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SAMIASA:To life before it. Ah! smilest thou still in scorn?Turn to thy Seraphs: if they attest it not,They are none.Aholibamah, own thy God!AHOLIBAMAH: I have ever hailed Our Maker, Samiasa,As thine, and mine: a God of Love, not Sorrow. (1.3.455-60).Earlier, Aholibamah refers to “the Almighty giver /Who folds in clouds the fonts ofbliss and woe” (1.1.117-8), combining joy and sorrow into the one godhead. Later,having encountered much more woe in the potential loss of Samiasa, she constructsthis distinction between images of God, and Japhet possibly learns from her, when helater calls upon the Deity to “be thou a God, and spare”. In doing so, Aholibamah andJaphet both take the Idealist step of questioning the true divinity of a god who couldbe so unsympathetic to humanity as to inflict the Flood upon the world. The dramacontrasts the Idealist image of God with its own ‘realist’ image of God, making theformer look far more moral than the latter.Even such apparently minor details as the person of Japhet’s friend Irad contribute tothe attack upon dogmatism. The identity of this character is not very clear: he is notone of Noah’s sons in Genesis, 553 and the Dramatis Personae of Heaven and Earthlists “Irad” as a separate figure from “Noah and his Sons”, but Irad does speak toJaphet of “our father’s herds” and “our tents” (1.2.31, 40). This, however, iscomplicated by the fact that Noah’s son Shem refers to Japhet as ‘going forth to meetwith Irad’ (1.2.84-5), which suggests that Irad and Japhet do not live in the sameplace. Irad’s possessives could be exclusive of his audience, thus meaning “our [butnot your] tents”, with “father” referring, as in common in biblical texts, to someonemore distant than ‘immediate male ancestor’; it could even be Methuselah, Noah’sgrandfather, who died in the year of the Flood, and would then be the patriarch of theextended family. 554 It is most likely that Byron is not rewriting the name of one ofNoah’s sons without any explanation of the fact, and so Irad is not going into the Ark.553 The third son is Ham, who does not appear in this drama (Genesis 5:32).554 Q.v. Genesis 5:26, 28, and 7:6.354