Genocide for Kids

The story of Noah’s Ark is a popular one for children, perhaps because there’s a boat full of animals and kids like animals. In illustrations for children’s bibles and Sunday School lessons, the animals featured on the Ark will invariably be large mammals you would find at the zoo like elephants, giraffes, lions and tigers. God’s decision to wipe out all life on earth due to humanity’s sinfulness is presented matter-of-factly but the descriptions of the actual exterminations are left out. After the rain starts and the Ark door is closed, the story jumps ahead to the rain stopping, the release of birds and the rainbow.

What exactly are we trying to teach our children when we instruct them in the story of the Flood? A survey of some Sunday School lessons informs me that the themes are obedience and salvation. Noah was obedient to God when all his contemporaries were not and, as a result, God saved him and the animals. As a parent of a small child, I can understand why parents would want to teach the value of obedience to pre-schoolers. Small children don’t have much empathy for the “bad people” who literally missed the boat, if they even thought about it. Only adults wonder if all the people on earth before the Flood – even the infants and children – could really have been so evil that drowning them was God’s only option.

“The World is Destroyed by Water” (1866) by Gustave Doré

Or, as a friend of mine placed the question in an article in his blog: 

How does the whole Flood thing lead anyone to think that Yahweh of the Old Testament is worthy of worship? It's more the action of a genocidal maniac, in my opinion -- killing everyone and everything, infants and children included, because of some perceived wickedness that couldn't be fixed any other way. 

It’s a valid question. Flooding the entire world to kill all human and animal life does seem to be a rather drastic solution. We can take some solace in the fact – based on geological evidence and implausibilities in the biblical text – that a worldwide flood never actually happened. That gets God off the hook for genocide, but doesn’t answer my friend’s question: Why would anyone worship a deity who would destroy all life on earth in a great flood?

The most chilling scene in “Noah” (2014) is in this homage to Doré where a remnant of humanity clings to the rock right before a massive wave wipes them out. Their screams and cries can be heard in the ark far off in the distance.

If the flood story in Genesis was unique to Judaism out of all the religions in the world, that would be one thing, but flood stories can be found all over the world, in many different cultures. Besides the Genesis story of Noah, other well-known flood stories in the ANE are the Sumerian account of Ziusudra, the Gilgamesh flood myth, and the Atrahasis epic. The Atrahasis epic (1700 BCE) is similar to the Genesis primeval history (Gen 1-11) in that it combines a creation story along with a flood story. These flood myths were popular and translated into many languages, so it is almost guaranteed that the biblical writers knew of these tales and adapted them to suit the Yahwistic cult.

In the Atrahasis epic, humans were created to do menial jobs that the junior gods refused to do. With no set limit to their lifespans, the human race multiplied to the point where their noise interrupted the sleep of the senior gods. After unsuccessful attempts to control the population, they eventually decided to wipe out the human race with a great flood. One of the gods, Enki (or Ea), disagreed with this decision and, although sworn to secrecy, managed to instruct Atrahasis to build a boat before the flood arrives in seven days. After a fierce storm of 7 days and nights, the boat landed and Atrahasis offers sacrifice to the gods. The god Enlil, who had ordered the flood, is angered at Enki for foiling his plan and put limits on the human capacity to reproduce by creating infertility, infant mortality, and death.

There is conflict in the non-biblical flood myths between the council of senior gods who make the decision to destroy humanity and the renegade god who disagreed with the edict and worked against it. Enlil is the “bad god” and Enki, who sought to preserve life, is the “good god” who is worthy of worship. In the context of the Yahwistic cult, there is only one deity, so the biblical writer has to present both the decision to destroy the world with a flood and the decision to save representatives of the human race and the animal kingdom as those of YHWH. 

In the non-biblical flood myths, the decision to destroy the world is made for capricious or frivolous reasons. The biblical author alters this by providing the setting of worldwide evil, violence and corruption as moral justification for YHWH’s decision to obliterate life on earth and start over. At the end of the flood story, YHWH accepts the fact that humans are inclined towards evil and wiping them out is no longer a possible solution. The guarantee of the rhythm of seasons for as long as the earth endures is a sign of the new stability of nature in a recreated world.

Given the popularity of the Mesopotamian flood myths, the ancient biblical authors had to show how YHWH was different than the Sumerian or Babylonian gods. Ignoring the flood was not an option; the author had to provide a counter-narrative just as he did with the creation story. YHWH destroys, but he also saves at the same time; he is in control of every aspect of the flood event. If you worship the YHWH who saves, you are also worshipping the YHWH who destroys. 

That’s what happens when you take a myth meant to promote one deity over another and adapt it for a religion that worships only one deity. Later on, the devil would become the one who destroys, but when the Genesis Flood myth was written, the idea of the devil didn’t yet exist. That is a story for another time.