Genesis flood narrative

Sources

Building the Ark (watercolor circa 1896–1902 by James Tissot)

The flood is part of what scholars call the Primeval history, the first 11 chapters of Genesis.^[5] These chapters, fable-like and legendary, form a preface to the patriarchal narratives which follow, but show little relationship to them.^[6][5][7] For example, the names of its characters and its geography - Adam ("Man") and Eve ("Life"), the Land of Nod ("Wandering"), and so on - are symbolic rather than real, and much of the narratives consist of lists of "firsts" - the first murder, the first wine, the first empire-builder.^[8] Most notably, almost none of the persons, places and stories in it are ever mentioned anywhere else in the Bible.^[8] This has led scholars to suppose that the History forms a late composition attached to Genesis to serve as an introduction.^[9] Just how late is a subject for debate: at one extreme are those who see it as a product of the Hellenistic period, in which case it cannot be earlier than the first decades of the 4th century BCE;^[10] on the other hand the Yahwist source has been dated by others, notably John Van Seters, to the exilic pre-Persian period (the 6th century BCE), precisely because the Primeval History contains so much Babylonian influence in the form of myth.^{[11][Note 1]}

The flood narrative is made up of two stories woven together.^[12] As a result many details are contradictory, such as how long the flood lasted (40 days according to Genesis 7:17, 150 according to 7:24), how many animals were to be taken aboard the ark (one pair of each in 6:19, one pair of the unclean animals and seven pairs of the clean in 7:2), and whether Noah released a raven which "went to and fro until the waters were dried up" or a dove which on the third occasion "did not return to him again," or possibly both.^[13] Despite this disagreement on details the story forms a unified whole (some scholars see in it a "chiasm", a literary structure in which the first item matches the last, the second the second-last, and so on),^{[Note 2]} and many efforts have been made to explain this unity, including attempts to identify which of the two sources was earlier and therefore influenced the other.^{[14][Note 3]}

Comparative mythology

The flood myth originated in Mesopotamia.^[15] The Mesopotamian story has three distinct versions, the Sumerian Epic of Ziusudra, and as episodes in two works in Akkadian (the language of Babylon), the Atrahasis Epic and the Epic of Gilgamesh.^[16] The oldest written text is the Ziusudra epic, dating from about 1600 BCE.^[16]

Summary

Noah was a righteous man and walked with God. Seeing that the earth was corrupt and filled with violence, God instructed Noah to build an ark in which he, his sons, and their wives, together with male and female of all living creatures, would be saved from the waters. Noah entered the ark in his six hundredth year, and on the 17th day of the 2nd month of that year "the fountains of the Great Deep burst apart and the floodgates of heaven broke open" and rain fell for forty days and forty nights until the highest mountains were covered 15 cubits, and all life perished except Noah and those with him in the ark.

In Jewish legend, the kind of water that was pouring to the earth for forty days is not the common, but God bade each drop pass through Hell of Gehenna before it fell to earth, and the 'hot rain' scalded the skin of the sinners. The punishment that overtook them was befitting their crime. As their sensual desires had made them hot, and inflamed them to immoral excesses, so they were chastised by means of heated water.^[17]

After 150 days "God remembered Noah ... and the waters subsided" until the ark rested on the mountains of Ararat. On the 27th day of the 2nd month of Noah's six hundred and first year the earth was dry. Then Noah built an altar and made a sacrifice, and God made a covenant with Noah that man would be allowed to eat every living thing but not its blood, and that God would never again destroy all life by a flood.

The flood and the creation narrative

The flood is a reversal and renewal of God's creation of the world.^[18] In Genesis 1 God separates the "waters above the earth" from those below so that dry land can appear as a home for living things, but in the flood story the "windows of heaven" and "fountains of the deep" are opened so that the world is returned to the watery chaos of the time before creation.^[19] Even the sequence of flood events mimics that of creation, the flood first covering the earth to the highest mountains, then destroying, in order, birds, cattle, beasts, "swarming creatures", and finally mankind.^[19] (This, incidentally, mirrors the Babylonian flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh, where at the end of rain "all of mankind had returned to clay," the substance of which they had been made).^[20] The ark itself is likewise a microcosm of Solomon's Temple.

