Navel Gazing

Did Adam and Eve have navels? They didn’t need navels because they did not form in a womb, but there is a theory called the Omphalos hypothesis that claims the world was created with an apparent age: Adam and Eve with navels, trees with rings in the Garden of Eden, light from distant galaxies created en route. The Omphalos hypothesis is sort of a get-out-of-jail-free card for creationists, because any evidence a skeptic presents proving the age of the earth or universe can be shot down with the assertion that God simply created it to look antique, like a rustic distressed coffee table from Pottery Barn.

But the situation changes when you get to the Noachian deluge. Here we are no longer dealing with the story of creation where “apparent age” can be used as a trump card. In the flood story, we find claims that can be scientifically verified or discredited. If a worldwide flood happened, there should be some trace of it left behind, whether geological, ecological or zoological. Or, historical traces since, according to biblical literalists, the flood was supposed to have occurred between 2300 and 2350 BCE, well within the confines of recorded history.

Skeptics have presented dozens of challenges to the veracity of Noah’s flood and creationists have found “creative” ways of answering most of those questions…to their satisfaction anyway. For example, a skeptic may question whether a large wooden structure like the ark would be seaworthy. Beyond a certain size, wooden ships bend and leak. But a creationist can argue that the ark was made of “gopher wood” and this wood, which no longer exists today, may have been as hard as steel for all we know. Or Noah was a master craftsman or God gave him special knowledge to construct the ark. 

Pretty sure it didn't look like this. ("Noah's Ark - The Homecoming" by Steve Crisp)

In the creationist literature, many appeals are made along the lines of “we don’t know what conditions were like on the pre-Flood earth.” Where did all the water come from? Where did it go? Maybe the pre-Flood earth didn’t have very high mountains or the oceans weren’t as deep. The tremendous weight of the water forced the oceans to become deeper and pushed the mountains up, so the water drained away from the land naturally. But geological shifts of this magnitude would have destroyed any trace of human civilization before the flood. Recall the flood is dated to approximately 2350 BCE and the Great Pyramid of Giza dates to 2560 BCE, 200 years prior to the flood. Yet the pyramid is still there when, according to creationists it should have been destroyed in the flood cataclysm. According to Gen 10:6, the founder of Egypt was Noah’s grandson, so the entire history of Egypt should post-date the flood, but Egyptian history is well-documented back to 3100 BCE and shows no discontinuity.

Either the dating of the flood is wrong, a theory creationists are loathe to admit because that puts the reliability of the Bible’s dates into question, or the generally accepted dates – not only for Egyptian history, but also for other ancient civilizations – must be wrong. But that poses another problem because the Bible dates to Exodus to around 1450 BCE, 900 years after the flood. Events over 1500 years of recorded Egyptian history would have to be crammed into 900 years. Far less than 900 years actually, because rebooting the post-Flood world with only 8 people would require many generations before there was enough of a population to form distinct cultures and societies.

And then there’s the problem of the animals and whether the ark was big enough to hold them all. Creationists claim that Noah didn’t have to bring every type of animal aboard the ark, but only land mammals, birds, and reptiles. Insects and amphibians were left to fend on their own and fish like water. And Noah didn’t have to bring a representative of every species, but only every “kind” and they define “kind” at the taxonomic category of “family” or, at worst, “genus.” For example, if Noah was only required to bring a pair from the “cat” family (felidae), that would cover house cats, cheetahs, lions, tigers, leopards, etc. That stretches credulity a bit, so most creationists will accept (for the sake of argument) that Noah would have to bring representatives of each genus. That’s over 4000 genera for mammals, birds and reptiles and there would be at least a pair of each and seven pairs for the clean animals, so it would be more like 10-20,000 animals.

And not just representatives of every living genus, but every genus that ever existed, dinosaurs included. Why? Because creationists use the flood to explain fossils, so all those extinct animals – pterodactyls, T-Rex, mammoths – had to be alive at the time of the flood. And Noah would have to bring their representatives – juveniles, to save space – aboard the ark, even though they apparently didn’t survive conditions in the post-Flood world. (God should have informed Noah not to bother with them.) One creationist estimates 16,000 animals in all, representing living and extinct genera. The number seems on the low side to me, but let’s go with it.

