The Bible and Me Part VIII - Noah and the Flood

[I've struggled for a long time with my relationship with the Bible. It has been a rich source of insight and spiritual nourishment to me, but also at times, a source of deep doubt and confusion. My intention in this series is to share a little of how that relationship has developed over time. If you're a Christian and you're trying to work out your own approach to the Bible then it won't give you all the answers, but it may give you some questions and insights that could help you along the way. If you're not a believer, but you're interested in the Christian faith - or in Christians in particular - then it may give you a little insight into how some of us tick!]

[The Bible and Me Part I - Beginning to Question]
[The Bible and Me Part II - Creation]
[The Bible and Me Part III - Inerrancy]
[The Bible and Me Part IV - Scripture vs Tradition]
[The Bible and Me Part V - Job]
[The Bible and Me Part VI - The Difficult Bits]

[The Bible and Me Part VII - The Supernatural]

One of the most iconic stories in the Old Testament part of the Bible is the story of Noah. This story takes place - according to the genealogies given - just a few generations after the time of Adam and Eve. In this story, mankind has become incredibly wicked, to the extent that, "the earth was ... full of violence", and, "every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time". Because of this, God "regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled"; so troubled in fact, that He decided to send a huge flood to drown everyone so He could start again. There was one person left however - Noah - who was "blameless among the people of his time" and who "walked faithfully with God". So God asked Noah to build a big boat - a huge boat in fact - to save not just Noah and his family, but also a representative sample of all the living creatures on the earth, so that their populations could be re-established once the floodwaters had subsided.

My first observation on this story, is that God killing everyone does sound rather brutal, but if He really is a truly righteous and impartial judge and people really had become as bad as all that, then perhaps He did have a right to. We are all mortal anyway and He does hold all of life and death in His hands, so if He decides to cut our lives short and make another go of it, then maybe that is just His prerogative!

On the more positive side though, this is a story about hope: that even in the middle of such incomprehensible evil - and God's grief and anger over what His creation has become - all is not lost. Also - apart from the creation story itself - it is perhaps the earliest example in the Bible of God's concern for the whole of His creation, and not just for people. Under God's direction, Noah is perhaps the first ever example of an environmental activist!

Is it a true story though, and if not then what do we make of it? Let's take a more detailed look:

As already said, the story starts with God deciding to send a flood, but in order to preserve Noah and his family, He instructs him to build a boat. As a believer in God I'm fairly happy with this so far! It is a big boat - but then it would need to be! The dimensions given, in modern measurements, equate to about 135 metres by 23 metres by 14 metres: it's almost as big as 3 Olympic swimming pools laid end to end! It has 3 decks, which equates to a total of perhaps about 9,000 square metres of floor space. Not an easy thing to try to build all on your own! But presumably his 3 sons at least (who came with him on the ark, along with their wives) would have helped him out. And perhaps he already had some sort of construction business - even a boat-building business - with hired labour on hand to help. We're not told and we don't know.

Noah is told to take into the boat 2 of every kind of animal, along with the necessary provisions for them all - although when they're repeated, the instructions are changed to seven pairs of each "clean" animal and one pair of each "unclean" animal. For me, this is where it starts to get a little interesting. A clean animal means one that is categorised as "clean" according to the Jewish purity laws. Clean animals for example, are considered fit for human consumption, whereas unclean animals are not. But according to the Bible itself, these laws were first given to Moses, another 16 generations later on! - so how does Noah even know what a "clean" animal is? And at this point, why does God care? Unless of course, this is detail that has been added in to the story at a later date, either before or while it was being written down...

Another point probably worth considering, is how did all of the animals get to the ark? God tells Noah that the animals will come to him - fair enough - but if this really was a global flood, then kangaroos for example might've had a bit of a problem, being several thousand miles away and on the other side of an ocean! And then of course there's the problem of how the kangaroos got back to where they were supposed to be, once the flood waters had subsided...

Anyway, reading on: the animals all come to Noah, God shuts them into the boat, the rains fall and the flood waters begin to rise. The story tells us that "The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than fifteen cubits". But this is curious as well: how would Noah (or anyone else) know whether all the mountains were covered or not, and to what depth? - some of them would have been thousands of miles away! This (as well as the animal distance/geography problem, the problem of where so much water could have come from in the first place and where it all disappeared to afterwards, and the complete lack of any geological evidence for a global flood!) does beg the question of whether or not this flood - if it happened - really did cover the whole earth. After all, how would Noah (or anyone else) be able to tell whether it had or not? Noah would have had little to no idea of how big the world really was, and would almost certainly have been unaware of most of it. I think perhaps the clincher for all this though, is the Hebrew word "erets". This is the word that is translated into English as "earth" throughout this story (which for us of course is equivalent to the word "world"), but it isn't always translated like this elsewhere in the Bible. In fact, "erets" is more often simply translated as "land" or "ground", and usually means the local area, rather than the whole world - which would have been far beyond the author's knowledge anyway. As an example, later on in the book of Genesis, God tells Abraham to, "Go from your country (erets), your people and your father’s household to the land (erets) I will show you" (Genesis 12:1).

