Trying to find a silver lining in a very dark cloud: does it take an esoteric literary tool to redeem this classic Sunday School story?
Remember the story of Noah’s Flood from when you were a kid in Sunday School? The pictures of a smiling Noah stepping off a cute little ark with happy animals, and a happy sun beside a bright rainbow in the clear blue sky? At the time, did you notice all the dead bodies buried in the mud under the ark?
Yeah, my teacher avoided that part too.
This story of Noah’s Flood is a Trojan Horse for many people. The parts of it that are in plain sight are perfectly fine. A sight to behold. Beautiful even. And so you let your guard down and embrace it. But it’s what’s hidden inside that can eventually destroy one’s faith. It certainly did destroy mine.
For many who grapple closely with this story, it’s the incongruity between the details of this ancient Semitic story and our modern understanding of science which erodes faith. There’s just so much evidence against the story. Not just pieces of evidence, but so many different kinds of evidence. From geology … archaeology … genetics … ecology … hydrology … cosmology … engineering (of the Ark) … history (evidence for civilizations before and after the Fundamentalist dating of the event which show no evidence of a global flood). Even evidence from the Bible itself: the “Nephilim” which haunted the Semites even after the Flood!? And so one often feels forced to either choose science or the Bible, because it seems you can’t have both. [Although appearances can be deceiving.]
But another toxic ingredient in this story is the basic morality which you have to accept. That an all-loving and all-powerful God finds humans to be so evil that he has to wipe them out. And to do so by drowning them, rather than a painless and immediate annihilating snap-of-the-fingers . Ironically, the text says it’s their violence that he finds so abhorrent, and yet his solution to the problem is … oh so very violent!?
And finally, there are so many details that quite anthropomorphize God. He seems to be repeatedly making mistakes. First He says he shouldn’t have created humans, then later that he shouldn’t have destroyed them; and then his solution to the human problem evidently fails because there’s just as much evil after the flood as there was before the flood (and some would say that some people — “the Nephilim” — seemed to have survived the flood). What’s that common saying in baseball: “Three strikes and ….”? And that puzzling scene where God smells the meat that Noah is barbecuing (as a sacrifice), and finds it so pleasing that his anger is cooled: what’s that about?
In this episode, we talk to Dr. Dustin Burlet, who focused his PhD project on the story of Noah’s Flood. In particular, he used a specialized literary tool called “rhetorical critical analysis” to reveal a whole new perspective on this story: that the latter actually reveals the compassionate, loving and provisional side of God! And I’ll admit that I can see how he gets there using this kind of linguistic and literary analysis. I just wish it didn’t require a specialized literary tool (one that only some scholars know about) to get there. I’m not trying to be insulting here, but I’m sure that even if a handful of scholars from different universities got together for beer and conversation at some major conference, and one of them said “we should apply some rhetorical critical analysis to what you just said there, Frank” I’m sure at least one of those other learned scholars will say “and remind me what that is again.” And more to my point, the average lay-person engaging with this story that was supposedly written for the benefit of anyone who wants to engage with God’s word just simply isn’t going to scratch their head for a second or two and then say: “I guess I’m going to have to apply some rhetorical critical analysis to this.” And I don’t think I’m far off by saying they’ll never hear their pastors mention “rhetorical critical analysis” in a Sunday morning sermon. Am I wrong?
So, again, using this tool, it is indeed possible to pull out a message that the story of Noah’s flood is about compassion, salvation, provision, and hope. But I myself am still left with the images of God opening up floodgates and turning on sprinkler systems, and then watching so many people struggle desperately till they die by drowning, including kids, babies, and pets, let alone a reasonable number of adults that I have to believe were around who really didn’t do anything deserving of being drowned to death. If we maintain that he’s all-powerful and all-loving, why couldn’t he just identify the worst trouble-makers and just … vaporize them. And then as soon as a few other characters started getting out of line, vaporize them too. And keep vaporizing until finally the people get the message and start staying in line. That’s what our police do using speeding tickets, and the government does with tax cheats. How is that not a better way to solve the problem than to just completely and utterly destroy everything and everyone on the face of the earth, as well as the face of the earth itself?
Or is this instead a story written by an ancient Semitic people who experienced a major, catastrophic flood at some point (apparently floods happened every year in that part of the world, and there would always be “the big one” that Grandpa would remind his clan of), and they, together with their Sumerian and Akkadian neighbors, tried to process that event in the way that they always did: they tried to see it as a divine act sent for some particular reason. I’m now leaning much more in that direction.
As always, tell us what you think …
Check out Dr. Burlet’s book at Amazon.
If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like Episode #31, where we talked to David MacMillan, who was working his way up through the ranks at Answers in Genesis until he had his own Plato’s Cave experience, saw through their rhetoric and distortion ……. and left.
Episode image by Gerhard from Pixabay.
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