Animals vary in size, but creationists like to use a sheep as an average size. The ark had a volume of 1.5 million cubic feet, which they say is equivalent to 570 railroad stock cars, each of which can carry 240 sheep. That works out to 11 cubic feet per animal, so if you have 16,000 animals, they would need 176,000 cubic feet. It sounds like there would be a lot of room left over on the ark, but Noah had to provision food for one year. A human can eat 8 times his weight in food over a year and an ox or cow twice that, so factoring in 8 times the space required for each animal for food, you arrive at 1.4 million cubic feet. This uses up all the space on the ark, with no space left for corridors, ramps, ventilation, water reservoirs or waste storage. Perhaps God put the animals in suspended hibernation – like astronauts in a science fiction movie – so they would not require food or water. But if God could whip out a miracle to save the day, why put Noah through the trouble of constructing an ark in the first place? Why not transport Noah and the animals to the tallest mountain and have them wait it out?

Once the ark landed and the animals disembarked, you would expect to see population densities in decreasing amounts as you travel further away from the site where the ark settled, but that is not the case. Marsupials managed to travel across oceans to South America and Australia, about as far as you can get from the Middle East, without stopping to settle anywhere along the way. God could certainly have infused a migratory impulse within the kangaroos and koalas to head to Australia and use ice ages to conveniently create land bridges for them to cross oceans, but that’s taking special pleading to ridiculous levels. A more plausible scenario is that humans brought the animals with them, but if that is the case, why did they only bring marsupials and not placental mammals? And how did flightless birds – penguins – get to Antarctica?

This brings us back to the Omphalos hypothesis. What young earth creationists are asking us to believe is that not only did God manage to set up the conditions on a pre-Flood earth that would have made a worldwide flood possible, but God also did an excellent job of eliminating all evidence of a global flood. The flood obliterated any trace of the pre-Flood world while, at the same time, laid down a sedimentary and fossil record that gives the appearance that animals went extinct over a long period of time. Recorded human history begins, not with a few survivors trying to rebuild civilization after the flood, but with well-organized societies of thousands of people building massive structures like the pyramids. Within an incredibly short period of time after the flood, animals and humans spread throughout the globe, crossed vast oceans and rapidly adapted to specific environments.

Is God is setting up a series of logically absurd situations in order to test our faith in the veracity of the Bible? The answer is clearly laid out in this quote from creationist literature: “The principal error of this view is that it starts from supposed scientific anomalies, such as the fossil record, rather than from Scripture.” In other words, Scripture drives the interpretation of science, not the other way around.

What is Gopher Wood?

In northern Kentucky, the Creation Museum is building a full-size replica of Noah’s Ark, based on the specifications provided in Genesis 6:14-16:

Make yourself an ark of gopher wood; make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch. This is how you are to make it: the length of the ark three hundred cubits, its breadth fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits. Make a roof for the ark, and finish it to a cubit above; and set the door of the ark in its side; make it with lower, second, and third decks. (RSV)

There’s not a whole lot of detail and it allows plenty of room for imagination. The Creation Museum ended up with a vaguely Egyptian-looking design. The Bible doesn’t define the length of a cubit but it is the length from the elbow to the tip of the fingers. If the standard measure is 18 inches, the dimensions of the ark would be 450 x 75 x 45 feet. The Creation Museum chose an Egyptian cubit of 20.4 inches, so that makes their Ark 510 feet long. By contrast, the Titanic was 850 feet long, but was made of steel. Noah’s Ark would have been bigger than any wooden ship that has ever been constructed.

“Entry of the Animals” to Noah’s Ark by Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680)

As you can see, the biblical description leaves a lot of wriggle room. And the dimensions and the description of the door and three decks are the clearest parts. The rest of the passage uses some rare words (that I have emphasized in bold), the meanings of which are much debated.

The Hebrew word translated “ark” is tebah. It is used many times in Genesis 6-9, but outside of the flood narrative, it only occurs in Exodus 2:3, 5 to describe the basket in which baby Moses was placed. (The word translated “ark” in Ark of the Covenant is a completely different Hebrew word.) Tebah is a loan word from the Egyptian language to describe a box or chest. The Vulgate translates it as arca, from which we get the word “ark.” To be consistent, the word should be translated as “box” in both Genesis and Exodus. While tebah does not mean a ship, functionally it serves as a lifeboat in both cases.