Intertextuality: the flood story as the reversal of creation

"Intertextuality" means the way episodes in the biblical books refer to and echo each other. Such echoes are seldom coincidental - for example, the word used for Noah's ark is the same used for the basket in which Moses is saved, implying a link between the stories of Moses and Noah, both of them divinely chosen saviours in a world threatened by water and chaos.^[21] The most significant such echo is with the Genesis creation narrative: the division between the "waters above" and the "waters below" the earth is removed, the flood covers the dry land, all life is destroyed, and only Noah and those with him survive to obey the divine command to "be fruitful and multiply."^[22]

Christianity

The Genesis flood narrative is included in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible (see Books of the Bible). Jesus and the apostles additionally taught on the Genesis flood narrative in New Testament writing (Matt 24:37-39, Luke 17:26-27, 1 Peter 3:20, 2 Peter 2:5, 2 Peter 3:6, Hebrews 11:7)^[23][24]. Some Christian biblical scholars suggest that the flood is a picture of salvation in Christ - the ark was planned by God and there is only one way of salvation through the door of the ark, akin to one way of salvation through Christ^[25][26]. Additionally, some scholars commenting on the teaching of the apostle Peter (1 Peter 3:18-22), connect the ark with the resurrection of Christ; the waters burying the old world but raising Noah to a new life^[25][26]. Christian scholars also highlight that 1 Peter 3:18-22 demonstrates the Genesis flood as a type to Christian baptism.^[27][28][23]

In the Catholic Church, literalist belief in Noah's ark and the flood narrative is neither required, nor forbidden. However, Catholic schools almost always teach evolution in science classes.

In Protestant churches more variability is found, and many, but by no means all, denominations teach a literalist stance.

Islam

The Quran states that Noah (Nūḥ) was inspired by God, believed in the oneness of God, and preached Islam.^[29] God commanded Noah to build an ark. As he was building it, the chieftains passed him and mocked him. Upon its completion, the ark was loaded with the animals in Noah's care as well as his immediate household.^[30] The people who denied the message of Noah, including one of his own sons, drowned.^[31] The final resting place of the ark was referred to as Mount Judi.^[32]

Yazidi

According to the Yazidi Mishefa Reş, two flood events occurred. The first flood involved Noah and his family, whose ark landed at a place called Ain Sifni in the region of Nineveh Plains, 40 kilometres (25 mi) north-east of Mosul. In the second flood, the Yazidi race was preserved in the person of Na'mi (or Na'umi), surnamed Malik Miran, who became the second founder of their race.^[33] His ark was pierced by a rock as it floated above Mount Sinjar, but settled in the same location as in Islamic tradition, Mount Judi.

Setting

The Masoretic Text of the Torah places the Great Deluge 1,656 years after Creation, or 1656 AM (Anno Mundi, "Year of the World"). Many attempts have been made to place this time-span to a specific date in history.^[35] At the turn of the 17th century CE, Joseph Scaliger placed Creation at 3950 BCE, Petavius calculated 3982 BCE,^[36][37] and according to James Ussher's chronology, Creation took place in 4004 BCE, dating the Great Deluge to 2348 BCE.^[38]

Flood geology

The development of scientific geology had a profound impact on attitudes towards the biblical flood narrative. By bringing into question the biblical chronology, which placed the Creation and the Flood in a history which stretched back no more than a few thousand years, the concept of deep geological time undermined the idea of the historicity of the ark itself. In 1823 the English theologian and natural scientist William Buckland interpreted geological phenomena as Reliquiae Diluvianae: "relics of the flood" which "attested the action of a universal deluge". His views were supported by others at the time, including the influential geologist Adam Sedgwick, but by 1830 Sedgwick considered that the evidence suggested only local floods. Louis Agassiz subsequently explained such deposits as the results of glaciation.^[39]

In 1862 William Thompson (later to become Lord Kelvin) calculated the age of the Earth at between 24 million and 400 million years, and for the remainder of the 19th century, discussion focused not on the viability of this theory of deep time, but on the derivation of a more precise figure for the age of the Earth.^[40] Lux Mundi, an 1889 volume of theological essays which is usually held to mark a stage in the acceptance of a more critical approach to scripture, took the stance that readers should rely on the gospels as completely historical, but should not take the earlier chapters of Genesis literally.^[41] By a variety of independent means, scientist have determined that the Earth is approximately 4.54 billion years old.