When the flood waters have subsided and Noah, his family, and the animals have left the ark, God makes a solemn agreement, or "covenant" with Noah that He will never again flood the earth (erets!), and declares to him that the rainbow will be the sign and reminder of this. I once took this to mean that God was introducing the rainbow for the first time at this point, which seemed unlikely, given what we now know about rain and physics! But it's since occurred to me that it could just mean that from now on the rainbow - which God created in the first place - would be treated by God, and should also be treated by Noah and his descendants, as a sign and reminder of this covenant.

So at face value this story does seem a little fantastical in places, but I don't find it too hard to accept that there might've been a local flood, which was nevertheless large enough to cover the tops of mountains and to cover the known world as far as Noah knew it at the time. I also don't find it too hard to imagine that God might've warned Noah about this, and may have even intended the flood as a form of judgement on the inhabitants. I can also accept that God cares enough about His world that He wanted to involve Noah in the preservation of its fauna, and was fully able to ensure that His creatures co-operated with him in this process. I can't accept though, that "erets" really means the whole world in the sense that we understand it today - for me the evidence all seems to mitigate too strongly against this.

As to whether this particular flood actually did happen - that's a different question which I don't feel fully qualified to judge. There doesn't seem to be any specific geological evidence - so far anyway - of a flood of this scale at a time and place that would fit accurately with this account, although there is a theory that a large flood occurred in the Black Sea, which could have provided the inspiration for this story, if not even been the actual source of it.

Interestingly, there is another very similar story to this one found outside the Bible, in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Both stories involve God (or the gods) sending a huge flood, but sparing one man who is told to build a boat to save both himself and all the animals. There are many other striking similarities between the two stories, as well as many differences in the details. My favourite difference concerns the reason for God (or the gods) sending the flood in the first place. In the Biblical version, God sends the flood because He is grieved by mankind's wickedness, while in the Epic of Gilgamesh (or at least in one version of it), the gods send the flood because the people have become too noisy and are keeping the gods awake!

The oldest copy we have of the Epic of Gilgamesh is on stone tablets and dates to about 1800 BC, whereas we only have much later copies of the Biblical account, meaning that scholars can only speculate - based on the contents - about when the originals were first written down. So based on the evidence, it seems we cannot say for sure whether the Gilgamesh story came first, or the Biblical version, or whether both were developed from an earlier textual or oral tradition. Many non-evangelical-Christian scholars believe that the Biblical account is the later version, and was developed from the Gilgamesh account during the Jewish captivity in Babylon in the 6th century BC, but I have not investigated this theory sufficiently to be able to form much of an opinion.

At the end of the day I am curious, but not deeply concerned about the extent to which the story of Noah is or isn't an accurate historical account. It's an interesting question and does have some significance in terms of how I read and understand the Bible, but I doubt if I will ever know for sure. There are things I can learn from the story either way though, and its historicity is not a core component of my faith.

[To be continued...]

The Bible and Me Part II - Creation

[I've struggled for a long time with my relationship with the Bible. It has been a rich source of insight and spiritual nourishment to me, but also at times, a source of deep doubt and confusion. My intention in this series is to share a little of how that relationship has developed over time. If you're a Christian and you're trying to work out your own approach to the Bible then it won't give you all the answers, but it may give you some questions and insights that could help you along the way. If you're not a believer, but you're interested in the Christian faith - or in Christians in particular - then it may give you a little insight into how some of us tick!]

[The Bible and Me Part I - Beginning to Question]

As I started to consider the idea that the Genesis creation account was a myth, I started to notice other things about the story that began to make a lot more sense. For example, God intially places Adam and Eve in a beautiful garden where all their needs are provided for, but as a result of Adam's sin, they are banished to the harsh world outside where he has to "work the ground from which he had been taken". But if the whole world was perfect, how come one bit was less perfect than the other? Had God been planning this "banishment" all along? Or does it make more sense to see the garden as a symbol of the goodness of a perfect relationship with God, which we are then excluded from when it all goes horribly wrong? Also, why is there a river flowing from Eden which separates out into four other major rivers? Rivers usually run into, not out of one another. Unless again, this is making some sort of symbolic point about the potency of this place - representing a perfect relationship with God - which is a source of the goodness of so much of the surrounding area. And where is the garden now, and what happened to the "cherubim" and "flaming sword" that God put there to guard the way back to the tree of life? There have been various speculations about its location, but it seems pretty clear that neither the tree of life, nor the sword, nor the cherubim have ever been found.