Next up, the ark is to be constructed of “gopher wood.” What the heck is gopher wood? “Gopher” is a transliteration of the Hebrew word goper and no one knows for sure what it means, except that it has nothing to do with a burrowing rodent. Many English versions of the Bible (KJV, RSV, NJPS, NAB, NABRE) don’t try to translate it. A few others (NEB, NIV, NRSV) translate it as “cypress” wood, but that is just a guess. Hebrew does have a word for cypress, so if that’s what the Priestly writer wanted to say, he could have used that word.

The problem is that goper only appears here in the entire OT. Such a word is called a hapax legomenon (meaning “said once” in Greek). The most reliable way to translate a word is from its context, but how do you do that when you only have one context in which it occurs? Well, we can look to see how it was translated in ancient versions of the OT. The LXX translates it as “squared timber” and the Vg as “smoothed wood.” Both translations are describing not a particular type of wood, but wood prepared in some certain fashion. Because the LXX and Vg were closer to the time of the biblical writings, they may reflect a knowledge of the word no longer available to us or they may have simply guessed at the meaning of the word.

The Hebrew word translated “rooms” in many English versions (KJV, RSV, NRSV, NAB, NABRE, NJPS, NIV) is qinnim. This word is the plural of qen (“nest”) which elsewhere in the OT appears only in the singular. Since the original Hebrew only contained the consonants with the vowels added later, some scholars have proposed a different set of vowels that would yield the word qanim, “reeds” (NEB, NJB). This would yield a neat parallelism in the translation: “Make yourself an ark of gopher wood, with reeds make the ark.” The implication being that the ark would be constructed of both wood and reeds, perhaps with the reeds helping to seal the gaps between the wooden beams. Reeds were also used in the construction of the boats in the other flood myths like Atrahasis and Gilgamesh, so its use here could reflect an influence from those tales.

The Hebrew word (koper) translated “pitch” only appears here in the OT. It is not a hapax legomenon in the strict sense because the word is used twice in the verse, as verb and noun: “and pitch it on inside and out with pitch.” Koper is only one letter different from the hapax goper, so there is a bit of wordplay here. Pitch, tar, or asphalt are petroleum-based products. This poses something of a problem for Young Earth Creationists because they insist that all petroleum products were formed during the Flood. So where did a pre-Flood Noah get his pitch?

V. 16 gives us another hapax in tzohar, which the Vg translates as fenestra (“window”). Modern translators turn to a similar Arabic word which means the back of a hand or a human back. The logical conclusion is that tzohar was used to refer to the top or roof of the ark. The next part of the verse (“and finish it to one cubit from above”) is somewhat incomprehensible, so it is not clear if a gap between the roof and the sides is being discussed or an overhang of the roof. 

What are we to make of all the rare words? One possible explanation is that those words were in the tradition that the Priestly writer received. Just like if we were retelling the nativity story, we might say something like “the infant Jesus was wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid to rest in a manger.” “Swaddling clothes” and “manger” are not everyday words for most people but those words from the King James translation are such a part of the tradition that we would repeat them as-is. Something similar may be happening here with words like “gopher wood”.

Between the vague specifications and the rare words with contested or unknown meanings, we can only have a general idea of what Noah’s Ark was supposed to have looked like. But if you want to see the Creation Museum’s version, The Ark Encounter is scheduled for a grand opening in the summer of 2016.

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.

Review of Darren Aronofsky's "Noah"

Noah, a major motion picture directed by Darren Aronofsky, was released in 2014. I only recently watched the film and, for the most part, I enjoyed it. Starring Russell Crowe as Noah, it isn’t a typical biblical epic of the Cecil B. DeMille variety with cheesy effects, melodramatic acting, and overwrought dialogue. Just like DeMille’s epics, it embellishes the source material, but it is true to the spirit, if not the letter, of the biblical text. It follows in the tradition of Jewish midrash, which sought to fill in gaps in the biblical narrative, sometimes in fanciful ways. (Warning: Spoilers ahead!)

