Noah and God's Angry Flood

Noah and God’s Angry Flood

     Throughout my life the Biblical story of Noah was often referred to simply as Noah’s Ark.  In my elementary years, it was presented as a “just so” story about rainbows with water color pictures provided by the whole class to illustrate the tale.  As I grew older it was taught as a story of awe and wonder about building a great wooden boat, assembling a vast collection of animals, and rain that won’t quit.  God, when He appeared in various redacted versions of the tale, provided warning of the calamity to come and safety and refuge for Noah during and after the great tragedy.  Most recently, in my adult Sunday school lesson book, the story was offered as an opportunity to point out Noah’s virtues and as an exhortation for us to emulate those virtues: faith, patience and obedience.  As I read the story preparing for my Sunday class, none of the interpretations from my Protestant past or present seemed to capture the plain text of the story. 
    
     So, read it again and let the story startle you.  After you’ve read it a time or two, take a close look at the painting by Jan Breughel the Elder, circa 1601.  It has come to be called “The Flood with Noah’s Ark”.  Breughel’s painting, like the story itself, is a gut punch—the story of Noah and the Flood is a horror show.  It is a story of an enraged slaughter. Not only do offending humans die, but also every other living creature on earth as well.  Look at the painting’s details.  Mothers grab their babies.  People claw to get to higher ground.  Some try to save possessions, while others simply hold each other and scream. You can hear the din of their cries and wails, and you can see the human variety of reactions: puzzled looks, panic, despairing acceptance, and fear.  Pandemonium is here for Death is coming.  Death is coming to the whole earth.

     Read the text again.  A wrathful God decides things in the world He created are not going as planned.  The text reads, “the Lord saw that the evil of the human creature was great on the earth and that every scheme of his heart's devising was only perpetually evil.”[1]  So, the narrator informs us that, “. . .the Lord regretted having made the human on earth and was grieved to the heart.”  God’s regret is so strong that He decides, “I will wipe out the human race I created from the face of the earth, from human to cattle to crawling thing to the fowl of the heavens, for I regret that I have made them.”   This is all recounted in Genesis 6.  Earthworms and aardvarks all must be destroyed because the Lord is having creator’s remorse about those humans.   Then, you know the story, 40 days and nights of rain.  Floods rise.  Everything and everybody, except Noah, his family, and all the animals on his boat, drowns. My Sunday School teachers never dwelt on the homicidal part.  We only heard about how big the ark was, how miraculously the animals came, and of course, the rainbow.  Yep, we glossed over the genocidal part, the part that makes the great mass murders of the 20^th century look like amateur hour.[2]

In the Noah tale, there is a puzzle that might help us return the horror of mass extinction to the central place in the story and drive us to think more deeply about God, humans and our role as his agents on earth.  To begin, note the rationale for homicide in Genesis chapter 6, “the Lord saw that the evil of the human creature was great on the earth and that every scheme of his heart's devising was only perpetually evil.”  The human creature’s congenital evil demands the extermination of every living thing on earth.  Now, read on into chapter 8.  After God “remembers” Noah (Gen. 8:1), the floods recede, and Noah builds an altar and offers burnt sacrifices from every kind of clean cattle and clean bird. [3]  As those fumes waft upwards and please God, He pledges eternal mercy to reemergent humanity, “For the devisings of the human heart are evil from youth.  And I will not again strike down all living things as I did.”[4]  The rationale for justice in Genesis 6, the compulsive evil of humankind, is, in Genesis 8, the grounds for showing mercy.  God looks at humans in Genesis 6 and says they are evil.  They mar His creation.  They deserve destruction.  After the devastation He has unleashed, God looks at humans in Genesis 8, notes again their congenital evil, and this time, He offers mercy.  

Justice is the rendering unto others what they are due.  The Law, the Prophets, the Writings, the Gospels and the Epistles are just chock full of calls for justice, stories of injustice, appeals for justice, and more.  Mercy is often thought of as the far end of the scale of justice: harsh, capital punishment at one end, and mercy, olly olly oxen free, at the other.  We seem to think that mercy is a lightening of the sentence, a reduction in penalty, a tipping of the scale until sometimes there is no penalty at all.

Who deserves justice and who deserves mercy?  Our social and political life certainly is full of debates over this sort of question.  Criminal justice, redistributive policies, even foreign policy decisions feature debates over what someone or some group is “due” and which characteristics or situations might mitigate harsh judgement.    