The scientific community regards flood geology as pseudoscience because it contradicts a variety of facts in geology, stratigraphy, geophysics, physics, paleontology, biology, anthropology, and archeology.^[4][42][43] Modern geology, its sub-disciplines and other scientific disciplines utilize the scientific method to analyze the geology of the earth. Scientific analysis refutes the key tenets of flood geology, which, as an idea, is in contradiction to scientific consensus.^{[44][45][46][47][48]} Modern geology relies on a number of established principles, one of the most important of which is Charles Lyell's principle of uniformitarianism. In relation to geological forces, uniformitarianism holds that the shaping of the Earth has occurred by means of mostly slow-acting forces that can be seen in operation today. In general, there is a lack of any evidence for any of the above effects proposed by flood geologists, and scientists do not take their claims of fossil-layering seriously.^[49]

Species distribution

By the 17th century believers in the Genesis account faced the issue of reconciling the exploration of the New World and increased awareness of the global distribution of species with the older scenario whereby all life had sprung from a single point of origin on the slopes of Mount Ararat. The obvious answer involved mankind spreading over the continents following the destruction of the Tower of Babel and taking animals along, yet some of the results seemed peculiar. In 1646 Sir Thomas Browne wondered why the natives of North America had taken rattlesnakes with them, but not horses: "How America abounded with Beasts of prey and noxious Animals, yet contained not in that necessary Creature, a Horse, is very strange".^[50]

Browne, among the first to question the notion of spontaneous generation, was a medical doctor and amateur scientist making this observation in passing. However, biblical scholars of the time, such as Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) and Athanasius Kircher (c.1601–80), had also begun to subject the Ark story to rigorous scrutiny as they attempted to harmonize the biblical account with the growing body of natural historical knowledge. The resulting hypotheses provided an important impetus to the study of the geographical distribution of plants and animals, and indirectly spurred the emergence of biogeography in the 18th century. Natural historians began to draw connections between climates and the animals and plants adapted to them. One influential theory held that the biblical Ararat was striped with varying climatic zones, and as climate changed, the associated animals moved as well, eventually spreading to repopulate the globe.^[50]

There was also the problem of an ever-expanding number of known species: for Kircher and earlier natural historians, there was little problem finding room for all known animal species in the ark. Less than a century later, discoveries of new species made it increasingly difficult to justify a literal interpretation for the Ark story.^[51] By the middle of the 18th century only a few natural historians accepted a literal interpretation of the narrative.^[52]

Footnotes

Bibliography

• Alter, Robert (2008). The Five Books of Moses. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 9780393070248.
• Arnold, Bill T. (2009). Genesis. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521000673.
• Baden, Joel S. (2012). The Composition of the Pentateuch. Yale University Press. ISBN 0300152647.
• Bandstra, Barry L. (2009). Reading the Old Testament : an introduction to the Hebrew Bible. Wadsworth/ Cengage Learning. ISBN 0495391050.
• Blenkinsopp, Joseph (2011). Creation, Un-creation, Re-creation: A discursive commentary on Genesis 1-11. New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark. ISBN 978-0-567-37287-1.
• Chen, Y.C. (2013). The Primeval Flood Catastrophe: Origins and Early Development in Mesopotamian Traditions. OUP Oxford. ISBN 9780199676200.
• Cline, Eric H. (2007). From Eden to Exile: Unraveling Mysteries of the Bible. National Geographic. ISBN 978-1-4262-0084-7.
• Cohn, Norman (1999). Noah's Flood: The Genesis Story in Western Thought. Yale University Press. ISBN 0300076487.
• Cotter, David W. (2003). Genesis. Liturgical Press. ISBN 0814650406.
• Finkel, Irving (2014). The Ark Before Noah. Hachette UK. ISBN 9781444757071.
• Friedman, Richard E. (1996). "Non-Arguments Concerning the Documentary Hypothesis". In Fox, Michael V.; Hurowitz, V. A. Texts, Temples and Traditions. Eisenbrauns. ISBN 9781575060033.
• Gmirkin, Russell E. (2006). Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus. Bloomsbury. ISBN 9780567134394.
• Habel, Norman C. (1988). "Two Flood Myths". In Dundes, Alan. The Flood Myth. University of California Press.
• Keiser, Thomas A. (2013). Genesis 1-11: Its Literary Coherence and Theological Message. Wipf and Stock Publishers.
• Leeming, David A. (2010). Creation Myths of the World: An Encyclopedia. 1. ABC-CLIO. ISBN 9781598841749.
• Levenson, Jon D. (2004). "Genesis: introduction and annotations". In Berlin, Adele; Brettler, Marc Zvi. The Jewish Study Bible. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195297515.
• Middleton, J. Richard (2005). The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1. Brazos Press.
• Sailhamer, John H. (2010). The Meaning of the Pentateuch: Revelation, Composition and Interpretation. InterVarsity Press.

Further reading