Russell Crowe stars as Noah

For example, one of the more interesting novelties in the movie is that of the Watchers. To provide manpower for ark construction, Noah enlists the aid of fallen angels whose bodies of light have become trapped within rock. Not surprisingly, Noah’s construction project and the mass migrations of thousands of animals have attracted the attention of Noah’s ruthless contemporaries and when the rain starts to fall and the mob tries to take the ark, the Watchers are instrumental in repelling the invaders.

"Noah" is sort of a mashup of "The Lord of the Rings" and "Mad Max"

I’m sure for many in the audience, this seems to be taking great liberties with the Bible, but the myth of the Watchers is well-known to those who have studied the inter-testamental literature – that is, the various non-biblical books written between the time of the OT and the NT – especially, the Book of Enoch. The Watchers were the “sons of God” who both taught humans the arts of mining and metallurgy and also mated with the “daughters of men” to give birth to the “giants” (or Nephilim). 

Fundamentalists, of course, have problems with the movie not being true to the letter of Scripture. One creationist review complains that the movie wasn’t historically accurate because it didn’t show Noah bringing dinosaurs on board the Ark. Seriously. Others have problems with the symbolism used in the movie. Christian theologian Brian Mattson calls it a pagan retelling of the flood story based on teachings from Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism) and Gnosticism (a heretic form of Christianity), two incompatible philosophies that he seems to conflate. Peter Chattaway at patheos.com wrote an article clarifying that “No, Noah is not Gnostic” (the actual title of his article). 

Another complaint of evangelical critics is that God did not speak to Noah in a clear and unambiguous fashion as he does in the Bible. “The Creator” (never called “God” in the movie) only revealed his plan to Noah in the form of a dream of a drowned world. But after coming in close contact with the brutal humans who overrun the antediluvian world, Noah decides that the Creator only wants to preserve the innocent animals and accepts that humanity is fated to die with him and his family after they live out their natural lives. Clearly, if the Creator had laid it out for Noah as God does in the Bible, the last part of the movie would have been less suspenseful.

But in real life, we’re not always sure what God’s will is. The Noah portrayed in the movie certainly wanted to follow the will of “the Creator” and thought he understood that will. But when Shem’s previously barren wife becomes pregnant with twin girls aboard ship, Noah decides that carrying out the Creator’s wishes will require him to slay the babies because they will grow up to bear children of their own. When Noah’s love for his family prevents him from doing that, he sees himself as a failure. It falls to his daughter-in-law to explain that the Creator chose him because Noah could see the good and evil in people and know if there was enough good left in humanity to make it worth saving.

Part of the reason evangelicals do not like the movie is that Noah is considered something of a saint in Christian theology. The Bible points out on multiple occasions (Gen 6:22; 7:5, 9, 16) that Noah did all that God commanded him, God established a covenant with him, Noah was considered a “righteous man” and so on. In the NT the flood was seen as a sort of extreme baptism (see 1 Peter 3:20-21), destroying the old world of sin out of which a new world would be born, and Noah was the instrument for salvation.

But Jews don’t see Noah the same way. One of the new insights that I discovered in preparing this review was in an interview by The Times of Israel with “America’s rabbi” Shmuley Boteach. Rabbi Boteach points out why the biblical Noah is not considered a hero in Jewish tradition:

He [Noah] failed in the greatest mission of all. He failed to protect human life. And failed to fight with God when he wanted to take human life. He refuses to wrestle with God. Noah is a fundamentalist. He’s a religious extremist. God says “everyone will die” and Noah says nothing. But this is not what God wants. God wants people with moxie! God wants people with spiritual audacity! He does not want the obedient man of belief. He wants the defiant man of faith.

The rabbi points out, by way of contrast, that when Abraham was told that YHWH planned to destroy Sodom, Abraham didn’t just nod his head and say, “Thy will be done.” Instead, he interceded on behalf of Sodom (Gen 18-22-33), forcing YHWH to agree to spare the city if only 10 righteous people could be found in it. “This made him the first Jew. A Jew does not just accept a divine decree, he does not just bow his head in silent obedience.”

In the final analysis, Noah portrays a religious man who will go to extremes to follow what he believes is the Creator’s will. His obsession will either guarantee the salvation of life on earth or result in the extermination of the human race. The outcome rests on his humanity.

