It was sad when the great ship went down

I was running the slides for a Sunday service and somebody started singing this song about it was sad when the great ship went down.  I knew that I was familiar with that song, but it took me a while to realise what it was, and where probably I had heard it.

It is a very simple song about, well, really about Noah's Ark.  It's sung at camps, and it's sung in Sunday School.  It is, basically because of its simplicity, a children's song.  It may have come from a spiritual or "Gospel" origin.  (It has some indications of that kind of provenance.)

Anyway, it started me thinking about the song, and the irony (or contradiction) inherent in the lyrics.  It tells, on some level of accuracy, the story of Noah's Ark.  The Lord told Noah to build an ark, and then it rained, and then everyone on the earth perished, except for Noah and his family and the animals that he had put into the ark.

So then we come to the chorus.  "Oh, it was sad (so sad),/Oh it was sad (so sad)/It was sad when the great ship went down (to the bottom of the sea)/Husbands, and wives,/little children lost their lives/Oh, it was sad when the great ship went down, down, down."

Now, of course, in the story of Noah's Ark, husbands and wives and little children *did* lose their lives.  But it wasn't when the ship went down.  The ship (well, the *ark*, if you insist) survived, and everybody *on* it survived.  It was the people who *didn't* get on the ship who all died.

Oh well.  As my church history professor told us (since we started every lecture with a hymn, generally representing the historical period that we would be talking about), we tend to sing more heresy than orthodoxy in any case.