NL 101: Flood and Promise

image: “Noah’s Ark Icon” by Jim Forest (Flickr)

Genesis 6:5-22; 8:6-12; 9:8-17

September 11, 2022

Genesis 6:5-22; 8:6-12; 9:8-17

Initial Thoughts

  • Begins the Narrative Lectionary Early Fall Theme of God’s presence and deliverance

    • Noah - Deliverance from the flood

    • Abram - God will be with Abram and bring him to a promised land

    • Joseph - God is present with Joseph in prison

    • Exodus - Deliverance from Egypt

    • Decalogue - God’s law and presence will be with the Israelites

    • Joshua - God’s deliverance and Joshua’s covenant

  • Not a children’s story despite the song: God Said to Noah

Genesis 6:5-22

  • Sets the stage:

  • Human creatures’ heart is perpetually devising evil

    • Their evil was “great” - same word as multiply as in “be fruitful and multiply over the earth” - what they have multiplied is evil

    • Robert Alter notes that while the other Mesopotamian flood myths are the “gods’ response to overpopulation or as an arbitrary act…here it is evil, not humankind, that multiples and fills the earth.” (Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, vol. 1, p. 26) 

  • God regrets making humans

    • What does it mean to worship a God who regrets?

  • God is grieved/in pain/”heartbroken”

    • God is angry because God is hurt and grieving - This is not a completely transcendent God, but a loving relational God

    • Same root verb used to describe Eve’s pangs (Gen 3:16) and Adam’s pain (Gen 3:17).

  • God plans genocide of not only humans but all creatures

    • A reversal of creation beginning with humans, then animals, then crawling things, then birds

  • Only Noah will be saved

    • He is righteous

    • He walked with God

  • Noah - Nuakh in Hebrew (pronounced like Bach)- mean rest or a resting place - same work used to describe the Sabbath (though Shabbat means to cease) and the same word used to describe the Ark resting in Genesis 8:4

    • God recruits Noah as his agent of salvation in the midst of his genocidal act- Is Noah God’s enabler?

  • Two of each animal - this will be contradicted in chapter 7 due to the merging of the Priestly and Yahwistic accounts of this story.

    • Some scholars argue the difference is to allow for regular sacrifices to be made of the clean animals

Genesis 8:6-12

The timing is interesting:

  • 40 days and nights of rain

  • 150 days until the Ark rested

  • 40 days of waiting

  • At least 2 weeks of sending out birds

  • So nearly a whole year

Origin of the olive branch as a symbol of life/peace

Genesis 9:8-17

Bible Study

  • The worldwide flood is one of the most common stories in ancient history. That so many cultures tell a story of a worldwide flood has led some to consider theories for how such a thing may have actually occurred. This How Stuff Works article gives a pretty concise view of two main theories. Like most of these types of stories however, the truth and meaning of the story is not found in scientific fact-checking.

  • End of a familiar story that is probably less familiar than people think.

  • Covenant

    • Act of covenant initiated by God.

    • All of creation included in the covenant - “every living being with you” (Gen 9:9)

    • The people are given the same command they were given at creation (Genesis 1:28), to “be fruitful and multiply. Populate the earth and multiply in it.”

  • God’s bow

    • The bow is a weapon, as in “bow and arrow,”

    • When God hangs up the bow, he is disarming himself.

    • Reminder of the hanging bow is a reminder to God that he will not lift up such violence again. It is a reminder that God’s way of “doing business” will forever be different.

    • Rainbow exists as a reminder that God has changed.

    • Just as all action of the covenant is initiated by God, all promises in the future are God’s alone. There is no action required by people, there is only a promise that God’s way of dealing with creation will never include destruction again.

  • Remember/Forget

    • Bad things happen when God and the people forget.

    • Reminders run throughout Hebrew Bible. People are told to “Remember what God has done.” God is told to “Remember the promises.”

    • Whenever people forget, they risk God’s judgment and anger.

    • Petitions in Psalms for God to remember include 9:12, 13:1 25:6-7, 42:9, 18-23, 77:9, 98:3, 106:4, 45. (Walter Brueggemann, Texts for Preaching, year B p. 193) 

  • Divine regret. 

    • Genesis 6:6 “The Lord regretted making human beings on the earth, and he was heartbroken.”

    • There are a lot of implications about what it means for God to regret something. It is hard to hold onto an omniscient God and one that regrets as the same. 

  • Alternative reading - Genesis 9:18-27, the passage immediately following this one

    • This passage “is a passage with one of the most notorious histories of interpretation in all of the Hebrew scriptures” (Rodney Sadler, Africana Bible, p. 73)

    • The Curse of Ham has been racialized and used to oppress Black people for centuries. 

    • “A close reading of the narrative reveals that it contains an enigmatic curse leveled against a now-extinct ehtnic group, the Canaanites, that justified their loss of land and servitude to the Shemites (read Israelites)... Yet this passage was revived and reinterpreted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by Euro-Americans and leveled against a new target of oppression. In this latter instance, Africana people were deemed the ‘Sons of Ham,’ and this curse of perpetual servitude was leveled against our ancestors as a theological justification for their enslavement.” (Rodney Sadler, Africana Bible, p. 73).

Thoughts and Questions

  • Hanging of the bow is an important reminder for those that think that the promise here is only that God won’t destroy the world “with a flood.” There is a strong strain of Christianity that envisions Jesus coming back as a warrior, ready to destroy those that have opposed him. This twisted theology is often wrapped in terms like rapture and tribulation, and was popularized and monetized by the Left Behind series. The promise of God lies not in the mode of destruction, but in the act. God is hanging up the bow - he is giving up that kind of behavior.

  • Question/Challenge why this is so popular with Children’s Bibles/nurseries. This, in a way, is a story that is outdated. It tells of a God that no longer exists. It is a reminder of how people thought of how gods acted in the world, but is also a foundation to how God is different. That God saved Noah and some animals (was it two of each, or seven of some?) ignores the fact that God then destroyed EVERYTHING else. People were disturbed by the Noah movie for many reasons. Maybe one is that they were expecting it to be a Children’s story.

  • The flood is such a rich story it is hard to capture in one week. For Lent, it must be seen as a larger picture of a journey to Good Friday and Easter. It is the initiation of the relationship between God and humanity. The flood waters did not cleanse humanity of sin. The humans are still created in the divine image, but are still going to be subject to sin. “That bow in the clouds is the sign of God's promise that whatever else God does to seek our restoration, destruction is off the table. An implication of this promise is that God will try everything else. God will seek us and seek us, despite or perhaps because of God's knowledge of every sin, every grief, and every shame that veils our vision of God's reality and of our own as God's creatures. Whatever dwells in our hearts that keeps us from hearing the harmony of all life in God's care, God will not give up on loving us into restoration” (Elizabeth, Working Preacher). In the framework of the beginning of Lent, we can see that God has promised not to destroy everything and start over, and we already know the path God has chosen to restore us to life. It is not the war bow. It is through his Son, the Cross, and the Empty Tomb.

Year 1Eric FistlerGenesisComment