A New Beginning: Genesis 8.20-9.17

The two most recent posts in this series exploring the first eleven chapters of Genesis looked at the flood story, There we saw that Genesis played with familiar stories and symbols to say something about God, namely that God is in control, deliberate, and always leavens punishment with grace. Today we’ll see that in the aftermath of the flood, this last piece is heightened, as God blesses creation anew and promises never again to destroy it.

Integrated Summary

In the symbolism of Genesis, the flood was an act of un-creation, with the primordial waters of chaos covering the earth once again. Here, the aftermath of the flood is presented as a new creation: The waters are once again gathered together, the land once again emerges and produces vegetation. And once again, the animals and people are brought forth to live in relationship with each other and with God. God reestablishes and reinforces both the blessing given to humanity in the garden, to ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth,’ (9.1, cf. 1.28), and humanity’s creation in the image of God (9.7, cf. 1.26-27). But, in full recognition of both the reality of sin and humanity’s post-garden status as moral agents, the circumstances are different. The terms of relationships between God and creation, humanity and the animals are now formally defined in covenant. The wild animals are now offered to humanity as food and will now see humans as predators and respond to them in fear. And God steps back and insists that the responsibility for justice on earth now rests in human hands. With this new set of relationships in place, God commits to never again wreak destruction upon the earth. God’s promise never to punish the planet for human wickedness stands as a stark counterpoint to those in every generation tempted to see every natural disaster as divine punishment that God doesn’t work that way. There is a shift away from the scheme of natural law, crime, and punishment (with grace) that we’ve consistently so far in these stories. Instead we see a new scheme of God’s eternal faithfulness, providence, and solidarity with creation, even in the face of evil. But, of course, and very relevant to our current age, God never says the world cannot be destroyed by human evil.

Text

For the full text, check out your Bible of choice, or follow this link: Genesis 8.20-9.17.

This text involves three distinct sections:

• 8.20-22 completes the ‘J’ version of the story with Noah performing a burnt offering and YHWH promising never to destroy creation again.
• 9.1-17 completes the ‘P’ version in two parts:
  • 9.1-7: God blesses Noah and his sons, restoring but also revising humanity’s original instructions
  • 9.8-17: God outlines the details of these new relationships in the form of a covenant.

Experience

After a few stories that have been weird or unsettling, this text stands out as being quite beautiful and encouraging. What is particularly remarkable is God’s absolute commitment to starting fresh — not just restoring creation and promising not to destroy it again, but also rebooting it on different grounds: Animals are now offered to humans as food, and God takes a step back from taking vengeance for murder, making humanity responsible for maintaining justice. It’s as though God has given up on a certain original vision for creation, accepting sin and death as now a given of life, and now accepts humans as moral agents and giving us the responsibility that goes along with it. This is something I’d like to know more about.

Encounter

This passage has only two characters, God and Noah. It starts with what is Noah’s only sign of initiative in the whole story. So far, he’s always been responsive to what God has commanded. Here, he takes it upon himself to make the burnt offering upon disembarking. This shows a natural religious instinct in him, to recognize God as God.

God seems changed here. Something about the flood caused God to make a very different choice for God’s relationship with creation moving forward. This is definitely something worth exploring further.

Explore

A few questions have arisen so far that will guide the ‘Explore’ section of the story:

• If the flood story represented an ‘un-creation’ event, how does today’s passage mark a ‘re-creation’?
• Is there any significance to Noah’s offering that is lost across time and culture?
• What can be said about the covenant God makes with Noah and creation?
• What does this tell us about God?

Re-Creation

Flooding was a particularly symbolic form of destruction in a culture where water was a symbol — and understood to be even a remnant of — primordial chaos. The flood was symbolically an act of un-creation, a restoration of that primordial uncreated, formless, and functionless state (Walton (2001).* It’s likely no accident, then, that the flood story ends by following the pattern of Genesis one: the waters recede, dry land emerges, vegetation grows, and animals and humans are brought out. And now, this brave new world is blessed, and the image of God in humanity reaffirmed (Walton (2001), Brueggemann). But this is no return to Eden. Humanity is changed and the world is changed with it. New kinds of relationships are required in the new world.

