The Flood Stories

A writer who read my recent article on the Ten Commandments and was impressed with it wanted to know more about another set of conflicting stories about the Genesis flood. As I have read books on Hebrew Bible scholarship, I have learned that biblical scholars have discovered what they consider to be two conflicting stories of the flood.

Probably the best discussion of them can be found in David Carr’s book Reading the Fractures of Genesis. One biblical scholar Dr. Steve DiMattei has produced probably the best summary that I have seen to date (he summarizes Dr. Carr’s discussion on the flood.) So rather than trying to summarize it below, I have decided to link to DiMattei’s discussion of the flood stories.

However, I have to introduce a couple of caveats about DiMattei’s work. First, I don’t agree with everything that he writes. There are some “contradictions” that he alleges that I either don’t agree with or if I do agree with, he doesn’t show that they are, indeed, contradictions. I find this with a lot of writers on the subject. This is one of my frustrations with Bart Ehrman’s book Jesus, Interrupted. Ehrman alleges a number of discrepancies but doesn’t do anything to prove them.

Next, DiMattei doesn’t discuss the solutions that religious conservatives have proposed, especially Christian apologists. I don’t believe that he’s obligated to discuss anything but by not engaging with any proposed solutions, it looks like he’s either ignorant of them or doesn’t have a good answer. When I write articles on discrepancies in the Bible, I at least try to answer solutions, whether they have been proposed or if I am simply playing devil’s advocate with my own work.

This being said I believe that the article that I linked to can probably make a better case than I can. I doubt that there is anything that I can add to it.