The flood, creation, and life: Flood stories
Part 1
When I was teaching, one of the first “academic” articles I introduced my students to was “Noah’s Flood I: The Theology of the Flood Narrative” by David Clines.1 Generally, if the students took the time to understand the article, they really liked it. I will link it here if you would like to read it yourself, but if that feels like too much work, no worries! I’m giving you a summary! I will divide my explanation into the same sections that Clines uses in his article over a series of blog posts to make things a little more bite-sized:
The Reason for the Flood
Many of us are familiar with the Noah story (Genesis 6–9); God was upset with mankind, sent a flood to destroy it, and saved Noah and some animals by commanding him to build a big boat. That is usually how much we know about this story. Interestingly, this isn’t the only flood story. We find ancient flood stories all over the world, containing similar elements. See this wiki list to get a taste of all of them. While these stories vary greatly, they also tend to have similarities, the biggest one being a great flood of destruction. Clines is interested in how these stories depict the reason given in each story for why the flood happened. He argues that we can see three main reasons given for the flood in the different stories around the world.
The first reason, he calls the “unfathomable will of the gods.” In other words, the gods decided to do it just because they wanted to, no explanation needed. He gives the example of a flood narrative from the ancient Mesopotamian story, the Gilgamesh Epic. In it, he argues, there is no clear reason given for the destroying flood. The gods just send it.
The second reason for a flood Clines identifies as “some non-moral fault in mankind that has angered the gods.” He gives an example of another Mesopotamian ancient story where the Noah figure is named “Atrahasis.” In this story, the reason the flood is sent is because the people are annoying to the gods. They multiply in the earth and are really loud - so loud that it makes it difficult to sleep. So, the gods decide they regret making humans and try various ways of getting rid of them, the flood being their final attempt. I used to read this particular narrative with my students and we would talk about how that would make you feel if this was your gods story. What does it say about humanity’s worth, about the trustworthiness of the gods?
The third reason some flood narratives identify as a punishment for human sin. Clines notes that we find this theme in flood narratives all over the world, with different specific sins as the push for the flood. He argues that often the focus of these narratives is on how clever the human being(s) who didn’t die in the flood was. The stories are focused on the resourcefulness of humanity in surviving punishment from the gods.
This brings Clines to the Noah story in the Bible (Genesis 6:11–9:19). Clines thinks the biblical story stands out because the focus is not on the clever human, but about God as a reasonable judge of humanity.
I will explore with you why Clines thinks this is significant in my next post
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I found this article thanks to Michael Lyons. Cheers! ↩︎