It’s notable that the blessing (9.1) and image (9.6) from Genesis 1.26-28 are reaffirmed now in humanity’s ‘fallen’ state. Even as God is promising not to destroy the earth again, God calls “the inclination of the human heart … evil from youth” (8.21). This double consciousness speaks so profoundly to the human experience as we know it. Any ideology which diminishes human dignity in any way strikes us as inherently evil; yet any overly positive ideal of human possibility strikes us as inherently naive. We see this front and centre here. As Brueggemann put it, “Hope for the future is not premised on possibility thinking or human actualization. Hope will depend on a move from God.” And God does move: From now on, God promises to deal with rebellious creation “with an unlimited patience and forbearance” (Brueggemann, cf. Carr, Sarna (1989) 59). “Never again,” says God when faced with the aftermath of the flood’s devastation.

Noah’s Offering

Immediately upon exiting the ark, Noah built an altar to YHWH and “took of every clean animal and of every clean bird, and offered burnt-offerings on the altar” (8.20). But, knowing that sacrifices carried a wide range of meanings in the Hebrew sacrificial system, it’s natural to wonder what exactly this sacrifice signified for Noah: Was it a thanksgiving offering in light of his deliverance from the flood? A sacrifice seeking forgiveness of the sins of humanity before the flood? Or something else entirely? The word used here, `olah signified a ‘whole burnt offering’, a sacrifice where the whole animal was burned, rather than part of it being reserved for human consumption (Sarna (1989) 59, Carr). Whole burnt offerings were offered in many different circumstances, so making a precise determination here impossible. But the general sensibility seems to be something like consecration, acknowledging something — the day, a new life, a deliverance from danger, or conversion — as belonging properly to God. If we accept Brueggemann’s reading of Genesis 3-6, in which the main problem is not moral or ethical but theological — creation refusing to properly acknowledge God as God — then this motivation behind the sacrifice makes complete sense: It’s Noah offering this fresh start and renewal of creation to God, “making a fresh announcement that God is genuinely acknowledged as God” (Brueggemann).

It should also be noted that a post-flood sacrifice was a common part of Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) flood stories. The function could not be more different, though, here. In the ANE stories, the blundering gods destroyed humanity forgetting they relied on humans to provide them with food. So, they are relieved when the survivor of the flood is able to make a sacrifice and alleviate their hunger (Walton (2001), Walton & Keener). Here, the sacrifice prompts God’s promise never to destroy the earth again. So, while in ANE legends, the sacrifice is about meeting the gods’ needs after their shortsightedness, in Genesis 8, it signifies God’s pleasure in creation and a turn in God which humbly places God’s desires within the context of human moral responsibility and freedom (Brueggemann, Walton & Keener).

The Noahic Blessing & Covenant

The changed relationship between God and creation following the flood is shown in both a blessing (9.1-7) and a covenant (9.8-17).

The blessing portion begins and ends by restating the blessing from Genesis 1.28, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth,” and the reclaiming the statement of the image of God from Genesis 1.26-7, “for in his own image God made humankind.” But where in Genesis 1, only plants are given to humanity as food, now “moving things that live” are given. This is generally assumed to mean that formerly vegetarian humans can now eat meat (e.g., Sarna (1989) 59), but Walton (2001) makes the case that there has been a functional assumption in the text until this point that livestock were also used as food and that this text expands meat consumption to include hunting. Either way, there is a new relationship introduced into human relations with animals, namely that of predator and prey, and therefore fear. This shows that God recognizes the further degradation that has happened away from the initial vision of creation as a peaceable kingdom. With God’s promise never to destroy the earth for human wickedness comes a new human responsibility to protect human life and enact justice (Walton (2001)). As Sarna notes, the demand here for capital punishment as a response to murder is actually harsher than what is found in surrounding ANE legal codes ((1989 61). He makes a compelling argument that this is the result of Genesis’s insistence that all human life is of equal value, since the laxer stipulations in ANE codes were based on the belief that some human lives were more valuable than others (Sarna (1989) 61). (He also notes that despite this, ancient Jewish judges were very reluctant to enact the death penalty because of that same value placed on human life.) This passing of the torch of justice to humans is a natural outcome of humanity’s becoming independent moral agents in Genesis 3; with the adult knowledge of good and evil comes with it the adult responsibility of working for justice in the world.

