The Flood Story Isn’t About A Flood – How the Bible Changed Our Thoughts About God, Part II
Most people are familiar with the flood story in the bible.
It’s a brutal story where God destroys everyone and everything because humans are evil and do terrible things, and God regrets creating them – but a “righteous” man named Noah, his family, and animals survive in a big boat and God creates a rainbow in the sky after they survive.
This story isn’t a sweet little children’s story. It’s brutal and violent. The story in Genesis says “God wiped away every living thing that was on the fertile land—from human beings to livestock to crawling things to birds in the sky. They were wiped off the earth.”1
But a story about God destroying the world with a flood wasn’t anything new.
A Cultural Story
Stories about God sending a flood to destroy the earth was just part of the culture.
Like big beards, crocks, skinny jeans (which are now out of fashion, FYI), or hipster glasses…everyone was doing it.
A 1997 study from Mark Isaak describes 148 flood myths from sources all around the world.2
China, Nigeria, Kenya, and Australia all have flood stories.
The Romans had a story about the god Zeus sending a flood to kill humans, but the god Prometheus warns two people to ride out the flood in a wooden chest. They end up on a mountain.
Bhil, India had a flood story where a fish warned a pious man about a great flood. The man survived the flood in a large box with his sister and a chicken (I just keep thinking of Moana and her chicken).
The Native American Tribes in Montana’s Yellowstone Valley have a flood story. In their story, God sends the flood on the earth to kill everyone because the people killed a buffalo for sport. They weren’t living at peace with the world. So, rain fell and big flood happened.
The people moved higher and higher up the mountains to escape the flooding. They find the body of a great white buffalo and they take the hide and stretch it across all the mountaintops creating a shelter so that rain would no longer fall in the valley. And then the buffalo and other animals came and gathered under the shelter and they all lived together with respect for creation as the storm raged (kinda like an ark). And then the floodwaters started to go down and when the sun came out it shone on the buffalo hide, it gleams in all kinds of colors. The hide shrinks until it is an arch in the sky over the valley…making a rainbow.
There are tons of other flood stories out there.
Real or Really Fake?
Now, when some people learn there are other flood stories and how similar they are to the one in the Bible they say, “See!! All these other cultures have these stories too. Noah and the flood is just made up story.”
Other people hear this and say,“SEE!! The flood really happened. That’s why all these cultures have flood stories…but only the Bible has the story that actually happened.”
People can become obsessed with whether the flood actually happened or not.
In Kentucky, there’s a group that built an ark modeled after the story in the Bible to try and convince people it literally happened.
Personally, I’m not interested in whether this story literally happened or not. I don’t find that helpful or very important to my faith.
BUT, the violence of this story (that God would kill everyone and everything) makes me hesitate to say it literally happened…because it doesn’t line up with the God we see in Jesus.
Jesus tells us to forgive our enemies, to love our enemies, to turn the other cheek when someone harms us. Jesus doesn’t teach us to kill for others but to die for others. Jesus forgives his enemies while they’re murdering him on the cross. (but the God in the flood story kills everyone out of grief?)
Now, you don’t have to believe what I believe…but if this is how Jesus teaches and how Jesus acts, and if Jesus is God and shows us what God is like…then I don’t think God would kill everyone and all of creation.
But if you believe differently, that’s okay.
Besides…this story isn’t even really about the flood at all.
A long time ago, the Rabbis said that the stories in the Bible can’t be what they seem to be about. They must be about something more than they seem.
And they are…
Epic of Gilgamesh
In 1872, scholars found and deciphered one of the greatest literary works ever written by the Babylonians. It’s is called the Epic of Gilgamesh.3 It’d probably take you 1.5 hours to read the whole thing.
It was written long before the ancient Israelites existed as a people.
The story is about an ancient king named Gilgamesh. This is an image of him:
Gilgamesh is part god but he’s also part human, which means he can still die.
So, he spends time searching for a way not to die when he hears about a man named Utnapishtim, who is immortal.