And what of the snake? Most Creationists seem to overlook this point, but if you're going to read the story literally, then read it literally! Adam and Eve were not tempted by the devil, they were tempted by a talking snake! And it is consistently referred to as "the snake" (my emphasis), so apparently there was only one of them - it didn't even have a mate! (This bit really does read like something from one of Aesop's fables!) And it seems like it must've had legs (although the text doesn't say so), or else God's subsequent curse - to "crawl on your belly" - wouldn't have counted for very much. Oh and also, as well as crawling on its belly, God told the snake it was going to "eat dust all the days of [its] life". But I don't know of too many snakes that do that...!

Or perhaps you could look at all this a different way...?: It is a common thread in Jewish and Christian literature and thought, that there are unseen and sometimes very powerful, non-human spiritual entities that play an important part in human life and history. The snake represents Satan - the adversary - who stands opposed to all of God's plans and purposes. Most Creationists accept at least this much anyway because even by their standards it makes more sense than the "literal" explanation given by the text for the snake's interference, which is simply that it was "the most clever of all the wild animals"! But when you begin to treat the whole story as more symbolic than literal, it suddenly begins to offer up other new layers of meaning. "Crawl on your belly" might not be much of a curse to a snake, but it is to a proud and powerful spiritual being - and it rings true! There are no depths to which the Adversary will not stoop. He has no honour - he abandoned all that when he decided to oppose God - hence the reason he is depicted as a snake in the first place. As for eating dust - snakes don't do that, but Satan does. There is no pleasure or fulfilment in a life devoted to destroying everything that is good and true. He is driven by jealousy and hatred and will never find satisfaction in anything he does. These are the kinds of important lessons that I think people are prone to miss, if and when they try to take the text too "literally".

There are actually two creation accounts in Genesis - a fact that is also easily missed when attempting to read this book as a straightforward historical narrative. The first account runs from the beginning of chapter 1, through to chapter 2 verse 2 (the chapter and verse divisions were added much later by Christian editors and unfortunately often bear little relation to the structure of the original text). The second account follows on from there. The distinction between the two can easily be seen by noting the different writing styles, the fact that the accounts overlap with one another chronologically, and the fact that they contradict each other in the detail (in the first account God creates plants on day 3 and mankind on day 6, but in the second account God creates Adam before any of the plants have appeared).

The second account (as just discussed) deals with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and the story of the temptation, but the first is a beautiful chiastic poem describing the 6-day creation of the world. Chiastic poems represent the subject material in a symmetrical form, and are heavily used throughout the Old Testament. This may be done for effect, or to make a story easier to remember, or possibly both. This could be an indication that a story has been passed down orally for some time before being committed to paper.

The creation poem starts with 3 days of "separating" - the light from the dark, the water from the sky, and the land from the sea (and plants appear on the land). These are followed by 3 corresponding days of "filling" - the day and night are filled with the sun and the moon, the sea and sky are filled with fish and birds, the land is filled with animals and with man (who are given the plants for food). This is the reason for the rather strange order of events, in which light is created before the sun, which is its source! It really isn't necessary (or desirable!) to invoke strange cosmological arguments in order to try to interpret this in a "literal" fashion!

[The Bible and Me Part III - Inerrancy]
[The Bible and Me Part IV - Scripture vs Tradition]
[The Bible and Me Part V - Job]
[The Bible and Me Part VI - The Difficult Bits]
[The Bible and Me Part VII - The Supernatural]
[The Bible and Me Part VIII - Noah and the Flood]

The Bible and Me Part I - Beginning to Question

[I've struggled for a long time with my relationship with the Bible. It has been a rich source of insight and spiritual nourishment to me, but also at times, a source of deep doubt and confusion. My intention in this series is to share a little of how that relationship has developed over time. If you're a Christian and you're trying to work out your own approach to the Bible then it won't give you all the answers, but it may give you some questions and insights that could help you along the way. If you're not a believer, but you're interested in the Christian faith - or in Christians in particular - then it may give you a little insight into how some of us tick!]