God then establishes a covenant, a formal agreement between two parties that defined the terms of their relationships, not unlike a treaty or contract. This covenant is unique for the wide variety of parties involved: it is not made with Noah or his descendants, but with them and “every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every wild animal.” Anything with the breath of life is therefore understood to be a suitable covenant partner with God (Bauckham 183, Brueggemann). This covenant repeats the promise of 8.20-22, that “never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth” (9.11). It is marked out by the rainbow as a sign. While the rainbow works perfectly fine as a functional sign, a more literal interpretation of the image is suggested by comparison with ANE legends. The bow was part of the armor of warrior gods throughout the area (Walton (2001). And in one poignant parallel, in the Enuma Elish, Marduk hangs up his bow in the sky as a sign of his victory over Tiamat (Sarna (1966) 58); here, God hangs up the bow too, but as a reminder not of victory, but of reconciliation, and God’s eternal commitment to peaceful relations with creation (Sarna (1966) 59, Brueggemann).

God in the Aftermath

As we saw above, this passage marks a dramatic change in how God relates to creation. This change is not due to a fundamental change in creation, but in a commitment on God’s part to respond to the world’s rebellion and strife with grace and forbearance. In a sense, this self-restraining vision of God, the God who approaches the world with infinite compassion and grace, is the first giant step in the biblical tradition towards the humble God we see in the prophets and later the New Testament (Brueggemann). The new relationship God builds with humanity is not unlike that a spouse who has been cheated on might make in order to reconcile and save their marriage. The relationship is seen as valuable and worth saving, but it will never be what it was. Interestingly, this is precisely the metaphor used for God and Israel in the prophets — God as the cuckolded husband welcoming back his faithless wife. In Christianity, this same divine humility in the face of creation comes to its fruition in the self-sacrificial life and death of Jesus (Philippians 2.5-11). This is to say that the change in God in this story is a lasting one. Yes the philosophical questions of God’s apparent mutability and the theodicy of the flood remain, but we should be clear on the intention of this story: Whatever happened in this distant past, God is committed to this “never again” and establishes a new way of being in relationship with creation (Brueggemann).

Challenge

From ancient times to today, it has been common for people of faith to interpret calamity, both personal and collective, as divine punishment. We see this language return every time an earthquake or hurricane or wildfire wreaks its destruction. But if there is one thing at all that the Noah story is trying to tell us, it’s that this is not how God works anymore. God has hung up the bow and is committed to doing things another way. As Brueggemann puts it, from that point on “God is not preoccupied with himself but with his covenant partner, creation.” And again,:

The one-to-one connection of guilt and punishment is broken. God is postured differently. From the perspective of this narrative, there may be death and destruction. Evil has not been eradicated from creation. But we are now assured that these are not rooted in the anger or rejection of God. The relation of creator to creature is no longer in a scheme of retribution. (Bruggemann)

All this is to say, that whenever someone blames sin — or more commonly, some defined group of ‘sinners’ — for natural disasters, we can and should rightly ignore them and put them in their place, as people of faith as much as people of science. That’s not just how God works.

Expand

So then how does all this contribute to our understanding of the story and Genesis more broadly? Thus far in Genesis, since the breaking of the shalom — the peaceful wholeness — of the garden, there’s been a pattern of sin leading to a punishment mitigated by grace. With this story, and God’s commitment to a new relationship with the created world, the grace takes priority. Never again will God destroy the earth and life upon it. And in every generation, this is the promise to all of us, no matter how bad things seem. In the depths of exile, the prophet wrote:

This is like the days of Noah to me: Just as I swore that the waters of Noah would never again go over the earth, so I have sworn that I will not be angry with you and will not rebuke you. For the mountains may depart and the hills be removed, but my steadfast love shall not depart from you, and my covenant of peace shall not be removed, says the LORD, who has compassion on you. (Isaiah 54.9-10)

Already with just this one passage, we see in the Old Testament a greater theological importance to this passage than to Genesis 3 and the fall! In the end, the flood story is not a reminder of God’s anger or amoral justice, but becomes a powerful symbol of God’s grace and compassion. At least where God is concerned, “Never again” means “never again.” Ever.

 

* Please see the series bibliography for details.