Noah Part 1 - Flood Story / Love Story

Many cultures of the world have stories of mythic proportions about a flood that virtually annihilates human civilization. Cultures as far apart as Scandinavians and Polynesians, Australian aboriginals and American Navajo, Celts, Mayans and Thai all tell a story of a great inundation.

The story of Noah is quite literally a watershed event in the Biblical narrative. (Genesis 6-9)  It is catastrophic - human and animal populations are all but destroyed. It is like a reversal of creation – the unmaking of earth. How are we to understand this devastating over-whelming of the earth?

Traumatic floods occur frequently all over the world,such as the terrible 2010 flood in Pakistan that swamped 20% of the land. They linger in the memory of generations and come to symbolize all kinds of threats to our survival. This may help to explain the plethora of flood stories around the world.

Biblical scholars debate whether the historic flood was global or local. Evidence in the narrative can be interpreted either way. Science seems strongly to favor a local event, but the account is nevertheless described as a vast and unprecedented event that altered the world as the survivors knew it.


Epic of Gilgamish Tablet

In the Babylonian flood story, human beings became so noisy, the gods couldn’t sleep, so they sent a flood to wipe out the people. Their motive comes from annoyance and inconvenience. In the Bible Yahweh’s motive is moral and ethical. “God saw that human evil was out of control.” (Genesis 6:5 MSG)

In fact, before we hear about forty days of rain, we hear about three other floods: human imagination is flooded with evil (6:5); society is flooded with violence (6:11) and God’s heart is flooded with pain (6:6).

When God announces that floodwaters will destroy “every creature that has the breath of life in it, and that everything on earth will perish,” (6:17) we could interpret it as the callousness of an enraged deity. But what we actually hear is deep sadness. It was the response of a heart-broken Lover.

The inhabited world God created and cherished had been tragically flooded by evil. Yahweh was not the initiator of the ruin, but the one who initiates the re-making of the earth by using water to expunge the moral and cultural corruption that had degraded it beyond repair.

The Genesis Flood story reveals Yahweh as an ethical and just God, who carries out the purging and re-making of the world even at the cost of personal heart-break and pain. God’s mercy towards Noah introduces a dominant Biblical theme of grace and compassion. And through Noah we see God’s preserving care for the whole of creation.  The flood story is actually a love story, full of pain and hope.



Evan Almighty - Universal Pictures

 God directs Noah to gather mating pairs of all the animals, and we read that “Noah did everything just as God commanded him” (6:22) – which contrasts the prevailing culture and reinforces the ethical theme of the story.

Noah illustrates another Biblical motif, i.e. the remnant, the pattern of one individual standing against the tide of his or her culture, bearing witness to God’s truth - and making a difference in their world.

In the building of the ark the terrible story of destruction becomes a story of deliverance and hope for humanity and all of God’s creation. It is a timeless story, rich with insight into how we can relate more creatively to God, to one another and tt our environment - if we listen with humility and take heed.

We’ll continue to explore the wonder of God’s grace in this devastating story in the next two posts, so I would love to hear your observations and questions.