Genesis flood narrative
The Genesis flood narrative (chapters 6–9 of the Book of Genesis) is a Hebrew flood myth.[1] It tells of God's decision to return the universe to its pre-creation state of watery chaos and remake it through the microcosm of Noah's ark.[2]
"The Deluge" redirects here. For other uses, see Deluge (disambiguation).
The Book of Genesis was probably composed around the 5th century BCE,[3] although some scholars believe that primeval history (chapters 1–11), including the flood narrative, may have been composed and added as late as the 3rd century BCE.[4] It draws on two sources, called the Priestly source and the non-Priestly or Yahwist,[5] and although many of its details are contradictory,[6] the story forms a unified whole.[7]
A global flood as described in this myth is inconsistent with the physical findings of geology, archeology, paleontology, and the global distribution of species.[8][9][10] A branch of creationism known as flood geology is a pseudoscientific attempt to argue that such a global flood actually occurred.[11] Some Christians have preferred to interpret the narrative as describing a local flood instead of a global event.[12] Still others prefer to interpret the narrative as allegorical rather than historical.[13]
Theology: the flood and the creation narrative
The primeval history is first and foremost about the world God made, its origins, inhabitants, purposes, challenges, and failures.[32] It asks why the world which God has made is so imperfect and of the meaning of human violence and evil, and its solutions involve the notions of covenant, law, and forgiveness.[33] The Genesis creation narrative (Genesis 1–2) deals with God's creation and God's repentance is the rationale behind the flood narrative, and in the Priestly source (which runs through all of Genesis and into the other four books of the Torah) these two verbs, "create" and "forgive", are reserved exclusively for divine actions.[34]
Intertextuality is the way biblical stories refer to and reflect one another. Such echoes are seldom coincidental—for instance, the word used for ark is the same used for the basket in which Moses is saved, implying a symmetry between the stories of two divinely chosen saviours in a world threatened by water and chaos.[35] The most significant such echo is a reversal of the Genesis creation narrative; the division between the "waters above" and the "waters below" the earth is removed, the dry land is flooded, most life is destroyed, and only Noah and those with him survive to obey God's command to "be fruitful and multiply."[36]
The flood is a reversal and renewal of God's creation of the world.[37] In Genesis 1 God separates the "waters above the earth" from those below so that dry land can appear as a home for living things, but in the flood story the "windows of heaven" and "fountains of the deep" are opened so that the world is returned to the watery chaos of the time before creation.[38] Even the sequence of flood events mimics that of creation, the flood first covering the earth to the highest mountains, then destroying, in order, birds, cattle, beasts, "swarming creatures", and finally mankind.[38] (This parallels the Babylonian flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh, where at the end of rain "all of mankind had returned to clay," the substance of which they had been made.)[39] The Ark itself is likewise a microcosm of Solomon's Temple.
Later traditions
Jewish
In Jewish folklore, the sins in the antediluvian world included blasphemy, occult practices and preventing new traders from making profit. Children also had the ability to talk and walk immediately after birth and battle with demons.
When the flood commenced, God caused each raindrop to pass through Gehenna before it fell on earth for forty days so that it could scald the skin of sinners. It was a punishment that befitted their crime because like the rain, humanity's sensual desires made them hot and inflamed to immoral excesses.[40]