou shalts’ and 365 ‘thou shalt nots’. And, if that were not enough, in case He might have forgotten something, the sting in the tail comes in Deuteronomy 18:13: Thou shalt be perfect with the Lord thy God.

Seven. Or fourteen.

The relevant passage in the King James Bible appears in Genesis 7: 2, where God tells Noah: ‘Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of the beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female.’

‘Unclean’ beasts are the extensive range of creatures that Jews were (and are) forbidden to eat, including pigs, camels, rock-badgers, chameleons, eels, snails, ferrets, lizards, moles, vultures, swans, owls, pelicans, storks, herons, lapwings, bats,ravens, cuckoos and eagles.

‘Clean’ (edible) animals include sheep, cattle, goats, antelopes and locusts.

So there were at least seven sheep on the Ark, not two as taught in Sunday school. But the passage is slightly ambiguous: does it mean seven males and seven females, or seven altogether? Those who know say that seven of each would be a disaster: fights would break out between the rams. A more practical solution would be one ram and six ewes.

However, the Douay-Rheims Bible, the authoritative Catholic translation of the Latin Vulgate published in 1609, is quite clear on the matter: ‘Of all clean beasts, take seven and seven, the male and the female.’ So it looks like there were fourteen sheep on the Ark.

Medieval rabbis spent a good deal of time debating whether fish were left to fend for themselves in the Flood, or whether Noah dutifully brought them on board the ark in an aquarium. In the mid-sixteenth century, Johannes Buteo calculated that Noah’s Ark would have had a usable space of 350,000 cubic cubits, of which 140,000 must have been taken up by hay.

But the flood really happened. More than 500 different flood-myths exist in cultures all over the world.

Human beings evolved during the last Ice Age. Towards the end of it, as the temperature rose, there were vast catastrophic rises in sea level caused by the melting ice-caps. The story of Noah is thought to describe the disappearance of the Tigris–Euphrates Delta under the Persian Gulf.

The sudden shortage of land could no longer support hunter-gathering, and, for the first time, human beings were forced to turn to farming.

Aborigines, whose culture and oral tradition reaches back to the last Ice Age, can name and locate mountains that have been under the sea since the ice-caps melted 8,000 years ago.

Enoch, Methuselah’s father, who’s still alive. He’s 5,387 years old, give or take a week. Methuselah lived to a measly 969.

Methuselah is famous for being the oldest man who ever lived but, according to the Bible, he was not that much older than his own grandfather, Jared, who lived to be 962. The direct line of Adam’s descendants up until the Flood (with their ages) is as follows: Adam (930); Seth (912); Enos (905); Cainan (910); Mahalaleel (895); Jared (962); Enoch (365 not out); Methuselah (969); Lamech (777); Noah (950).

Though all of these characters were abnormally old, all but one of them died in a perfectly normal way. The exception is the mysterious Enoch, who was a stripling of just 365 when God ‘took him’. Enoch never died at all: a distinction not even granted to Jesus Christ. In the New Testament St Paul reiterates the story of Enoch’s immortality in his Epistle to the Hebrews.

‘By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death; and was not found, because God had translated him: for before his translation he had this testimony, that he pleased God’ (Hebrews 11:5).

The French philosopher Descartes believed it ought to be possible for all human beings to live as long as the Biblical Patriarchs – around 1,000 years– and was convinced he was on the brink of cracking the secret when he died in 1650, aged fifty-four.

At Much Wenlock, Shropshire, in 1850. The games were held there annually and inspired Baron Coubertin to organise the Athens Olympiad of 1896:

‘Much Wenlock is a town in Shropshire, a county on the borders of Wales, and if the Olympic Games that modern Greece has not yet been able to revive still survive today, it is due not to a Greek, but to Dr W. P. Brookes.’

Brookes believed a rigorous programme of physical training would help make people better Christians by keeping them out of the pubs. His knowledge of the ancient Olympics inspired him to found the Much Wenlock Society for the Promulgation of Physical Culture in 1841.

The first of the annual ‘Brookes’ Olympian Games’ was held in 1850 with small cash prizes for running, long jump, football, quoits and cricket. Other events were gradually added, such as a blindfold wheelbarrow race, a pig race and a medieval tilting contest. Winners were crowned with laurel wreaths and medallions inscribed with Nike, the Greek goddess of victory.

The fame of the Wenlock Olympics quickly spread, attracting entries from all parts of Britain. They were even noticed in Athens and King George I of the Hellenes sent a silver medal to be awarded as a prize.

With visions of reviving the ancient games on an international scale, Brookes founded the National (British) Olympic Association in 1865 and staged its first games at the Crystal Palace in London. Without sponsors, it was snubbed by the leading sportsmen of the day.

In 1888 Brookes began a correspondence with Baron Coubertin. In 1890, the Baron came to see the Wenlock Games for himself, planting an oak that still stands in the village. He returned home determined to re-establish the ancient games, founding the International Olympic Committee in 1894.

Through his wealth, prestige and political connections, Coubertin succeeded where Brookes had failed. He staged the first international revival of the games in Athens in the summer of 1896.

Dr Brookes had died the previous year, aged 86. The Wenlock Games are still held annually in his honour.

For the convenience of the British royal family.

At the first three modern Olympics, the marathon was run over a distance of roughly 42 km (26 miles), varying from games to games. In 1908 the Olympic Games were held in London and the starting line was put outside a window at Windsor Castle from which one half of the royal family could watch, with the finish in front of the royal box in the White City stadium where the other half of the family was waiting. This distance was 26 miles and 385 yards: the standard length of a marathon ever since.

The origin of the 26-mile run dates to a Greek messenger called Pheidippides, who ran this distance from Marathon to Athens to relate the victory of the Athenians over the Persians in 490
BC
. According to popular legend he delivered the message and then dropped dead.

It’s a heroic tale but it doesn’t hold water. Very few marathon runners die after the event, and professional ancient Greek couriers were regularly required to run twice as far.

This version of the story first appears in the work of the Roman historian Plutarch (c.
AD
45–125) more than 500 years later. He calls the runner Eucles. It seems to have become confused with the much older story of Pheidippides recorded by Herodotus, who was born six years after the battle, and whose account is the nearest we have to a contemporary one.

According to him, Pheidippides ran from Marathon to Sparta (246 km or 153 miles) to ask for help in beating off the Persian attack. The Spartans were busy with a religious festival, so he ran all the way back and the Athenians had to fight the Persians on their own. They won a resounding
victory, losing 192 men to the Persians’ 6,400. Pheidippides didn’t die.

Ultra-running is the discipline that covers any running event that’s longer than a marathon. In 1982, the American Ultra-running Association ran the authentic Pheidippides route (as agreed by a consortium of Greek scholars) and established it as the International Spartathlon in 1983. The first winner was a modern legend: the Greek long-distance runner, Yannis Kouros.

Kouros currently holds every world record from 200 to 1,600 km (125 to 1,000 miles). In 2005, he retraced Pheidippides’ complete route, running from Athens to Sparta and back.