Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

Some time ago, in the mythic past before history proper began, the world was in a sorry state. People were shamelessly doing murders, half-divine beings roamed chaotically about, it was a mess. News of this reaches the heavens, and rather than try to fix things, the Divine realm opens up the cosmic sluicegates and unleashes a flood upon the earth. All the land animals die; civilization is obliterated; creation is all but undone. Only the tiniest of human groups — just a single family – survives the onslaught, and when the waters recede, they come down from their mountain, send up a prayer, and then, after receiving a Divine blessing of plenitude, set about the task of repopulating the earth.

I’m talking, of course, about the flood myth in the first book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

For those unfamiliar with it, Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a magisterial account of the whole mythological history of the world to his own time, from the creation of the earth right up thru the deification of Julius Caesar. Even if you haven’t read it, you’ve almost certainly encountered stories recounted in it, whether of Icarus flying too close to the sun, Daphne turning into a tree to escape Apollo, or Narcissus falling in love with his own reflection.

Ovid isn’t inventing these stories out of whole cloth, by and large — his tellings are based on earlier recountings of the same stories, both in formal literature and in the ambient awareness of his own cultural milieu — but he’s certainly telling them in his own way. He’s an enthusiastic poet, and loves to flesh out his tellings with a degree of narrative detail that you don’t always find in ancient sources. Homer might simply tell you that this river famously flooded once; Ovid is going to describe each stage of the water overflowing its banks, and is probably going to throw in a couple fishermen frantically trying to dig their bait boxes out of the mud to boot. His verse is lively and funny, sometimes to the point of impropriety. When Pyramus stabs himself in a fit of grief, for example, Ovid describes the blood splurting out all over the place like water from a busted pipe. It’s that kind of poem.

He brings this humor to the flood narrative, too. As the waters swell up over the land, he describes a farmer stuck in a little boat, floating up above the fields where he had been ploughing just the day before. Now, instead of shoving earth around with a hoe, he’s shoving water around with an oar, to little avail. We certainly don’t have any images like that in the flood story in Genesis.

This isn’t an arbitrary comparison. There’s good reason to believe that Ovid’s flood narrative is, at some remove, ultimately based on the Genesis narrative — not just the general form of the flood myth you can trace back to Ancient Sumer, but the actual redacted text of Bəreishit [a]. I say “at some remove” because there’s no reason to think that Ovid actually read the Bible. Certainly, there’s no reason to think he knew Hebrew, but even in translation, Torah wasn’t exactly a bestseller in early Imperial Rome. The influence here is the kind of glacial cultural osmosis that unfolds over centuries.

[a] There’s a thoro version of the argument laid out in Alan HF Griffin, “Ovid’s Universal Flood”, Hermathena 152 (Summer 1992): 39–58.

The kind of osmosis, in fact, that produced the account in the Torah. If you start reading commentaries on Parashat Nó’aḥ, it won’t be long until you encounter a discussion of the Biblical flood story’s origins in earlier Mesopotamian stories featuring a guy named Utnapishtim or Ziusudra. These commentaries, understandably, treat the telling in this parashah as the endpoint of a long process of telling and re-telling, but Ovid’s version reminds us that it’s not. The version in Bəreishit is a snapshot of this ancient story at one moment in time, but it kept growing and changing and crossing cultural borders from there. It found its way to the Greeks, and then to Ovid, and then to a million other places from there. Parashat Nó’aḥ isn’t the end of this story’s story; it’s just a stop along the way.

We haven’t talked about a word yet; let’s talk about a word.

When the casements of the heavens and the deeps are closed and the waters start to recede from the face of the earth, the ark Nó’aḥ built comes to rest עַל הָרֵי אֲרָרָט | al harei Ararat | “on the mountains of Ararat” (Bəreishit 8:4). A lot of place names in this part of Tanakh are hard to pin down precisely, but the Ararat mountains are generally accepted as being a range situated in present-day Armenia. The writer(s) of Bəreishit might not have meant specifically the present-day mountain identified as Mt Ararat starting in the Middle Ages, but it’s in more or less the right neck of the woods.

Remember above how I mentioned that, in his flood story, Ovid throws in a line about a farmer rowing a boat over the fields he once had ploughed? Specifically, it’s line 294 of Book I, where he describes a guy in a boat floating over land ubi nuper ararat | “where he had recently ploughed”.

One word there might jump out at you.

The Latin verb that means “to plough” is arare. To change this to the right tense for Ovid’s line, you would standardly say arauerit [b]. There is, however, a standard shortening you can use to change arauerit to ararat. Ovid is not making up a form here out of thin air; this is standard Latin grammar.

[b] Or araverit if you’re not a freak like me.

