I don’t know about you, but I find Noah’s Ark to be the most disturbing story in the Bible.
I think this for two reasons.
One, how it’s presently taught tempts me to conclude God is cruel. Perhaps the cruellest being ever.
We conveniently focus on those whom God saves, but I cannot ignore how this is a story of annihilation. Over two million species are brought to the brink of extinction and billions of creatures are killed in the violent death-spasms of drowning.
And three times the Bible says God is behind it (see Gen. 6:7 & 13; 7:4). Therefore, we’re not talking about a natural disaster, but the worst deliberate act of violence ever perpetrated on earth.
Two, most Christians seem content to justify God’s extinction-level killing spree.
If this story wasn’t in our holy book, then we would find God’s actions morally reprehensible and utterly indefensible. But because it’s found in our Scripture, we defend mass murder and the destruction of nature by hiding it behind holiness. We even turn it into a children’s story. This is not a children’s story regardless of how many church creches and Sunday school rooms we paint with colourful pairs of animals boarding a wooden ship.
God tells Noah in Genesis 6:7, “I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast, creeping thing and birds of the air.” (NKJV) Then, in Genesis 7:4, God tells him, “every living thing I have made I will wipe from the face of the earth.” (CSB)
It’s time we stop using cute animals to desensitise ourselves from the horror of these statements.
Are God's actions evil or holy?
God is "deeply grieved" (Gen. 6:6 CSB) by how "every inclination of the human mind was nothing but evil all the time" (Gen. 6:5 CSB). Therefore, the traditional way we read Noah’s story is that we say he cannot let this sin go unpunished. All of humankind deserves the consequences for sin, but God, in his grace, provides a way to save a remnant who trusts him (Noah and his family) from the coming destruction.
It preaches well alongside the currently popular view of the cross and hell, but what about the animals? What have they done wrong? How have they sinned?
What kind of god punishes two million other species for human sin?
God could have wiped humankind off the map without harming other creatures or causing a natural disaster, yet he chooses not to. He floods the world and kills virtually every living thing.
How is that morally just?
The answer is that it’s not. Even if—and it’s a big if—the popular reading is right, it doesn’t set God apart from any other despot or deity or fossil fuel company throughout human history.
It’s not holiness, it’s evil.
Would Jesus send this flood?
Can you imagine any scenario where Jesus would say to Noah that he's going to wipe out all living creatures?
No, me neither. And this is the major problem with our current way of reading the Bible. Jesus is "the visible image of the invisible God" (Col. 1:15 NLT) and "the exact representation of [God's] nature," (Heb. 1:3 NASB) yet we do not let the nonviolent Jesus challenge and transform our theology of the OT's violent god.
Consequently, we read stories about God sending a flood to end all life as a perfectly reasonable thing for him to do, even though Jesus shows us the opposite is true. And by justifying God’s callousness towards nature and both human and non-human life, it becomes so much easier to justify our own disregard to things like our current climate crisis.
God's violence emboldens our own.
The other issues with this story
Genesis tells us about a worldwide flood where the waters flooded the earth for 150 days (Gen. 7:24) and "the mountains were covered as the water surged above them more than twenty feet" (Gen. 7:20 CSB). An extinction-level flood of this magnitude would leave ample evidence for us to discover, yet we’ve found none.
There is zero geological evidence of a world-wide flood event.
This lack of evidence undermines the authority—not of the Bible itself—but of our common understanding of this story. Why does the Bible tell a story about a global event that didn’t happen as it’s described?
And then there are the incredible details of the story.
- Four men build the largest wooden ship ever constructed in the history of humankind.
- Over 2.1 million pairs of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects, arachnids, and molluscs somehow all survive travelling to the ark from all across the globe.
- These 4.2 million creatures somehow fit on the ark and co-habit this floating box for over six months without eating each other, or dying from starvation, dehydration, the wrong climate, or just a naturally short lifespan, and without overwhelming the eight human passengers with poo or babies.
The details beg disbelief, but perhaps that’s a clue this story is not what it appears to be.
Ancient flood stories
The Israelites were not the only ones in the ancient Near East who wrote about a divinely caused flood. Nearly all of their neighbours told such a tale.
Modern-day scholars believe this wasn’t because of a shared historical experience, but because people resonated with the idea of the gods trying to destroy humankind using a great flood.
Don’t believe this idea is credible? Go visit your local bookshop to check out the young adult section. There, you will find a whole range of books devoted to post-apocalyptic fantasies. It may be four thousand years later, but we still find it fascinating to ask what happens if someone—gods, humans, aliens, monsters, or artificial intelligence—seeks to destroy our world.