       This time, as I read the Noah tale and struggled with its horror, I found another, and no less startling, lesson.  God’s mercy may not be at one end of a sort of scale of human justice at all.  The story seems to indicate that God has a change of heart about the humans and the world that He has created.[5]  What in the human situation has precipitated that change?  As the judge might ask, “What in this situation might merit tipping the scale towards mercy?”  The answer is nothing.  Humans have not changed one bit. Noah is still human.  Read on through the rest of the Scriptures.  It’s abundantly clear that humankind, the children of Noah, is just as full of mischief, murder, and idolatry after the flood as we were before the flood.  Nothing in the text suggests that God has suddenly seen something heretofore unnoticed about human beings.  And God offers the whole creation mercy:

As long as all the days of the earth -

seeedtime and harvest

and cold and heat

and summer and winter

and day and night

shall not cease."

You see, later in the holy tale, God tells Moses that His very name is “I shall have mercy on whom I will have mercy”. (Ex. 33:19).  God uses the same formulation of ineffability that He uses when he originally whispers His Name to Moses.  Mercy and the offer of mercy “to whom I will” is God’s very Name. The Noah tale, I suggest, teaches that mercy, the mercy of God that is, is, orthogonal to the scale of justice.  It is for all of creation, murderous humans included.  It is a divine offer and a divine promise.  We see it repeatedly in the holy story.  When Jacob meets Esau (Gen. 33), he expects the knife in the neck for his birthright bargaining and theft of blessing.   Instead Jacob receives mercy.  He cries out in surprise and relief that to look at Esau is to see the face of God!  Indeed, “I shall have mercy on whom I will have mercy”.  Do you want to ‘see’ what God looks like?  John tells us to look for a Jew dying on the empire’s cross pleading to his Father to offer mercy to his executioners.  “I shall have mercy on whom I will have mercy”. 

I still don’t rest easy with the mass murder at the center of the story.  Breughel’s painting haunts.  There is just no way I can put on the moral blinders that justify extermination.  Yet I have known the offer of mercy.  I have experienced the power of mercy undeserved, of mercy unrelated to my conduct.  Face to face, heart to heart, I have been offered that mercy.  Without that mercy, I would be a wreck of a man with a life of shambles.  That mercy is my liberation.  Because of that mercy I have a chance at shalom.  That mercy is the seed of my transformation into a person who loves and who offers mercy to others.  When I looked into the eyes of the one who offered mercy to me, like Jacob, I saw the face of the main actor in the Noah tale and in all of the holy tale.

Muestra misericordia.

Buen Camino

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[1] Here and below I’ve used the Noah text as translated by Robert Alter.

[2] Today, I don’t know which I find worse, glossing over the murders or attempts to justify God’s murders.

[3]There is a puzzle here as well.   In Genesis 6:19-20 Noah is told to bring into the ark two of every kind of animal, male and female, on the face of the earth.  In Genesis 7:2 Noah is instructed to bring into the ark two of every kind of clean animal.  Further in Genesis 8:20 God instructs Noah to take of the clean animals and make sacrifices.  The distinction between clean and unclean animals doesn’t reappear until the Law is given in Leviticus 11:1-47.  The easy interpretive way out is to claim that years later an editor picked up the scroll, clearly after eating a kosher lunch, and added the pious gloss to the Noah text. Of course, note the assumption that “we”, today in all our wisdom, know better than those foolish editors of long ago who add an anachronistic comment in one place but ignore the other places they could have inserted the same sort of material.

[4] Mercy not just for humanity, but also for the entire creation. ”I will not again damn the soil on humankind's score.” (v. 21).

[5] Many are loathe to say things like “God changed His mind.”  There are certainly claims in scripture that God is unchanging.  There are also certainly stories in which God changes.  Here is one for instance.  Further, the narrator in Exodus describes how God wants to wipe the Israelites out after the Golden Calf incident, but Moses reminds Him of His own purposes and promises and God “relents”.  Why do the metaphors of God as unchanging have precedence over the stories of God changing?  I suggest that a rationalist approach to theology, an approach that seeks orderliness of the logical and rational kind at the expense of all other forms of order, forces us to choose between biblical metaphors and assign priority to one set over other biblical images and metaphors.  Think of all the times the text says something like “God walked in the garden in the cool of the day.”  Immediately, theologically driven folks will clear their throats, hem and haw, and begin to explain that we don’t take too seriously what the inspired writer clearly wrote. Language deemed too anthropomorphic, well it doesn’t bear up to our theologically informed readings.  For the theologically minded we should, however, take seriously the equally inspired writer who informs us that God is Spirit and conclude of course, spirits don’t go for a walk. For me, the Scriptures are a sea of metaphors that don’t always fit together in rational order.  The whole variety of metaphors are the revelation of God. Their sheer variety may well provide multiple doors for folks to enter into a relationship with the One who is revealed there.  Our task is not to be’ smarter’ than the inspired writers but to read, re-read, and be transformed by what they tell us.