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.
