Transcript

Welcome back to Shameless Potpourri.

I'm Joe Heschmeyer, and I wanna ask three questions today about Noah's Ark and the Great Flood.

Question number one: Did it really happen, or is it just a retelling of older Babylonian stories?

Question number two: If it did really happen, was it a global flood or a local or regional flood?

And finally, question three: Are we missing the point of the story in asking these questions?

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All right, question number one: Is the story of Noah's Ark historical, or is it just a retelling of ancient Babylonian myths?

The case for it being just a myth is that we find similar versions of the Great Flood story in things like the Epic of Gilgamesh, and scholars date these texts to earlier than they date the Book of Genesis.

And so, the argument goes, the author of Genesis just reworked these pagan stories and replaced their gods with the God of Israel.

Now, that could lead to a complicated debate on the dating and authorship of the Book of Genesis, but I suggest we just leave all of that aside because the true story is a bit more complicated.

Because it's not just in Gilgamesh and Genesis that we find an account of the Great Flood.

As the archaeologist John Henderson explains, we actually find similar Great Flood stories around the world.

I think there's no doubt that almost every culture in the world has a flood myth, a deluge story, because we developed as a species within this period of rising sea level.

So we find flood narratives everywhere from India to the New World, and many of them, like the Greek myth of Deucalion, follow the same basic pattern.

The Earth was dominated by man's greed, and peace had completely abandoned the Earth.

Zeus, enraged, took drastic action.

He summoned Poseidon to Olympus.

The supreme god asked his brother to flood the planet, exterminating all men.

Okay, so humanity is wiped out, save for Deucalion and his family.

Now, there's actually different versions even of this Greek myth, but in at least some of them, the pious Deucalion is spared, so he and his family board a boat with pairs of every kind of animal to be saved from the flood.

The accounts are so obviously similar that St. Justin Martyr explicitly described Deucalion as just a Greek name for Noah back in the 100s.

Now, amongst the different versions of the Great Flood story told throughout the ancient world, the Mesopotamian ones, the ones from Babylon, are the most important because they're the ones scholars believe are the oldest.

But as the archaeologist Tikva Frymer-Kensky explains, we actually have records of at least three different Babylonian stories of a great flood.

And like the story of Noah's Ark, they share some striking details with the biblical account, despite some divergences.

For instance, animals are placed in an ark, the ark lands on a mountain, birds are sent forth to see if the waters have receded.

Despite the differences then, she refers to these as different retellings of an essentially identical flood tradition.

Now, I would suggest that leaves us with basically three ways of accounting for this evidence.

One is to say, you know, floods are a recurring thing.

Oops.

Floods are a recurring thing.

Natural disasters were seen as evidence of divine disfavor, so it's not shocking to imagine different cultures coming up with different stories involving floods.

The movie Twister, it's not a retelling of The Wizard of Oz, for instance.

It's just tapping into the same basic human fascination with and fear of tornadoes.

Now, I think that explains some of the stories we see.

I don't think that works completely.

I don't think it can account for the number of details we find in common in some of these ancient accounts.

So it's gonna get you some similar stories, but it's not gonna get you essentially identical ones.

Okay, so the second theory is that everyone is copying the oldest story, perhaps the Atrahasis Epic, and retelling it in ways that make sense in their own culture, in their own region, or else they're copying those copies.

There can be some truth to that.

As Pope Pius XII points out, it's perfectly possible to believe both that the ancient sacred writers have taken things from popular narrations and that they did so with the help of divine inspiration, through which they were rendered immune from any error in compiling and transmitting these sacred stories.

Well, the third theory is just that these various flood myths exist because there really was a great flood.

In other words, we find real and fictional accounts of the Great Flood for the same reason that we find real and fictional accounts of the Civil War: because it's a thing that happened.

It was a traumatic event people wanted to talk about for ages afterwards that maybe they processed through art and storytelling.

Well, the fact is, I think all three of these theories might be true.

They're not actually incompatible.

It's perfectly possible to believe that floods are a regular phenomenon, people like to talk about them, that there really was a great flood in which God spared Noah and his family, they ended up on a mountain, and that the author of Genesis is drawing upon earlier, partially true tellings of that Great Flood story and presenting his own divinely inspired version.

We even have biblical precedent for this.

In 2 Peter 2, St. Peter mentions that God casts the fallen angels into Tartarus.

Now, he's describing an event recorded in the Old Testament, the fall of Satan, but he is employing the language of Greek mythology to do so.

That's where the idea of Tartarus comes from.

So the author of Genesis might be doing something similar with the language and framing of Babylonian mythology.

Now, all of that is to say that I think there are good reasons to believe that the Great Flood really did happen, even if a lot of the language used to describe it is mythological language.

But just how great was this Great Flood?

That's question two.

Growing up, I believed the Great Flood had to be understood as global.

After all, doesn't the Bible say, The waters prevailed so mightily upon the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered?And that it wiped out every living thing that was upon the face of the ground?

Now, that raises some practical difficulties.

Things like how did Noah keep polar bears and penguins and the like alive on the ark for forty days?

Or how was there enough water on the planet to flood the entire world, including the highest mountains, under fifteen cubits?

That's about twenty-five feet of water.

And if there was that much flooding over the entire earth, where did all that floodwater go afterwards?

Now look, you can write all those difficulties off as miracles.

Obviously, God can do whatever he wants to do.

But I think there's a bigger problem with the way I'd heard this story as a kid, and the problem is this the Bible doesn't actually say that the flood covered the entire earth.

I know it says it in many English Bibles, but what it actually says is that it covered the whole land.

The Hebrew word there is just eretz, which means land.

