Creation Undone: Genesis 6.5-8.19, Part 1

So far, this series has been going through Genesis at a slow pace. But today, with the story of Noah and the Ark, we can speed up considerably, and take up the bulk of three chapters in just two posts. This is because this story is very well-known already, because its narrative is pretty straightforward, and because the version we have is so repetitive that it basically tells the story twice, meaning that there’s really only a chapter and a half of content rather than three.

Today I’ll focus more on the text and its cultural background; next time I’ll turn to the moral and theological implications of the story.

[Note: In keeping with the revised format of these posts, I’ll start with an integrated summary for those who aren’t interested in the details of ‘the work’.]

Integrated Summary

Like so many of the other parts of Genesis we’ve looked at, the flood story is dependent on and fully participates in broader Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) literary and cultural traditions. Flood stories abound around the world, but were especially common in Mesopotamia, which is located in a giant flood plain subject to periodic, localized, catastrophic flooding. These stories share many common features, which are shared also by the Noah story, including details that would be unlikely to be relevant to an Israelite audience. In the cultural context, in which water was a symbol of primordial chaos, floods were particularly compelling as a force of destruction, since they represent the figurative undoing of creation.

In addition to this connection to ANE legends, the Genesis flood story as we have it integrates two different texts, one using the divine name YHWH and marking time through the sacred numbers of seven and forty, the other using the general term Elohim ‘God’ and marking time on Moses’s life and the lunar calendar. While these two versions differ in details, they share a common theological viewpoint that offers a marked alternative to that of the ANE flood stories. Namely, Genesis insists that God is fully in control and rational in both the decision to undo creation and wipe out life on Earth, and to start over through Noah’s family and the animals brought onto the ark.

Text

For the text, please see your Bible of choice, or follow the link to the text here.

Experience

I have mixed feelings when I read this story. On the one hand, it’s pretty horrific. It’s a story of God killing most human life — and animal life along with it. It’s no wonder so many people today read it and think it portrays God as a genocidal psychopath. And yet, that is just a minor aspect of the story. It doesn’t go into detail at all about the nature of the sins that made God so upset, or the horrifying deaths of those left behind. The focus of the story is rather on the ark as God’s provision for the continuance of creation. I can’t help but see in it echoes of the other two main stories involving sin in Genesis, Adam and Eve in the Garden, and Cain and Abel. All three of these stories share the same basic structure: Brief description of the sin, lengthy description of the consequences, and an ending that includes mercy and grace. Only here, the mercy and grace part is not a minor part of the story, but the main point.

On another note, I also can’t help but notice all the repetition in the story and wonder what’s up with that.

Encounter

There are two main characters here, God and Noah.

Despite many contemporary readers’ feelings about God in this story, I don’t get a sense that God is particularly angry here, let alone a ‘genocidal psychopath’. At worst, God comes across as amoral. The mass destruction of life is not seen as a good or bad thing, but as an act that, from God’s perspective, is simply a solution to the problem at hand that still allows for life to continue. But even this seems to go too far, since the text shows that God is deeply grieved by this decision. Perhaps it’s less a case of God’s amorality than it is of ‘heavy is the head that wears the crown.’

For his part, Noah comes across as blandly faithful. The story actually tells us nothing about how it was he pleased God, just that he was “a righteous man, blameless in his generation” and that, like his ancestor Enoch, he “walked with God” (6.9). When God gives him the rather bizarre instructions to build the ark, Noah does it without question or comment.

Explore

For being such a long story, it’s also pretty straightforward and doesn’t bring up too many questions for me. But there are a few:

• What’s going on with all the repetitions in the story?
• How does this story connect to Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) myths and legends?
• What, if anything, is the story telling us about God’s character?

Today we’ll look at the first two of these.

Two Texts in One Story

The greatly repetitive nature of the Noah story has been noted since at least the beginnings of modern biblical scholarship, in Jean Astruc in the eighteenth century. His findings were actually one of the main drivers of modern critical study of the Bible. This is more than just a case of one story being supplemented by a different voice; rather it is “beyond dispute” that the Noah story as we have it in Genesis incorporates two separate, and virtually complete, versions of the story, generally assigned to the ‘Yahwist’ (’J) and Priestly (P) traditions (Brueggemann, cf. Carr).*

Here’s a simplified comparison (for an extended table see Carr):

	Version 1 – ‘J’	Version 2 – ‘P’
Contrast between human wickedness and Noah’s faithfulness	Gen 6.5, 8	Gen 6.9-12
God’s decision to destroy humanity	6.6-7	6.13
Instructions to build an ark	n/a	6.14-16
Instructions to bring family and animals onto the ark	7.1-4	6.18-20
Noah’s obedience	7.5	6.22
God seals the ark	7.16b	7.13-16a
‘Waters of the heavenly ocean’	7.10	7.6
Torrential rains	7.12	7.11
Notice of death of living things	7.22-23	7.21
Waters retreat	8.3	8.5

Not only do the two versions differ in how they refer to God (YHWH vs ‘Elohim’), but they also provide different instructions for the animals (with version 1 commanding Noah to save seven pairs of clean animals rather than just one), and in how they measure time (with version 1 based around seven- and forty-day intervals, and version 2 based on the New Year and Noah’s life) (Carr).