The Eridu Genesis
The Eridu Genesis (also known as the Sumerian Flood Story) has gained wide recognition as the original version of the popular ancient flood myth.
Scholars speculate people spread the story orally along western Asia’s trade routes from approximately 2300 BCE, inspiring ancient storytellers from other cultures to adapt it for their own religious purposes. The Akkadian Atrahasis, the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, and even the Israelite Noah’s Ark are all famous stories based upon this single tale.
Most of the small tablet containing the written account of Eridu Genesis are missing, but the basics of the story are there. The gods An and Enlil decide "the seed of mankind is to be destroyed" using a flood. The god Enki instructs the human hero of the story, Ziudsura, how to survive. Enki does this by talking to the "side-wall" of Ziudsura’s house, because he and the other gods have made an oath not to forewarn the human population.
The flood sweeps over the land "for seven days and seven nights" until the sun-god Utu appears, to whom Ziudsura then offers a sacrifice. The story ends with An and Enlil granting Ziudsura "life like a god," so grateful they are that Ziudsura preserved "the animals and the seed of mankind."
Atrahasis
In the Akkadian myth Atrahasis, we are told in a repeated refrain that humankind became "as noisy as a bellowing bull," causing Ellil, the king of the gods, to keep complaining he was "losing sleep over their racket."
Human overpopulation—and consequently human noise—was an ongoing issue for the gods because they had created humankind without a set life-span. Every human lived and reproduced for centuries, making the earth overcrowded and too loud. Therefore, Ellil asks the "great gods to give the order" to send plague, then famine, and then a flood to reduce the human populace.
Atrahasis, king of the city Shuruppak, is the epic’s hero. He is someone, "Whose ear was open (to) his god Enki. / He would speak with his god / And his god would speak with him." With each attempt to reduce the human population, Atrahasis would cry out and Enki would counsel him how to reverse the gods’ decision and stop the people’s suffering.
Ellil becomes wise to this and makes Enki swear an oath not to tell Atrahasis about the coming flood. Enki gets around his oath by speaking to the wall of Atrahasis’ house while Atrahasis is inside. Enki tells the wall, "Dismantle the house, build a boat / Reject possessions, and save living things."
The flood lasts for seven days and seven nights. At the end of this time, Atrahasis exits the boat and presents an offering to the gods. The gods rush to the sacrifice. They’ve become hungry without humankind to sustain them through offerings.
The sight of the boat enrages Ellil. The subsequent argument between him and Enki leads to the gods agreeing to three less destructive ways of limiting the number of humans.
The Epic of Gilgamesh
The best-known flood story outside of Genesis is in the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh (even though someone may have added the story to the epic later).
Gilgamesh is king of the city of Uruk and starts the story as an immature young man whose overbearing behaviour causes his people to complain to the gods. He ends up on a series of heroic quests for fame and immortality. This search leads him to Ut-napishtim, the only human alive to have gained immortality. Gilgamesh persuades him to share the secret of how this happened, and so Ut-napishtim tells him how he gained immortality after surviving a flood sent by the gods.
This time it is the god Ea who swears an oath of secrecy, only to circumvent it by speaking to the wall of Ut-napishtim’s reed hut while the man is inside. The story offers no reason for the gods making a flood.
"Dismantle your house, build a boat.
Leave possessions, search out living things.
Reject chattels and save lives!
Put aboard the seed of all living things, into the boat."
— Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet XI
Translated by Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia
Once workers build the boat—one acre in circumference and ten poles high—Ut-napishtim fills it with silver, gold, the seeds of all living things, all his "kith and kin," as well as cattle, wild beasts, and every kind of artisan.
When the flood arrives, it's so terrifying that even the gods are "afraid of the flood-weapon" and withdraw to the heavens.
The storm blows itself out on the seventh day and the boat comes to rest at the top of Mount Nimush. Ut-napishtim then releases three birds in the hope one of them will find something on which to perch. When the third doesn’t return, Ut-napishtim sets out an offering at the top of the mountain to which "the gods like flies" rush to the sacrifice.
Like in Atrahasis, this enrages Ellil, "No man should have lived through the destruction!" Ea talks Ellil out of his anger by suggesting they control human population in the future through the lion, the wolf, famine, and through Erra (the god of war, hunting, and plague). Ellil then blesses Ut-napishtim and his wife with immortality.
Noah's Ark
The Israelite flood story of Noah’s Ark in Genesis 6 to 9 starts off similarly to the other flood stories. Of course it does. This is the cultural river Israel swims in. All ancient people understood that human activity can spur the gods to anger. But which activities? And how is this anger expressed?
