What Was Noah’s God Thinking?
A Scholar of Hebrew Scriptures Takes On a Huge “WTF?” in the Book of Genesis
It’s not easy these days being a Seminary professor, a faculty member at a Divinity School, or a member of a Department of Theology at a University — especially if you happen to be the school’s Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature! I should know. I’ve been in this hot seat for about thirty years since getting a doctorate in this stuff from Yale in the early 90s. I teach at the world’s largest and strongest seminary of the Anglican Communion, so I kinda have my finger on the pulse of what many mainline and progressive rising ministers and priests are thinking, and lately their thoughts about Noah’s God and the sending of the Genesis Flood are not easy for me to hear. It’s not good news, even for tenured faculty, when God gets a horrid rap just as seminaries close up shop and faculty positions in theology and religion departments dry up. Frankly, I’m reeling. I’ve started offering an elective on Violence and Theology (students pack it) and I also need to get out on the road about this.
It’s not hard to find Noah’s God getting blasted hard these days, even from the pulpit by educated preachers. Around the time that Noah, starring Russell Crowe, hit the theaters a few years back, noted lawyer and philosopher Ronald A. Lindsay wrote in Huffpost that much more such public blasting is a great desideratum. In fact, Pope Francis himself should “repudiate the depiction of God that’s set forth in this story.” Echoing the tone and diction of New Atheists such as Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, and Dennett, he styles Noah’s God as “morally repugnant,” “some psychopathic juvenile.”
Taking his skeptical cue from Hobbes and Machiavelli, Dr. Lindsay doubts religious leaders like the pope will ever condemn Noah’s God. Their authority and their paycheck are too grounded in a support base of large numbers of “naive believers.” Clearly, Lindsay hasn’t been going to church, at least not to the churches that I attend. Many Christian leaders today, in fact, do think that they can get away trashing Noah’s God. They think that this God is the “God of the Old Testament,” not Jesus’ “loving” God. That view, however, is theologically untenable and remarkably ignorant of the New Testament.
Jesus’s only Bible was what Christians today call the Old Testament. The only God to whom he prays is the God of the Old Testament. Jesus does not repudiate the story of Noah’s Flood, but rather strongly affirms its message (Matthew 24:36–44; Luke 17:20–37). Remember Jesus’s parable of the foolish man who built his house upon the sand (Matthew 7:24–29)? Jesus is warning about a coming time when the rain will fall, the floods will return, and the foolish will be lost. To separate the two Christian Testaments as referring to two separate deities and to two different spiritual sensibilities is always and everywhere a form of Marcionism, the first Christian heresy.
The problem now comes to a head. What on earth does all this violent flood imagery in Scripture contribute to theology and spirituality? What did communities of faith hear in the flood story that impelled them to preserve the Noah episode as authoritative Scripture? Why risk retelling a violent, originally polytheistic story, demeaning of human life, which, in an earlier (18th century BCE) Babylonian version called Atra-Hasis described petty gods destroying humanity because their loud din prevented a good night’s sleep? Tablet 1, lines 355–60 speak of earth “bellowing like a bull” so that Enlil complained, “I cannot stand this uproar, I cannot sleep!” “Send an epidemic!”
The Scriptures make a critical appropriation of polytheistic material like this for compelling reasons, which include both co-opting the archetypal truths to which the mythology witnesses and simultaneously debunking the mythology’s polytheistic misconceptions. To illuminate what the Scripture is doing with the Babylonian mythology, look carefully for the archetypal truths as well as for the changes introduced as the Bible re-mixes and transforms the story. To explore profoundly structural truths, flood stories invite us to enter a primordial world, to temporarily bracket the workaday, banal, quotidian, mundane world of day-to-day life and morality. With a Georgetown doctorate, Ronald Lindsay should know better than to complain that our story disses human and animal rights. One might as well insist that Genesis explain how the snake is able to talk or the fruit supply Adam and Eve with knowledge! Quotidian laws of science and norms of morality do not operate in this world.
The flood story presupposes a primordial world where both humans and animals are so consumed with violence and vengeance that earth’s downward death spiral is irreversible and irremediable. Out of sheer mercy, God must ease that runaway journey into chaos. And to “ease the journey” is not assisted suicide, because chaos, in this poetic, primordial world of the Flood, is a different matter from modern notions of death. Chaos in ancient Near Eastern cosmogonic poetry is the wet soupy sediment out of which God calls forth new creation, new order, and new peace. Its poetry about a reversion to the flooding soup with which Genesis began means the Flood story is about radical re-creation and recapitulation, not annihilation. Genesis knows no creatio ex nihilo; the Genesis Flood is about birth, new birth. None of this jives with our modern culture’s idolization of biological life. It is not supposed to — it intends to critique all such idolatry, which in fact woefully impoverishes the ideal of holy, numinous, life offered in Scripture (think resurrection).
Where does the Genesis Flood differ from, and push back against, the earlier Atra-Hasis myth? As we just saw, the flood comes because of an uncontainable contagion of violence, not because of a loud din that annoys Heaven. Pressing farther, the Genesis Flood does not issue forth from a cold and juvenile deity at all. Apparently Ronald Lindsay did not read Genesis 6 very closely at all. Scripture re-mixes the story so that the Flood issues forth from God’s deep pain, from divine pathos. Genesis 6:6 is clear about God’s vulnerability and broken heart in this situation. I think that the NLT translation captures the Hebrew best. The Hebrew root is עצב, the stem is the Hithpael. The NLT nicely renders the sense to mean that the world’s death spiral “broke God’s heart.”
Don’t take my word for it — do some cross-referencing of this Hebrew usage; let the Bible interpret the Bible (rather than jumping to impose our secular, “enlightened” value judgments). The kind of wrenching pain to which the Hebrew usage points pops up later in 2 Samuel 19:2, where David in total vulnerability is grieving the death of his beloved son Absalom, who had just self-destructed and died. The usage pops up as well in Isaiah 54:6, where a totally vulnerable Israel mourns its own terrible fate as it experienced Babylonian exile. This is the emotional situation of vulnerability and anguish out of which God grapples with a world on its last legs and resurrects it.