It's the word used for the Holy Land, for instance.

And even kol ha'arets, translated in many Bibles as the whole earth, it means the whole land.

In Genesis thirteen, Abraham says to Lot that the whole land, kol ha'arets, is before him because they're standing before the Jordan Valley.

But he's not saying that Lot is standing before the entire planet.

He means the land before them, the whole area they're looking at, not all of planet Earth.

So the Bible doesn't actually say that the flood was global, but there are still people who insist that it must be read as if it did.

Answers in Genesis, for instance, argues that the flood must be understood as global because Genesis refers to the face of the earth, eretz, and the face of the whole earth, kol ha'arets, being flooded.

But in the same article, they admit that eretz also means ground, land, soil, or country.

So why insist on reading it as planet here?

Well, they claim that it must mean the whole planet here because in the flood narrative, the context doesn't indicate a geographically limited area.

In other words, they're just assuming it means the whole planet because the text doesn't explicitly say how large the land is that got flooded.

So the Bible says the whole land got flooded, and Answers in Genesis assumes that means all of planet Earth because we don't know how much land Genesis seven is referencing.

But there's simply no reason to accept that reading as the only possible reading of Genesis seven, because the Hebrew doesn't require that, and also because there are plenty of times in which the Bible sounds like it's saying the whole world when it's really only talking about a small portion of the world.

For instance, in Acts, chapter two, St. Luke says that there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven.

Now, that language actually sounds much more clearly like we're going to be dealing with the entire planet rather than a vague expression like the whole land.

And yet even here, there weren't literally people from every nation under heaven.

We know this partly because Luke actually records a list of who was present in verses nine to eleven, and it's people from across and around the Roman Empire.

No one from the New World showed up at Pentecost, for instance.

But neither do we hear of people from places like Ethiopia or India or Spain, nations which we know the biblical authors like St. Luke knew about because those places are referenced elsewhere in the Bible.

So it's not that St. Luke made a mistake here, as if he thought every nation was present there and we know better today.

No, Luke knew that not literally every nation was there.

He doesn't literally mean the entire world.

Modern readers are simply taking these texts in a stiffly literal way that isn't how ancient authors tended to write.

And the problem is we're doing the same thing when we demand that a flood over the entire land must have covered all of planet Earth instead of, say, the entire region.

Now, to be clear, I'm not demanding that you read the Great Flood as a strictly regional event.

I'm simply pointing out that the arguments for it being global are often quite weak and that demanding a global interpretation creates a number of difficulties in interpreting the text.

So please just don't force your personal reading on others if you are someone who believes it was a global flood.

For myself, I would suggest that the debate about the extent of the flood geographically risks just missing the point entirely.

And this is the third question I want to explore, because it would be like reading the story of the Prodigal Son and focusing all of your attention on trying to figure out what percentage of the property would have gone to the younger son by right.

Is he getting fifty percent or less?

That's not the point of the story.

As St. Paul said of the Exodus, these things were written for our instruction.

In other words, whenever we're reading of a past event in the Bible, we don't just want to know what happened, but what am I meant to learn from this?

So how did the early Christians understand the point of the story of Noah?

Three ways.

First, it's a foreshadowing of the final judgment.

Jesus treats it this way in Matthew twenty-four.

At some point, Jesus is going to return, and God will wipe out the old world of sin, just as he did in the days of Noah.

Only the righteous will be left behind.

Second, the wood of the ark passing through the waters of the flood is a foreshadowing of the saving power of the cross and baptism.

St. Augustine taught that Noah, with his family, is saved by water and wood, as the family of Christ is saved by baptism, as representing the suffering of the cross.

For some of you, that might sound like a stretch, but that actually lines up perfectly with how St. Peter describes the ark in the New Testament.

He said that in the ark, a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water.

And then he adds, Baptism, which corresponds to this now saves you.

So it's through baptism that we're united with Jesus Christ, who died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God.

Or as St. Paul puts it, Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?

In other words, we are united with the wood of the cross through the waters of baptism.And just as the old world of unrighteousness was destroyed in the flood, so too we were buried therefore with him by baptism into death.

So this Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.

Our old unrighteous self dies in the waters of baptism and we are reborn to new life through union with the cross of Christ.

Third, the ark represents the church.

St. Cyprian of Carthage famously warned that you can no more be saved outside the church than you could have escaped destruction if you were outside of the ark when the flood came.

Or in the words of St. Jerome, a church father that I know is beloved by many Protestants, in his letter to Pope Damasus in three seventy-seven, quote, my words are spoken to the successor of the fisherman, to the disciple of the cross.

As I follow no leader save Christ, so I communicate with none but your blessedness, that is, with the chair of Peter.

For this I know is the rock on which the church is built.

This is the house where alone the Paschal Lamb can be rightly eaten.

This is the ark of Noah, and he who is not found in it shall perish when the flood prevails, end quote.

My fear is this.

If we spend our time fighting about the historical and geographical details of the great flood, about Noah's ark, we risk missing the deeper spiritual points, the instruction we are meant to take.

And I think that instruction is this.

Someday, maybe a long time from now, maybe any moment, God will come and set the world aright again.

And on that day, we want to be left behind like the righteous in the days of Noah.

And to do that, to be left behind, we need to be saved by the water and the wood, by baptism and the cross, and thereby be incorporated into the ark of Christ, the church.

Now, unfortunately, many Christians today have been taught that it's actually bad to be left behind based on this false teaching called the rapture.

Now, if that is what you've been taught, I hope you'll take a look at this biblical explanation that I made debunking the most commonly used proof text for the rapture and see that this whole idea is actually quite biblical.

For Shameless Popery, I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

God bless you.