I was brought up as an evangelical, Bible-believing Christian and the Bible has always been a central - indeed crucial - part of my faith. Without the Bible I would probably have a completely different view of God - if I even believed in God at all. Without the Bible I would probably have no idea who Jesus was and I wouldn't be calling myself a Christian. My faith is based on mine (and others') experience, as well as on the Bible, but without the Bible I would have no framework for that faith and would probably not have had the chance to encounter, or respond to God - or Jesus - in the way that I do today.

I was taught from a very young age that the Bible was "The Word of God". Although I didn't know the technical term at the time, I was also taught that it was essentially "inerrant" - i.e. because it was The Word of God, it contained no mistakes, factual inaccuracies or inconsistencies. It was to be believed unequivocally and without question. To disobey anything the Bible told me was to disobey God himself.

As I grew up it gradually became apparent that things were not quite this simple. There were some bits of the Bible for example - mostly in the Old Testament - that didn't apply to me. The old Levitical laws about things like not eating shellfish or not mixing together 2 types of fabric, applied only to those under the old Jewish Covenant and were not rules that I was expected to follow today. OK, so that made sense - so far so good!

I also started to notice that there were some events that were recorded in the Bible more than once, and that the accounts of these didn't always seem to match up. For example, there are some quite big differences in the way the story of Jesus' resurrection is recorded across the 4 different gospels. We did an exercise once in a church youth group that I belonged to, where we attempted to reconcile the 4 accounts by taking them all apart and putting them back together again in a way that made them all fit - in order to demonstrate the fact that they were actually compatible, just told from different angles with different bits missing. To my mind though, we had to work so hard in order to do this, that it was almost as though the accounts weren't really fully compatible with one another at all...

And then there was the whole question of creation and/or evolution. It was probably in my early teens that I first started to become aware of this potential dichotomy. At that time, a popular view on this (and fairly acceptable, in the Christian circles that I moved in) was that the "days" in the Genesis creation account could just as well refer to millions of years. This was justified on the basis that, "with the Lord, a day is like a thousand years" (the Bible, 2 Peter 3:8), and also on the fact that since there was no sun right at the beginning, then who could say how long a day was?! And the order of events in the Genesis creation account more-or-less corresponds to the scientific account anyway, so they're perfectly compatible! - except that when you get right down to it, it actually doesn't...

Then when I went to University I was introduced to a rather radical idea - and because it came from a visiting speaker at our Christian Union, who otherwise seemed to believe in and know the same God that I did, and because he was also quite a high up member of the London Bible College (I think he might've been the president, but I can't remember now), I was able to treat it with a little more credence than I might've done otherwise. The idea was this: What if the Genesis creation account is actually a myth? What if it isn't even intended to be treated as a literal account? What if it's just there to teach us stuff about God and about ourselves and about how we relate to Him and to the world? What if it isn't - and isn't meant to be - a scientifically accurate, historical account?

This idea made quite a lot of sense to me. After all, it seemed very unlikely that there was anyone actually there, that far back, who was able to write - and certainly no-one who was there before Adam and Eve to witness the first 5 days! If the Genesis creation account did come directly from God himself (the only other possibility!), then it had to have been somehow revealed to someone so they could write it down. But how would God explain something like that to someone who had none of the scientific knowledge that we have today? Surely the point of it wasn't to teach science in any case, it was to teach us about our relationship with God and with the world?

This was probably the first time I seriously entertained the idea that perhaps the Bible wasn't all meant to be taken entirely literally after all (apart from things like Jesus' parables, which were obviously just stories that he told in order to make a point).

[The Bible and Me Part II - Creation]
[The Bible and Me Part III - Inerrancy]
[The Bible and Me Part IV - Scripture vs Tradition]
[The Bible and Me Part V - Job]
[The Bible and Me Part VI - The Difficult Bits]
[The Bible and Me Part VII - The Supernatural]
[The Bible and Me Part VIII - Noah and the Flood]

Outside the System?

I recently came across this post on the BBC website, discussing the influence of human hunting activity on evolution. The basic point of the article is that humans have evolved/developed predatory abilities which are far beyond those of any other organism on the planet, and that as such we represent a major threat to the rest of the system.

Normally - so the theory goes - organisms develop, in part at least, as a consequence of an evolutionary arms race between prey and predator. So carnivores for example, become faster runners or develop sharper teeth and claws, while the herbivores they prey on become faster or larger or develop tougher skin or other defences.

The problem is that humans have an incredible ability to out-think their prey, and to develop tools or technology that can get round any or all of their defences, and they have been able to do this so quickly that evolution no longer has any chance of keeping up. The consequences of this are obvious - we have already wiped out many species and seem to be well on our way to wiping out an awful lot more!

