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Vol. 24, No. 2, 2025
 
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THE FLOOD


by
ROBERT LYON

______________________________________________________

Robert Lyon is a retired clergyman who divides his time between Guelph, Ontario and Melaque, Mexico. He taught high school English, Latin, Greek and science, and served as an officer in the Canadian Armed Forces Reserve, retiring in the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. His latest book, Don't Throw Out Your Bible, is now in print.

 

The only thing that stops God from sending another flood
is that the first one was useless.
Nicolas Chamfort

In ancient Greece, the philosopher Aristotle and his famous student Plato disagreed about the relative merits of history and fiction. Aristotle favored history, because it shows you what really happened at a particular time and place. Plato favored fiction (which then generally meant stage plays), because it can show you what typically happens at any time or place. That’s why Jesus taught in parables. Which, considering who their Author was, must be not only true but divinely inspired. That’s why it’s ok that some parts of the Bible that we have mistakenly read as history are, strictly speaking, more in the nature of extended parables. They’re still true, but just not in the way we may have thought they were. That’s what we find in the story of the Flood.

The Flood story occupies the largest part of the Genesis Prologue. It covers four of the Prologue’s 11 chapters (chapters 6 to 9), so we know that the writer intended it to be really important. But we need to be sure that we’re reading it in context. That context includes not just the rest of the Genesis prologue, but the rest of the Pentateuch, and also the circumstances in which it was written, and its relationship to other Hebrew and Middle-Eastern literature. Now, that may sound a bit academic, but if what matters to us in reading Scripture is what many like to call the “take-away”, then we want to be sure that we’re not taking away any meanings that are not really there, and we don’t want to miss any meanings that really are there.

So – there is some evidence that around 5600 BC the water level in the Black Sea rose sufficiently to inundate the lands to the South – Turkey and Syria, the Mediterranean, and the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates. That’s the most recent explanation of all the Mediterranean and Mesopotamian Flood stories that have survivor heroes with names like Deucalion, Atrahasis, Ziusudra, Utnapishtim, and, of course, Noah. Some of those stories, of which archaeologists have discovered ancient copies, may have been known even to Abraham. (Check out those names in Wikipedia.) And there may very well have really been one or more actual heroic survivors behind those stories. But a lot of scholars today think that the Noah version of the story, as we have it written in Genesis, comes from the 6th Century BC, during the time of the Jewish Exile in Babylon.

If that theory is correct — and, of course, we don’t know for sure — then the Noah story was written something like 1200 years after Abraham, 800 years after Moses; and 400 years after David and Solomon. Moses is particularly significant for the Noah story because the Hebrew word for Noah’s ark, “tevah”, is the same word that the same writer uses in Exodus for the basket in which baby Moses was saved in the River Nile (2:3) – and that word appears nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible.

So it seems that what we have here is a deliberate parallel. Baby Moses was saved from drowning by a little “tevah”; Noah was saved from drowning by a really big “tevah”. Moses becomes the leader of a rescued people; Noah became the progenitor of those rescued people. And God made a covenant with Noah, just as he did with Moses, and with key individuals in the centuries before Moses and after Moses. But the covenant with Noah is not just with Noah; it’s with “[Noah] and [his] descendants and with every living creature in [his] company, with any bird or beast or animal that leaves the ark, [and] with every beast of the earth” (9:9f). Note some parallels: God’s covenant with Abraham included a promise that in Abraham all the nations of the world would be blest. God’s covenant with Moses included all Israel, and anyone who came over from the other nations to join Israel. And God promised David that he would never lack a son to sit on his throne forever – which the prophets took to mean that one day all the nations would eventually recognize the God of Israel and come to worship at Jerusalem. But that’s hardly a promise that the Jewish exiles in Babylon would have been feeling the fulfillment of in their captivity.

So the comparison between Noah and Moses is more than just a big ark versus a little ark. Moses’ little basket was a foretaste of big things that would happen later in his life. Just as Noah and his family were saved by water, so Moses and the entire covenant people were also saved by water, and from water, when the waters receded and they escaped out of Egypt through the Reed Sea, and the pursuing Egyptian army got bogged down in the mud and drowned. So what is the writer’s take-away for the Jews in Exile?

He’s saying something like this:

You exiles feel as if you’re drowning in a sea of paganism. But remember that 800 years ago God rescued our tribes out of Egypt through the sea, turned them into a nation, and made covenants with them that were to last forever. Now, you exiles know that the pagans here in Babylon have a story about a chap who escaped the Flood. Well, let me tell you the Jewish version of that story to show you what’s really going on:

It was our ancestor Noah who escaped the Flood – and since he was the only escapee, that makes him their ancestor, too – and it was the LORD, our God, not the Babylonians’ imaginary god Enki, who gave Noah the warning. And when it was all over, it was the LORD, our God, not their mother goddess Nintu, who made an everlasting rainbow covenant with the survivors. And you need to remember that the LORD, our God, does not renege on his covenants.

