Why god flooded the earth

So we begin our study with a look at what Genesis intends to teach. My particular interest in the Flood story arose from my earlier thinking about Genesis In the past couple decades, Evangelicals have returned to the question of human origins, as depicted in these opening chapters of the Bible, because of the powerful evidence in support of evolution provided by the mapping of the human genome.

To be honest, I never had any problem with evolution because I felt confident that while the Bible tells us that God created everything including humanity , it did not intend to tell us how he did so. Since the time of the early church, many theologians have recognized that Genesis presents a largely figurative depiction of creation.

Augustine and Origen both understood, for instance, that the Bible did not describe literal twenty-four hour days. Now, of course, these early church fathers were not defending a long creation process. Quite the contrary! They thought the actual creation only took a millisecond.

After all, why would God need a whole week to create the creation? My point is that they knew from reading the text itself with all of its figurative elements does God have lungs? But it is appropriate for me here to more fully talk about what type of literature we have in Genesis , because biblical scholars universally recognize these chapters as a literary unit.

The technical term for type of literature is genre. What is the genre of Genesis ? In a text, whether in the Bible or not, the author writes a text to communicate a message to the reader.

To misunderstand the genre leads to a distortion of the message. What is the message of this passage? Most of us would recognize in these words an expression of the passionate desire of a woman for physical intimacy with a man. In other words, these words open a collection of love poems.

But such an interpretation was rare at best during the Middle Ages. Because, during this time, the Song was read as an allegory of the relationship between God and his people. Indeed, the Targum a Jewish paraphrase of the Song written in Aramaic in the 9 th century AD read these verses as a reference to the Exodus from Egypt!

The woman, Israel, begs the man, God, to take her into his bedroom the Promised Land. Getting the genre right is pivotal to getting the message right. Most people today, myself included, believe that the Targum got it wrong. What then is the genre of Genesis ? To answer this question, we need to look for those signals that the author sends his readers.

But before describing those signals, let me make two more introductory comments. First, the question of genre of Genesis is often presented as a choice between two alternatives. Is it history giving a literal depiction of events or is it myth having no real connection with actual events?

There is no reason to think there are only these two possibilities. People on both sides of the question want us to think so. Again, we need to avoid this unfortunate and unnecessary characterization of the question of genre.

Second, as we address the question of genre, we need to remember that the Bible, while written for us, was not written to us. The authors of the books of the Bible had an original audience in mind when they wrote, and that audience is not us.

It was written to the church in Rome and when we read it, we need first to put ourselves in the place of the church of Rome before applying it to ourselves. Just the fact that the Bible was written in ancient Hebrew illustrates this important point. Modern 21 st century readers need to first translate the text from ancient Hebrew into a modern language in my case, English. Of course not everyone can do this, so God encouraged some of us to go to graduate school to study ancient Hebrew as well as related languages like Akkadian, Aramaic, Ugaritic, etc.

And as we will see, we put ourselves in that ancient cognitive environment by also studying ancient Near Eastern literature, including ancient stories about floods. Previously, I talked about the importance of genre. Whenever we read anything, we identify either consciously or not the genre of what we are reading. Sometimes it is natural and easy because we are so used to certain types of writing whether a novel or a textbook or a newspaper editorial , but sometimes we need to be self-conscious about identifying the genre.

To do so is particularly important as we consider the truth claims of the Bible. Genre triggers reading strategy and helps us see what message the author wants us to learn from his words. So, what is the genre of the Flood story? There are continuities that unite these three sections and we will take those seriously, but there are also significant stylistic differences that signal different levels of interest in reporting historical details. These continuities and differences will come out in my following comments.

My focus will be on how Genesis relates to Genesis First, those toledot I mentioned a moment ago. After all, even granting that Moses is the author of Genesis, he would have used earlier sources to talk about the distant past. Some ancient interpreters, pondering the connection between Genesis —4 and the flood, sought a different explanation. A story in the noncanonical Book of Enoch with a parallel in one of the Dead Sea Scrolls is most remarkable in this respect.

In the Qumran version, Lamech confronts his wife, who is named Bitenosh. She tearfully denies any infidelity on her part, reminding Lamech of the passion that they shared in conceiving their son. Lamech is not assuaged, so he solicits information from his grandfather Enoch, who is privy to heavenly secrets. Read in this manner, the flood story contributes to one of the great biblical themes, namely the setting of clear boundaries between the respective realms of God and humans.

It is not the world of myth, in other words, but the real world in which we live. In the Bible, context means everything. Rather, Genesis highlights how the wickedness unleashed by the Fall caused him sorrow and grief.

God made the earth to be a place where humanity could flourish, but instead they turned it into a theater of violence and disaster Genesis , , The Curious Climax: Covenant.

In that covenant, God promises that nothing like this will ever happen again. So what have we learned so far? God was acting to restore the goodness of his creation. God preserves one family through the flood and elevates Noah as a new Adam, placed once again in a garden on a high mountain paradise with the commission to be fruitful and multiply. All of the Bible is a unified story that points to Jesus, and the story of the flood is no exception. Noah becomes a paradigm for the kind of leader we are awaiting—the righteous one in a wicked age who enters the waters of death and comes out the other side into a new creation, bringing about a new covenant of peace and life.

The gospel authors use allusions to the flood story to confirm Jesus is this leader. There is a curious moment in the Gospel of Luke where Jesus talks about a future baptism he must accomplish Luke What was Jesus talking about?

But this flood story has a different ending. In the flood account in Genesis, the wicked died and the righteous one was spared. With Jesus, the wicked were spared and the righteous one sank beneath the waters of death. Unlike Noah, Jesus did not escape the flood alive; the waters of death rose and drowned him.

Noah survived the flood by taking shelter in the ark. All rights reserved. Weather provided by OpenWeatherMap cc-by-sa. Email Using: Gmail Yahoo! Outlook Other. Ticket Options A Wicked World The Lord saw how utterly wicked people on earth had become; every thought was only evil all the time. Noah Pleases God But Noah found favor with God for he alone was righteous among the people of his day. Noah Sends Out a Dove After sending out a raven, Noah sent out a dove to see if there was dry ground.

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