As with all findings of historical criticism, the obvious follow-up question to this is, ‘So what?’ And, as always, very little depends on these analyses. What it does show, however, is that the Noah story was well-enough known to have two separate accounts circulating in Ancient Israel, and that while they differ in details, they share the same general theological point and perspective. Unlike, say, the Genesis 1 (also generally assigned to ‘P’) and 2-3 (assigned to ‘J’) creation stories, which have different theological approaches, here the two traditions are of essentially one mind.

Floods in ANE Literature

It has to be stated at the outset that there is no geological or archaeological evidence to support a large-scale regional, let alone global, flood as described in Genesis 6-8. At the same time, it must also be stated that the motif of a global flood and its few survivors is among the most common across human cultures around the world. So there is clearly something deeply compelling to the human psyche and religious instinct about this motif (Sarna (1966) 38). If we look back at the Genesis 1 story and its ANE counterparts, we’ll remember that water was a symbol of primordial chaos in these cultures. Floods therefore represented not just a human calamity, but an undoing of creation and a return to the pre-created state of functionless ‘void’.

Nowhere was this literary trope more common than in the ANE, particularly in Mesopotamia. This Mesopotamian context stands to reason, as in Egypt flooding was cyclical, predictable, and the great blessing around which its civilization thrived, and the Levant’s rough, arid, and mountainous landscape did not make flooding a problem; but Mesopotamia rests on a giant floodplain in between and around two great rivers, the Euphrates and Tigris (Sarna (1966) 39 and (1989) 48). Archaeological evidence in Mesopotamia shows periodic and localized catastrophic flooding (Sarna (1966) 42). So it makes perfect sense that flood narratives would be prevalent in this part of the world. And indeed, the Noah narrative in Genesis shows very close ties to not one ANE text, but to several related stories, including the stories of Atrahasis, Utnapishtim (found in the Epic of Gilgamesh), Ziusudra, and Xisuthros (a later (3rd C BCE) Greek version of the Ziusudra story) (Carr, Sarna (1966) 40, Sarna (1989) 48). The prevalence of these stories could simply reflect the common issue of flooding in Mesopotamia, or could all derive from one particularly bad flood. (If it’s the latter, the main suggestion places this event in Shuruppak, a Sumerian site in what is now central Iraq, that shows evidence of a devastating flood just after 3000 BCE. The city is linked in one way or another to characters in all of the Mesopotamian flood stories (e.g., Ziusudra was a king of this city and Utnapishtim was also said to be a resident of it) (Sarna (1989) 48).

The ANE flood stories are of a common type and share many features, but seem more to have existed in a web of narrative connections than simple dependence of one story upon another. As such, they have many common, but few universal, elements. Some of these common features include the gods wanting to destroy humanity (Ziusudra, Atrahasis, Noah), the hero belonging to the tenth generation (Xisuthros, Noah), a warning to one who found favour with the gods (Ziusudra, Noah), instructions to build a large boat (Utnapishtim, Xisuthros, Noah), exact design specifications and instructions on how to save the animals and shut the door (all), and the sending of birds to monitor the receding flood (Utnapishtim, Xisuthros, Noah) (Sarna (1989) 48-50, Sarna (1966) 44-46, Carr).

So then, the Noah story’s connection to ANE literature is beyond question. But as we’ve seen throughout this series, Genesis is never a passive recipient of these traditions; rather, it shapes and reframes them within the unique worldview of Israelite religion. Against its ANE forebears, the Noah story emphasizes God’s moral purpose in flooding the earth, God’s omniscience and omnipotence (by contrast, in some ANE versions, the gods are shocked and terrified by the forces they’ve let loose (Sarna (1966) 48), and the complete lack of human agency and decision-making in the story. And of course, it is monotheistic in orientation.

That about does it for the background of the flood story. Next time, we’ll look at the meatier issues of what the story tells us about God.

 

* Please see the series bibliography for details.