Rethinking The Flood

Now that we know what meditation literature is, let’s sink our teeth into an example. Where better to start than a story we are all familiar with: Noah’s Ark.

The first thing we need to do is jettison our ‘story-book’ version of Noah’s Ark and actually read what the Bible says (not what we think it says). This can be an uncomfortable thing to do. You probably have a good idea of what the story is about, but sometimes what we think the Bible says is not actually what the Bible says. Let’s go over the events of Genesis 6-9, the story of Noah.

Chapter 6 starts by giving us two reasons for why God decided to flood the world. First, it starts with some sort of divine beings called “the sons of God” coming down from the heavenly realm to have sex with human women, resulting in some kind mortal/divine hybrid offspring called the “Nephilim”. After this, God saw that “wickedness was widespread on the earth and that every inclination of the human mind was nothing but evil all the time, the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth” So He decided to destroy the whole earth and everything in it. “the Lord said, “I will wipe mankind, whom I created, off the face of the earth, together with the animals, creatures that crawl, and birds of the sky — for I regret that I made them.” Despite this, God found one person who was “blameless among his contemporaries” – Noah. God warned Noah that He was going to flood the entire world, and told him to build a large boat (about half the size of a modern cruise ship). In this boat, Noah is to house his family along with 2 animals of each kind. So God preserves a single family and drowns all other humans and animals. The Bible does not say that God or Noah attempted to save anybody except for this family.

… you don’t hear the story told like that in Sunday school, do you? It doesn’t usually start with divine beings having sex with humans, does it? When kids are told this story, we just say “God was really sad that the people were mean” or something that brushes over the reality of the story. The reality is that this story is very weird and it’s very harsh. Isn’t this the same God who is called “… gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” in Psalm 145? But here He is killing every last person on earth, apart from Noah and his family. Don’t try to ignore the fact that this is a really harsh story. This should be troubling. This should challenge you.

So, what happens next? Noah’s family live inside the boat for 150 days, then it lands atop a mountain, and Noah sends out a raven and dove to test whether it was safe to leave. After several days, the dove comes back with an olive branch, signifying that it is safe to exit, and God calls to Noah and the family to leave the ark. Noah then took one of all the clean animals from the boat, and sacrificed them to God (despite the Bible never claiming the animals multiplied on the ark). God was pleased by this, and promised to “never again strike down every living thing as I have done,” despite the fact that even still “the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth onward.” God made a covenant with Noah that “there will never again be a flood to destroy the earth,” giving a rainbow as a sign of the covenant.

So we’re all done with Noah’s story, right? Well… That’s usually where the story ends, but it’s not where the Bible ends Noah’s story. After making this covenant with God, Noah planted a vineyard, “became drunk, and uncovered himself inside his tent.” Noah’s son, Ham, “saw his father’s nakedness”, so Noah cursed all of Ham’s descendants after “Noah awoke from his drinking and learned what his youngest son had done to him”

Once again, this is not quite the story you hear in Sunday School. What on earth is going on here? What did Ham do after seeing his father’s nakedness? Clearly he did something! What’s even weirder, Ham wasn’t even cursed, just his descendants! This is all so bizarre, isn’t it?

Lastly, Noah dies at the age of 950, and his story is over.

Now that we’ve gone over the story of Noah, do some of the details make you uncomfortable? I bet they do. Between an extreme example of God’s wrath, and two really weird stories about some kind of sexual activity, it sure makes me uncomfortable. But is it responsible as a reader to ignore these aspects of the story? We can’t just take out the parts of the Bible that make us uncomfortable, can we? To be frank, we don’t need to come to peace with what the Bible says, but we also can’t pretend that these things don’t exist.

I hope the simple retelling of this famous story has helped you realize that the way we think about Bible stories often differs from what the text actually says. Often we add and/or subtract details from what the Bible actually says in order to help us be more comfortable with the story. This is what I mean when I say “We need to read the Bible on its terms, not our terms.”

Over the next few weeks, we are going to re-evaluate this story in light of a few others, as well as read those stories in light of this one. I think the parallels between this story and the other stories I plan to explore will really illuminate how the authors of the Bible communicated through patterns, character archetypes, repetition, and symbolism. I hope you’re excited, because I am!

Matt

P.S. – If you are just yearning for homework (which I’m sure nobody is!), consider reading through chapters 6-9 of Genesis. Reread the flood story, and don’t gloss over all the weird details. Let it make you uncomfortable, and really ponder the text.