P, R and J Sandwich

The familiar Christmas story is taken from the first two chapters of Matthew and Luke. The magi, the slaughter of the innocents, and the flight into Egypt all come from Matthew. The census, birth in a stable, and shepherds all come from Luke. These individual elements from the two distinct infancy narratives fit well together in the traditional nativity story and it would be hard to identify them if we didn’t have the original narratives in Matthew and Luke.

We have a similar situation with the flood story in Genesis 6-9. Here we have elements from two different narratives – one from J and one from P – that were woven together by a redactor (“R” for short; redactor being another name for editor). Bible scholars can ascribe the verses to J or P based on the use of the divine name, themes, vocabulary or narrative style. Unlike the creation stories and genealogies where R left the J and P narratives stand on their own, in the flood narrative R used P as the main storyline and supplemented it with J at appropriate points. Sometimes R alternates several verses between J and P, but at other times he interweaves his source material. 

For example, R provides parallel accounts for the decision to destroy humanity. J’s account is in 6:5-8 and P’s version is in vv. 11-12. J emphasizes that YHWH is sorry that he had made humans. P repeatedly uses the word “corrupt” to emphasize his point: “Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence. And God saw that the earth was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted its ways upon the earth.” 

“Building Noah’s Ark” by Franzosischer Meister (“The French Master”), 1675

These passages are followed by instructions for the building of the ark (vv. 13-22) taken from the P account. Similar instructions must have existed in J’s account, but R left them out. P delights in specifications for the length and width and height of the ark, along with the number of floors, window and door. The familiar command to bring aboard the ark “two of each kind” of bird, animal, and creeping thing recalls the similar enumeration of animals in P’s creation story in Genesis 1.

R returns to J’s narrative with the commission to enter the Ark in 7:1-5. Noah is instructed to bring a pair of unclean animals, but seven pairs of clean animals. “Clean” and “unclean” refers to whether the animals in questions are considered suitable for sacrifice. You would expect that the Priestly writer would be more concerned about ritually “clean” vs. “unclean” animals, but for P those categories did not exist until Moses was given the Law on Sinai. J’s rationale for having Noah bring aboard seven pairs of clean animals is to allow for their use in a sacrifice to YHWH after the flood (8:20-21).

With the description of the coming of the flood in 7:6-24, R repeatedly switches back and forth between P and J, sometimes in the middle of the same sentence. Here is what J’s portion of this passage would look like:

And Noah went into the ark to escape the waters of the flood and YHWH shut him in. The rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights. And the waters increased, and bore up the ark, and it rose high above the earth. He blotted out every living thing that was on the face of the ground. Everything on dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died. Only Noah was left, and those that were with him in the ark.

In J’s account, YHWH personally seals Noah and his family into the ark. The flood is brought about by rain for forty days and nights. The reference to blotting out all creatures “in whose nostrils was the breath of life” recalls how YHWH breathed life into the earth creature in J’s creation account (Gen 2:7).

P’s narrative in the remainder of 7:6-24 illustrates his style of providing exact dates (“In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month”) and numbers (“fifteen cubits deep”). P’s flood is not just a very long rain, but a return to the chaos prior to creation as windows in the firmament are opened to allow the upper waters to pour down and the lower waters below the earth are allowed to erupt. Unlike J’s forty days, P’s flood lasted for 150 days and took an equivalent amount of time for the waters to recede. The earth was dry (that is, the flood over) on the first day of the first month (8:13). Just as Gen 1 provided the context for the Sabbath observance, the flood story provides the context for the New Year’s festival because God is creating the world anew.

The ark soon came to rest on “the mountains of Ararat” (“Ararat” is a region, not a specific mountain). In the J account (8:6-12) Noah experiments with birds to discern when it is safe to exit the ark, but in the P account (8:15-19) God simply tells Noah when it is time to disembark. This is followed by J’s report of Noah’s thanksgiving sacrifice and YHWH’s promise not to again destroy the earth (20-22). The parallel passage from P narrates God’s renewed blessing of Noah (9:1-7) and his covenant to never again destroy the earth with a flood (8-17).

Sandwich structure of the flood narrative

In this article I focused on the separate J and P traditions so you could see the distinctiveness of each. But we also have to look at the complete text as it came down to us from R. There is artistry here. R did not simply grab bits and pieces from each tradition and insert them willy-nilly, but chose them to fit a chiastic pattern (or “sandwich” structure) with “God remembered Noah” at the center. It is not that God had forgotten about Noah; “remember” in this context means refers to God’s mercy towards one in danger of death (see Gen 19:29). It is the pivotal moment of the story because from here on, God’s attention is on reversing the destructive actions of the flood.