All of this raises the question though: If evolution has been such a wonderful system up until now, then what has gone wrong? This system has worked effectively for billions of years, allegedly producing living organisms from non-organic matter and then producing the mind-blowing quantities and variety of flora and fauna that we see today. Has this system finally broken in the last couple of hundred thousand years? Has it finally unbalanced itself by producing this strange new species of super-predator which somehow seems to have the capacity to destroy the whole thing?

There is another way to read this story. It's not a scientifically precise or complete way of looking at it, but in many ways it's a lot more useful. This version of the story has been around a lot longer than modern science or evolutionary theory and can be found - yes alright, you've guessed it! - in the pages of the Bible.

This version of the story says that human beings were made, "in God's image". In ancient times, long before the advent of modern communication, if a king ruled over a large empire it was common for him to put statues of himself in the places he ruled over, to remind the inhabitants of who was in charge. In the same way, according to the Bible, God has left a living statue of himself on this planet - that is, you and me! According to the Bible then, it isn't an accident that human beings have intellectual and other capacities which are far beyond those of any other creature - we've been given these capacities by God because we are here with a job to do. We've been given control of this planet and He expects us to look after it for Him, and to show the world what He is like by our wise and careful stewardship of it.

Of course it doesn't take a genius to notice that this arrangement also seems to have gone rather wrong! But the problem is with us. We know that we have the capacity to be wise and careful stewards, but we often choose to be selfish and short-sighted instead. This again, is either a sign that evolution has gone very wrong (if you believe that version of the story), or that there are other forces beyond mere evolution which are at play.

So then, are we independent creatures with the capacity for moral choice who are meant to reflect the good God who made us, but often don't and - it seems - have become estranged from Him in some way? Or are we simply evolved beings whose existence represents the fact that the impersonal system that created us has now finally over-reached itself? Or could there - possibly - be elements of truth in both versions of this story...? What do you think...?

A Modern Creation Myth

No-one knows for sure exactly how the world started, since none of us were there to see it.

The Biblical creation account in Genesis is, in my view, a God-inspired myth.  It's a story, set within the cosmos according to the way the Jews understood it at the time, which attempts to encapsulate what they knew about God, the world He created, and our place within that world.

Nowadays, modern science has uncovered a lot more about the way the world works and has advanced various theories regarding it's history.  None of these theories are complete and what we think we know is constantly being challenged and refined.

Here is a modern "creation myth" based on the generally accepted current understanding.  (I prefer to think of it as supplementing, rather than replacing the original).  I found it in Arthur Peacocke's "Paths from Science Towards God":

There was God. And God was All-That-Was. God's Love over-flowed and God said, 'Let Other be. And let it have the capacity to become what it might be, making it make itself - and let it explore its potentialities.'

And there was Other in God, a field of energy, vibrating energy - but no matter, space, time or form. Obeying its given laws and with one intensely hot surge of energy - a hot big bang - this Other exploded as the Universe from a point twelve or so billion years go in our time, thereby making space.

Vibrating fundamental particles appeared, expanded and expanded, and cooled into clouds of gas, bathed in radiant light. Still the universe went on expanding and condensing into swirling whirlpools of matter and light - a billion galaxies.

Five billion years ago, one star in one galaxy - our Sun - became surrounded by matter as planets.  One of them was our Earth.  On Earth, the assembly of atoms and the temperature became just right to allow water and solid rock to form.  Continents and mountains grew and in some deep wet crevice, or pool, or deep in the sea, just over three billion years ago, some molecules became large and complex enough to make copies of themselves and became the first specks of life.

Life multiplied in the seas, diversifying and becoming more and more complex.  Five hundred million years ago, creatures with solid skeletons - the vertebrates - appeared.  Algae in the sea and green plants on land changed the atmosphere by making oxygen.  Then three hundred million years ago, certain fish learned to crawl from the sea and live on the edge of land, breathing that oxygen from the air.

Now life burst into many forms - reptiles, mammals (and dinosaurs) on land - reptiles and birds in the air.  Over millions of years the mammals developed complex brains that enabled them to learn.  Among these were creatures who lived in trees.  From these our first ancestors derived and then, only forty thousand years ago, the first men and women appeared.  They began to know about themselves and what they were doing - they were not only conscious but self-conscious.  The first word, the first laugh were heard.  The first paintings were made.  The first sense of a destiny beyond - with the first signs of hope, for these people buried their dead with ritual. The first prayers were made to the One who made All-That-Is and All-That-Is-Becoming - the first experiences of goodness, beauty and truth - but also of their opposites, for human beings were free.