In the Babylonian version, Nintu swears by the stars in her necklace that she will remember the Flood; and then after all the ordeal has passed, what Nintu craves more than anything else is a drink of good Babylonian beer (more about that later). Of course, the writer knows that what the Babylonians call Nintu’s necklace is really just stuff that happens in the sky after a rain. He wouldn’t have known what we learned in Grade 11 Physics about sunlight entering water droplets at a 42° angle and getting refracted out like a prism. But he did know that this was some sort of natural phenomenon, without any goddess or necklace involved – which was pretty good science for the 6th Century BC.

So here’s the question: What was the story of Noah’s rainbow intended to say to the exiles – and what might it say to us? There’s no suggestion in the story that God is inventing the rainbow there for the first time. He takes an existing phenomenon and gives it a new meaning – maybe several layers of new meaning. It’s not a promise that there’ll never be any more floods, but that whatever floods we may experience – whether literal or metaphoric – they’re not the end of our world. There’ll still be a rainbow.

For the exiles in Babylon, that would have been hard to believe. Their “flood” was a captivity that lasted 70 years – two whole generations. And they weren’t seeing any metaphoric rainbows. But the rainbow in the Noah story was the sign of a covenant, so I think the Noah story was supposed to remind them about all the covenants that God had made with his people over the previous 1200 years. The writer wants the exiles to understand that, like the beauty of the rainbow, all the goodness God had covenanted to Abraham, and to Moses, and to David, was built right into the very design of the world God made. For all the world to be blest in the offspring of Abraham – that was part of the design. The 10 commandments that Moses received on the mountain – they were part of the design – like an operator’s manual from the manufacturer. The promise that David’s kingdom would always have an heir – that too was part of the design. Which should mean that every sort of “Babylon” must eventually fall, but those covenants are here to stay, and God will make them good.

The next thing I think the writer wanted to emphasize is the scope of the covenant: “it’s [not just] with [Noah] and [his] descendants [but] with every living creature in [his] company, with any bird or beast or animal that leaves the ark, [and] with every beast of the earth” (9:9f). Now, a promise made to “every living creature” must include even the Babylonians. That tells the exiles that despite their being in Babylon, it’s their own God who has control of the situation; their pagan captors are pawns in God’s plan.

There’s a lovely bit of Jewish one-upmanship in the story: In the Babylonian version, the mother goddess Nintu is desperate for a beer, of which there isn’t any. (Anybody remember the Ontario beer strike of 1985?) But our guy Noah planted a whole vineyard, and he has made enough wine to get drunk on! Which is a nice segué to the next point. When the writer says the covenant is “with [Noah] and [his] descendants”, he’s saying that we had better read the rest of his book – right through Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy – and maybe also Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. Because there’s a pattern that runs through the lot of them.

When I was teaching lay readers in Belize some years ago, I had only one three-hour class in which to introduce the Pentateuch. I knew they couldn’t read all five books before that class, so I prepared a synopsis for them to read instead. At the start of the class, one young woman, who had done her homework (and subsequently became an Anglican priest) announced: “I don’t like any of these people!” She had discovered the pattern: Despite God’s ongoing faithfulness and his constantly bailing them out, there was a recurring pattern of ethical failure. God chose a series of righteous heroes and made a covenant with each of them, and then every one in turn went and did something reprehensible. Starting with Noah, who got drunk, and then his son Ham, who saw, and presumably enjoyed seeing, things he shouldn’t have. Abraham let Sarah persuade him to have an heir by Hagar. Abraham lied to Pharaoh about Sarah. Isaac told the same lie about Rachel. Rachel stole her father’s household idols. Jacob had a streak of larceny. Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery. David compounded adultery with homicide. And Solomon, the wise, became a nasty and stupid old man with a harem the size of a battalion and a bunch of no-good kids. It’s no wonder that a couple of centuries later they wound up captive in Babylon!

It’s a recurring pattern, and the writer projects it all the way back to the Garden. There’s a seed of evil, however you understand it, that persistently reappears. You see it rear its head after the Flood had given them a new start. You see it again after a 40-year Exodus gave them a new generation that had not known Egypt. And the writer knows it will appear yet again after two generations have cooled their heels for 70 years in the Exile. You see the same pattern occurring in the history of the Church to the present day. Yet that writer is inspired to remind those exiles, as he reminds us, to keep the faith and not give up hope, because they are – and we are – a people under a covenant that is at the same time both inexorable and gracious.

The Noah story tells the exiles to look outside their present circumstances – to look back to God’s redemptive actions in the past, and to look forward to the future that God promises.

It says the same to us: On the corporate level it speaks about a present-day Church that has been taken captive by a society that has become sophisticatedly pagan. On the personal level, it speaks about the small but devastating floods that keep happening in our own lives. But God’s word of hope wants us to remember that, in God’s good time the Flood subsided, the tribes entered the promised land, the Exiles went home, Jesus rose from the grave, and rainbows still happen.

 

 

 

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