Read the story here in parallel versions of Genesis 6:5-22, Genesis 7, Genesis 8, and Genesis 9:1-17.
This is one of those stories that everyone knows, even if they don't know anything else about the Bible. Most of us read this as children, or saw a movie or cartoon version of it. These are so many meorable images, from the ark, to the pairs of animals coming on board, to the rainbow that they make this one of the best loved stories of the Bible.
We are still in the part of the Bible where stories are all story and no history, though there has been a lot of effort to find some historical evidence of this particular story. Partly, that's because there are so many legends of a great flood. The Greeks told the story of Deucalion and the flood, the Sumerians and Babylonians told the story of Ut-Napishtim who also built an ark, and there are many other stories from around the world about a great flood.
Geologists tell us that there have been a number of global floods but none of them happened at a time when there were people on the earth. The possible exception is a hypothetical flood created by the draining of the gigantic Lake Agassiz in North America in about 8400 BC. But, if the Genesis flood was historical, it was more likely limited to the Mediterranean region. There are a several interesting possibilities, notably, the hypothetical Black Sea flooding in 5600 BC or the tsunami created by the erruption of Thera in about 1630-1600 BC. The discussion on the flood is ongoing, as are the efforts of people to find Noah's Ark but this has not met with success. If any part of the story is historical, we can't prove it. Fortunately, the meaning of the story doesn't depend on whether it's historical or not.
The story begins with the Lord looking out over the world and despairing. Human beings have not turned out well and the Yahweh sees a need to wipe the slate clean and start over.
This is a frightening image. Knowing what we do about human nature, it's hard to believe that every single human being, except for Noah and his family, were so terrible that they deserved to be killed. That's at odds with our experience, and with many other stories in the Bible, that show that there is bad in the best of us and good in the worst. Killing everyone and starting over is a monstrous overreaction.
If you think that this doesn't sit well with the story of a just, loving, and infallible God, you're right. The people who first told this story didn't have any of those assumptions about God. They lived in the midst of a bunch of cultures whose religions taught of angry, unjust gods who considered humans as slaves or pawns. In fact, before they were called Hebrews, Israelites, or Jews, the people of the Old Testament were a part of these cultures and worshipped the same gods. Their expectations of a deity were pretty unsophisticated compared to ours.
Let's set aside our preconceptions about God for a moment and look at just what we see in the story. First, when the Lord sees that people are evil, he isn't wrathful as much as heart-broken, and regrets having created them. The word used in Genesis 6:6 is that the Lord "repents" of having made humans.
If we jump all the way to the end of the story, we see the Lord change his mind again. It seems that wiping out the human race with a flood wasn't such a good idea after all. When the Lord realizes this, he makes a pledge; a covenant with all the world, never to do this again.
When we look at the flood story, we can get a clear idea of what the people who first heard it believed about God.
1) They believed that God cared about the people he made and wanted them to live up to their potential. When this didn't happen, it caused God grief.
2) They believed that God sometimes made mistakes and sometimes changed his mind.
3) They believed that God was capable of making rash and foolish decisions, like wiping out the human race with a flood.
4) They believed that God was honest in admitting his mistakes faithful in learning from them.
If you take it literally, this is a story about God learning what it means to be God. He still has a number of flaws, but, like any first time parent, he's learning, growing, and getting better in the process.
It's a charming story that tells us more about the people who wrote it than it does about God. They were still getting rid of the baggage of the Near Eastern religions they had come from and getting used to the idea of the true God. We will see this a lot as we go through the Old Testament; some stories will have wonderfully insightful understandings of God, while others will slip back into the old understanding of a petty and angry God. In the story of Noah we get a clear picture of people taking a giant step forward in their understanding of God.
I've skimmed this story to pull out the meaning but don't worry; in the next blog, I'll go through and highlight the interesting details.
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