Gilgamesh finds him, and Utnapishtim tells him that long ago the gods decided to destroy the world with a flood. One of the gods told him to build an ark and he gathered together his family and all these animals and put them on the ship so that they would all live. A huge storm came and raged for 6 days and nights. It was so bad the gods themselves were terrified from it.
After the storm his boat lands on the top of a mountain and he sends out birds to see if the water is gone. After the water is gone, he comes out of the boat and offers a sacrifice on the mountain. All the same things Noah does. The goddess Ishtar, grateful humanity survived, flings her necklace of jewels into the sky, where it sparkles (like Noah’s rainbow).
But then, the god who caused the flood shows up and is angry that any human survived the flood. The other gods calm him down and then he ends up giving Utnapishtim and his wife eternal life for surviving the flood.
In this story, humans only survived because one of the gods was tricked.
Atra-Khasis
But there’s an even older flood we found about a man named Atra-khasis. This is a third millennium flood story.
In this story, there are lots of gods and the boss god is upset by how much noise the human race is making so he decides to kill everyone with a flood.
(Try telling this story to your kids at bedtime. Once upon a time, God sent a flood and killed everyone because they were too LOUD)
One of the other gods warns a man named Atra-khasis and tells him to build a boat and put animals on the boat. Eventually, the boat lands on the mountains and birds are sent out to see if the water has dried up. A goddess references her necklace and talks about never forgetting the flood. The chief god who sent the flood finds out that a human survived and is furious, but allows him to live.
These stories existed before the people of Israel. Before the Bible was ever written down.
Scholars generally agree that these two stories helped form the story we have in our Bible.
We know that one culture’s story can impact another culture’s story.
Like in Hawaii, there was an indigenous flood story about a couple who was saved by climbing to the top of dormant volcano (Mauna Kea). But after this tribe was Christianized, the story was revised and it started to include a houseboat and a rainbow as part of the story.
Changing Our Thoughts About God
The flood is an ancient, wide spread tradition, so there are lots of similarities but they all definitely aren’t the same.
The Israelites don’t push back against this ancient and wide-spread tradition. Instead, they tell the story in their own way to share really deep truths.
The flood doesn’t happen because God is angry that humans are too loud and annoying (even though that may be true). God isn’t petty.
For the Israelites, the reason the flood happens is because of the violence and harm we cause to each other and the world. The book of Genesis puts the flood story just after the story of Cain killing his brother Abel and the horrors of violence we act out on each other.
We don’t have to imagine what that world would look like. Groups of people waging war, killing each other, taking land, enslaving others, physically abusing, people being raped, people ignoring those who are hungry and begging for help.
Our flood story says that what God ultimately cares about is about how we treat each other and creation.
This is God’s ultimate concern and what God cares about the most. Our failure to treat each other and creation well makes God grieve.
So, just like all the other stories, God sends a flood and people are killed and the earth is destroyed.
But in this story God makes a promise to never do it again – which the other stories don’t say.
God’s bow (a weapon of destruction) is hung in the clouds to never be used again. This is the rainbow.
So, when people start saying floods and hurricanes and earthquakes are all signs from God telling us that we are evil and we need to change… I don’t know where they get it from. Because the Jewish and Christian story about the flood is literally saying the exact opposite.
Instead of killing and punishing people for being bad, this story says that God has promises to give people another chance – again, and again, and again.
This story is making a revolutionary claim about who God is and what God is like.
This isn’t a story about a flood that destroyed the world.
This is a story about a God who is willing to bear all the grief and pain of our shortcomings, failures, and mistakes.
A God who is willing to give us constant second chances to learn to live lives of peace and love.
Conclusion
People can do horribly bad and evil things.
Yet this story reminds us that God is always giving us another chance
It’s a reminder that God is with us, rooting for us, wanting the best for us, believing us, and giving us continuous second chances to get it right, to do better, to love more.
And that even when we get it wrong, God is still with us.
The flood story isn’t about a flood at all.
It’s about constant second chances.
For you.
For me.
And for the world.
What a great story.
(I’m still not convinced its a good children’s story though)
Genesis 7:22-23
https://talkorigins.org/faqs/flood-myths.html
You can read the whole story here: http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/mesopotamian/gilgamesh/