The Myth of the Great Flood

"WTF? (Why the Flood)" Part One: I want to explore the story of Noah, an Ark, and an earth-resetting flood. Care to join me?

A TERRIBLE STORY TURNED CHILDREN’S DELIGHT

Is there any ancient story more horrifying and yet also more marketed-to-children than the story of Noah’s ark?

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If you grew up in the church (especially Sunday School) then you know well that which I speak of. Every flannel graph had the paper boats, animals, and old white people. Each bucket of toys had variations of plastic boats and toy animals. Somehow, we’ve managed to take a story about the genocide of all of humanity and most of the animal kingdom and turned it into a fluffy tale with happy rainbows.

For the next few weeks I want to dust off this ancient story, look at it with fresh eyes, and discern what (if anything) it has to say to us today.

If Bible stories are your jam, then welcome to the party.

WHY TALK ABOUT NOAH

As a progressive Christian I’m particularly interested in ways to read, think about, and interpret the Bible that honor the ancient wisdom of the past, but also gets properly contextualized for the world we live in today.

In my more evangelical days, the simpleton approach to the Bible was to assume that pretty much everything in it should be read and understood literally (well, except moments like, “Give away all you have to the poor,” or, “it’s impossible for rich people to enter the kingdom of heaven.” We had a funny way of abstracting certain kinds of words, didn’t we?) So when it came to the story of the worldwide flood in Genesis 6-9, like the Creation stories that proceed it we were taught that these are literal, historical accounts of things that actually happened.

It’s worth pointing out right away that such an understanding of the story of Noah’s Ark is super sketch. We’re left holding a smoking gun of a God who doesn’t mind killing off the entire human race.

That should be a thought that wakes up every sleeping church goer.

In opposition to such a literal reading then, when many people shift away from religious fundamentalism it’s not uncommon to find ourselves swinging the pendulum the other way in response. This typically looks like an outright dismissal of stories like this altogether. Seen as stuffy old stories from thousands of years ago, told by unintelligent cave people, it is sometimes questioned why we’d want to preserve stories like this at all—let alone read or teach from them.

And yet, here I am.

A sucker for this kind of punishment.

An enjoyer of walking that line between Bibliolatry on one side, and a complete dismissal of sacred texts on the other.

So for better or worse I’m gonna dive in to the waters, hope not to drown, and hope to not drag y’all with me. Instead, maybe we’ll discover some interesting insights in to how ancient Israelites understood God, themselves, and one another.

Which, as it turns out, are three things I’m still infinitely curious about today.

ABOUT GENESIS

Before we get to the flood story in Genesis 6-9, a quick word about Genesis as a whole.

You can break up Genesis in to two big chunks. Chapters 12-50 describe how the people of Israel came to be (with Chapter 12 being the calling of Abraham, the founding Father of Israel.) After that you get familiar stories such as Isaac and Ishmael, Esau and Jacob (who eventually had a name change to “Israel”), and the story of Joseph’s brothers selling him to slavery. Genesis ends by setting up the book of Exodus where Moses frees the Hebrew people from the slavery of Pharaoh. In fact, many scholars would say that Exodus is the most important book of the Bible (and Genesis is merely the prologue laying the foundation to get there).

Chapters 1-11, then, give a kind of Big Picture account for how the ancient Israelites understood the Creation of the World, and, more specifically, why they believed that their God (Yahweh) was calling them out for special purposes.

The stories found in these chapters are the Israelite’s theological history of the world (which is not the same thing as an historical/factual history). Genesis 1-11 provides the complex, problematic environment in which Israel’s faith and life are to be understood.

They are, you might say, Hebrew Myths intended to establish the foundation for how Israel understood God, Creation, and their place in it.

Okay, let’s pause for a quick word about that word, myth.

MYTHS: WHAT THEY ARE AND AREN’T

In popular parlance, the term “myth” implies falsehood. A story that is not real or true. But those types of stories would be more accurately called fables or legends.

The term myth, especially when dealing with ancient civilizations (such as these Old Testament stories), ought not be conflated with fable or legend. Rather, as Joseph Campbell put it, “Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life… it is the way to talk about that which cannot be known or named.”

Read that again: Myths are a way to talk about that which cannot be known. We tell myths as a way to try and explain or describe our external experiences in a way that aligns with our internal realities. Myths have been the founding narratives that people tell to help explain the reason for their existence and how they should live within the world around them.

It’s not that the events of a myth did or didn’t happen, it’s that the truth—embedded in and revealed by the myth—happens.

Put another way, myths may or may not be “real” stories, but they do reflect what was believed to be “true.”

So to call the story of Noah and the Flood “myth” is to elevate it to something higher than just “a story that actually happened.” Its “actual-happenedness” is not the point.

The better questions to ask are why was this story told, and what might have it meant to those who heard it?

A MYTH AMONG MYTHS

Ancient civilizations had their own unique myths to describe their beliefs about the foundation or the creation of the world. The ancient Isrealites were no exception to this, and they emerged as a unique people group amidst a culture of many competing myths.

Walter Brueggemann reminds us that the Biblical literature “did not exist in a cultural vacuum, but in lively engagement with its context.” In other words, the writers of the earliest chapters of Genesis did not lock themselves away in a cave and emerge only after having information beamed into their brains by God. No, they were telling and refining and preserving their stories in the context of other culture’s stories.

Brueggemann insists that asking about the historicity of these old, Hebrew stories is the wrong question,

“Rather, these materials may better be understood as complex, artistic attempts to articulate the most elemental presuppositions of life and faith in Israel, attempts that understood the world in a Yahwistic way. The end result of the interpretative process is a text that provided an imaginative context for the emergence of Israel in the midst of older cultural claims, visions, and affirmations.”

So when we read ancient stories (especially those in Genesis 1-11, which includes Noah and the Flood), we should be trying to ascertain what it was these ancient followers of Yahweh were trying to articulate about their God that set him apart from the other gods. As well as listening to how they saw themselves as distinct peoples set apart from other tribes and cultures.

Also, keep this in mind: the earliest Hebrew people were polytheists. Meaning, they, like everyone else back then, assumed there were multiple gods. Israel’s theological trajectory began with the insistence that their god, “Yahweh,” was the MOST High God (e.g. “You shall have no other gods before me.”), and then over time their theological intuitions evolved to reflect monotheism (there is only ONE God… THEIR God).

This is important because it informs how us readers—some three thousand years later—ought be hearing these kinds of stories. They were stories told to illuminate deeply held beliefs about what is true, as a way to contrast against other culture’s stories.

Less historical, and more theological, these myths give us insight into the kinds of conversations being had by ancient civilizations as they fought—both psychically and metaphysically—to exert their views on to those around them.

Sometimes we even get the gift of multiple surviving myths from different cultures. When that’s the case we can compare and contrast them in ways that reveal what each story was saying about the storytellers’ paradigm and theological understandings.

Which is where we’ll pick up next week.

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A FINAL WORD ABOUT GRACE

Some of you might have heard the news, but Sojourn Grace Collective, the church that I started (with my wife and co-pastor, Kate) in 2014, is closing down.

After eight and half years of incredible ministry, and doing life-changing work, we ultimately had to acknowledge that the Covid pandemic impacted our church in ways we couldn’t recover from. As a result, October 30th will be our final Sunday.

As we’ve been winding things down, I wanted to talk a bit about why GRACE is our middle name.

I talk a lot about the story often called The Prodigal Son.

If you’re curious, you can watch it here: