The flood, creation and life: the punishment fits the crime
Part 3
Let’s continue looking at the article by David Clines. I left us off looking at the “why” for the flood. All of creation, humans and animal life, were destroying themselves. There was a “natural order” that God had put into place, and they were doing violence against this. What are the consequences for this?
Judgement
If the flood was sent because all flesh had “corrupted” its ways, then what was the punishment? Well, I guess we kind of know that already - the flood was sent. But, Clines again looks closely at the story to help us understand “why” a flood. He argues that what we see in Genesis up to that point is that the punishment fits the crime. Adam and Eve wanted to have knowledge apart from God, so God’s punishment would be that they are sent away from God. Cain was a “man-slayer” so he was sent away from men.1 The flood is also a judgement that fits the crime.
In Genesis 6:11–12, the prologue to the flood story, the word that is translated as “corrupt” in our English Bibles is the same word as “destroy.” Essentially, the world was destroyed in front of God by all flesh (Genesis 6:11) so God says “Behold I will destroy them [all flesh] with the earth” (Genesis 6:13). The punishment matches the crime.
Taking a step back, if we look at the stories of God creating in Genesis 1–2, we see that God took the chaos of the uncreated world (think “the world was formless and void and the spirit hovered over the waters) and put it into order. The water that once had no boundaries is held separate from the land with God’s word. Gods sets an order between the different elements of his creation.2 In the flood story, all of God’s ordering is reversed. The order of nature that has been destroyed by all flesh is fully returned back to its original state of chaos by God. Clines says:
At his creation man is made of “dust from the ground”; then when God breathes into his nostrils the “breath of life” man becomes a living being (2:7). At the Flood, when Yahweh determines He will “blot out man whom I have created” (6:7), “all in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of life” died. The very constitution of man falls apart: at the first, body plus breath made a living man, but now that last union is broken, and creation is undone.3
Well, creation is mostly undone… there is still that big boat floating over the chaos…
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In a parenting class I recently attended, they taught that the consequences of doing something wrong should be connected to the wrong. Hehe. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a parenting class look at the Genesis narratives for biblical evidence of this idea. ↩︎
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Creation as represented in Genesis 1 has been largely a matter of separation and distinction: light is separated from darkness (1:4), the waters from the dry land (1:9), day from night (1:14). All plants and animals are created according to distinct categories, each “after its kind” (1:11, 21, 24f.). There is a fundamental concept of the binary nature of created existence: there is heaven and earth, light and darkness, day and night, upper and lower waters, sea and land, plants and trees, sun and moon, fish and birds, animals and man, male and female, sacred time and non-sacred time. ↩︎
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139. ↩︎