But it’s not exactly a standard Latin word. The Perseus Digital Library hosts, among other things, an online collection containing every classical Latin text currently published. All in all, it runs to a little more than ten million words. And in all those ten million words, this contracted form of ararat shows up exactly once, right here, in a story written by a poet who spent a lot of time absorbing earlier mythological sources, a story about a cataclysmic flood, a story that ultimately derived from the flood story in Bəreishit, where Ararat is where the ark comes to ground. That seems like one hell of a coincidence. Is it?

Well, maybe. Again, there’s no particular reason to think Ovid read any part of the Hebrew Bible in translation. Ararat is a perfectly legitimate Latin verb, and given the sheer volume of text we have from Ancient Rome, it’s not really that surprising to find one unlikely coincidence like this [c]. Ten million is a lot of words! If it is a reference, it’s a strange one — it’s not like he’s going “the only humans left alive were on Mt Parnassus, which the Hebrews call Ararat”, he’s just dropping in a verb that sounds like the name of a mountain in a similar story from a relatively distant culture that essentially no one in his audience would likely have read. It’s a weird thing to do.

[c] And, not for nothing: The uncontracted form, arauerit, also only shows up once in the Perseus Latin corpus.

But artists are frequently weird people.

There’s this Romantic-era vision of the artist as a kind of mad prophet, receiving inspiration from some otherworldly muse and then delivering them to the earthly realm in an inexplicable fit of genius. This is, mostly, not how artists work, and getting away from this notion has, mostly, been a great boon for various fields of artistic analysis. By and large, artists make deliberate, thought-out choices in making their work; if you want to understand a text, it’s usually much more fruitful to begin by assuming that any features that baffle you were put there for a reason, and you can open a lot of broad vistas by sussing out what that reason is. This is in no small part the core of the activity I’m describing as bug analysis in this project. Bug analysis sticks to the text. It asks what} is there and why it might be there, and I think those are questions worth pursuing groundedly, with a careful eye towards specific evidence.

And yet. Artmaking is also not a purely rational activity. Putting in a microscopic reference that no one on earth will catch is a pretty weird thing to do. It’s also something I’ve done myself. I used a friend’s rare neopronouns in a psalm translation in my siddur as a kind of hidden benediction. I put a six-word fragment from Cymbeline (one of Shakespeare’s (frankly) justifiably more obscure efforts) in an opera libretto because I saw a production where those six words just shattered me. There’s one specific chord from Doctor Atomic I’ve dropped into any number of my pieces. I suspect I’m not the only artist ever to work this way.

Why do these things? Because I like them. Because I think they’re funny. Because I understand my work as being woven inextricably together with all the work that’s come before me. Because I want to share an inside joke with a dearly beloved in plain view of the whole world. Because making things is hard, and the blank page is daunting, and sometimes I just need to feel like I’m not alone in grappling with the vagaries of the creative process.

If you were to go over my entire creative output with a fine-toothed comb, you’d probably find a lot of things that could be micro-references like this. Some of them would be real, put there deliberately by me. Some of them would be unconscious borrowings, moments where I show my influences with maximal transparency. Some of them would be actual coincidences springing from the fact that there are only so many words, only so many notes. My memory is imperfect; even I couldn’t tell you exhaustively which ones are which.

These little linkages between works are thin gruel for academic argument. They’re not sturdy enough to hang much on, analytically, even when they’re real.

But there’s an aspect of art that goes beyond analysis. There’s no evidence that Ovid read Genesis, but it’s just possible he could have. The Torah was translated into Greek a few hundred years before his work, and there was a longstanding Jewish community in Rome itself by the time Ovid was born. Unlike Latin translations, which substitute it for Armeniae, the Greek translation keeps Ararat as the place where Nó’aḥ ran aground. He could have encountered the Biblical version directly, and been delighted to discover he could sneak in some wordplay in the middle of his aside about a hapless farmer. That doesn’t mean it did happen, but it isn’t wholly outside the realm of possibility. Bug analysis may be right to ignore this when analyzing Ovid’s text, but I think as humans we lose something ourselves to only what careful analytic scrutiny can support.

There is a joy to the inexplicable mysteries of art. There is a richness to encountering something that has no explanation. Commentaries — like this one! — usually strive to explain, but the point of art is not the explanation, but the experience. I am not going to claim that Ovid’s ararat is a deliberate reference to Bəreishit’s, an echo of G-d instructing us to read these two texts as one. But knowing about this echo deepens my experience of reading each one in its own right. It keeps me alive to the strangeness of life and the happenstance of art. I don’t understand everything that happens in my life; art without mystery would be a poor vehicle to explore that reality. Sometimes you have to leave the bugs behind.