If you’re wanting to develop people’s ideas, you start with what they know. And what the Israelites know is that their God isn’t as fickle as the other gods. You make their God angry with evil actions and thoughts, not from making too much noise (see Gen. 6:5).
But, his response is still divine judgement.
The Israelite's thinking is different, but not massively so. There’s still a long way for them to go before they understand their God is nonviolent.
Noah’s Ark contains many of the same elements as the narratives I summarised above. Again, of course it does. It’s based on a popular set of flood myths that had been told by their neighbours for over 1,500 years before the Israelites wrote their own one.
We’ve got all the major themes and scenes:
- Divine anger. Check.
- Divine judgement. Check.
- A righteous male hero—conveniently one of their own—who gains divine favour. Check, check, and check.
- A god warning the hero by telling him to build an ark. Check.
- The building of a giant floating wooden box. Check.
- The rescue of animals. Check.
- The sending out of the birds to check for dry land. Check.
- The sacrifice towards the end. Check.
- The gods agreeing to no longer use floods to wipe out humans. Check.
The original audience would have heard almost identical stories before. They would have been listening to the story of Noah’s Ark thinking, I know where this is going.
In both Atrahasis and the Epic of Gilgamesh, the gods decide they’re no longer going to use floods to wipe out humans if we become too many or too noisy again. This is because they agree upon using other violent methods that will be equally effective but cause less disruption to them.
The modus operandi of these gods will essentially stay the same. They’re going to remain quick to anger and respond with divine judgement.
A new ending
Noah’s Ark follows the familiar plot right until the end. The original audience are expecting a decree from God about what he'll do the next time they turn to evil...
But then the author pulls a fast one.
The ending is so unexpected, it’s like a magic trick.
"Understand that I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you—birds, livestock, and all wildlife of the earth that are with you—all the animals of the earth that came out of the ark. I establish my covenant with you that never again will every creature be wiped out by floodwaters; there will never again be a flood to destroy the earth."
— Genesis 9:9-11 CSB (emphasis mine)
The author subverts the established story by taking the ending in a whole new direction. Israel’s God, too, says he’ll “never again” use a flood to wipe out humans, but he says it within the framework of an oath or an agreement called a covenant.
What this means is that God promises Noah and his sons and every living creature on earth that he will deal with sin through relationship and not through violence or natural disaster.
Never again will we need to worry about what God might do if he becomes angry at human activity.
This was revolutionary at the time.
It still is.
At the start of Noah’s Ark, the author of Genesis portrays God as being like all the other gods in the neighbourhood. That God becomes angry at humans and resorts to violence to fix the issue.
At the end of the story, his portrayal is very different. This God values all life, human and non-human, so much so that he establishes a covenant with every living creature. He limits himself by committing to only work within a set of relational boundaries in order to preserve all life on earth.
There’s a movement here that we’ve still not got our heads around.
From that God to this God.
From a violent God to a nonviolent God.
With the beginning reinforcing the popular idea that God must punish sin and the ending attempting to lead us in a new direction, it’s no wonder we’ve not figured it out yet.
What’s going on?
Which God is it?
Because isn’t that the question we're left with in the Noah’s Ark story?
Is it the God at the beginning of the story we’re to believe in? The one who deals with sin using violence and shows a callous disregard towards nature when he drowns all oxygen-breathing creatures to punish humans.
Or is it the one at the end? The God who promises to deal with sin through relationship?
Noah's Ark presents us with two incompatible images of God. There’s the one at the beginning: angry and violent and demanding and identical to the neighbour’s gods. And the one at the end: loving and gracious and relational and unique.
Our issue is that we try to believe in both versions. Our overly-literal way of reading the Bible leaves us giving equal weight to all parts of the story. God said it, we declare, so it must be true. So we miss the progression.
We miss God’s intent to move us from our current concept of him to one where he is as Christlike and nonviolent as Jesus.
Never like that
And that’s the thing with the God being revealed at the end of the story. If you try to insert this God back into the beginning of the story, it doesn’t work.
It’s the same if we attempt to put Jesus into the beginning of Noah's Ark. Imagining a nonviolent God playing a part in world annihilation or natural disasters or climate change feels so wrong.
That’s what we used to believe. And that’s okay. We didn’t know the end of the story before, but now we do. We’ve moved on.
We no longer believe God is like that.
And once we think this, we realise God was never like that in the first place.
At the end of the story, instead of simply believing God will never again wipe out every breathing creature on the planet, we’re meant to never again consider him capable of doing so.