The flood story itself is pivotal in that it separates the primeval events “before the flood” from historical events “after the flood.” The world following the flood is the world in which we live.

How the Mighty Have Fallen

In my very first article on this blog, I wrote: “I hope to shed light on obscure or downright weird passages in the Bible that make people scratch their heads.” Well, I think that description definitely applies to Gen 6:1-4. It is short enough to quote in its entirety:

When men began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair; and they took to wife such of them as they chose. Then the Lord said, “My spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh, but his days shall be a hundred and twenty years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown. (RSV)

The KJV translates Nephilim as “giants” due to the report in Num 13:33 describing the original inhabitants of Canaan: “All the people that we saw in it are of great size. There we saw the Nephilim … and to ourselves we seemed like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.” Nephilim means “the fallen ones,” the ones fallen in death, because every time the Nephilim – or similar names like the Anakim or Rephaim – are mentioned in the Bible, it is only to explain how one of the great heroes (like Moses or Joshua or David) wiped them out.

"Giant Ancestors" by blackbook (5th place entry in a Photoshop contest on worth1000.com,)

Jews and Christians were scandalized by the thought of “sons of God” mating with mortal women and bearing giant demigod offspring. It is like a tale you would find in Greek mythology of the god Zeus mating with a mortal woman who then gives birth to a great hero like Heracles. Also, the idea of “sons of God” was anathema to monotheistic religions like Judaism or Christianity. So the interpretation took hold that the “sons of God” were actually angels who rebelled against God. Just as we’ve seen with other ancient “interpretations” of difficult biblical passages, there’s nothing in the text to support the idea of a rebellion in heaven. Plus, the idea of half-angelic, half-human offspring doesn’t really solve the “ick” factor.

So another interpretation developed whereby the “sons of God” were interpreted as members in the line descending from Seth, and the “daughters of men” were women descended in the line of Cain. In this interpretation, the offspring would be fully human. The scandal, if any, would be in the “pure” population of the Sethites becoming polluted with the “bad seed” of the Cainites. Again, nothing in the text supports this speculation and it doesn’t explain why children of these unions would be extraordinary warriors or giants.

We have clear evidence from elsewhere in the Bible that the “sons of God” really are divine beings, lesser gods in YHWH’s assembly (Job 1:6; Ps 29:1; Ps 89:7). They were present with YHWH at creation (Job 38:7) and the nations were divided up amongst them (Deut 32:8). The passage really is as scandalous as it appears to be. It recalls an older polytheistic tradition wherein YHWH was one god among many.

But why would the author repeat such a fragment of mythology? Vv. 1-2 and 4 seem to be an origin story of the Nephilim, the heroes of old, the warriors of renown. The author seems to recognize that v. 3 breaks up the flow of thought, because he recapitulates the first two verses in v. 4. V. 3 also appears out of place because YHWH seems to be punishing humans by limiting their lifespan to 120 years although it seems the “sons of God” are the guilty party here, using their power to take advantage of the subordinate mortals. So why isn’t YHWH punishing the divine beings instead?

Biblical scholar Ronald Hendel has a theory that this passage originally served as YHWH’s motivation for sending the Flood. There is a Babylonian flood story called the Atrahasis in which human overpopulation caused so much noise that the god Enlil lost his sleep. His final solution was to send a flood to wipe out all human life, but Atrahasis and his family escaped. Thereafter, death was instituted to prevent a repeat episode. We have allusions to this mythology in Gen 6:1-4 with the references to humans multiplying over the face of the earth and the restriction of human lifespans to (only) 120 years.

According to Hendel’s theory, the original story recounted the creation of demigods, the Nephilim. This creates an imbalance in the cosmos because the divine and mortal realms become intermingled. The solution to this problem was to destroy all living things with a flood in order to restore balance. The Yahwist (J) obscured the causal connection between the creation of the Nephilim and the Flood by providing a different reason for the Flood in vv. 5-7: YHWH saw the evil in humanity and regretted creating human beings, so he will wipe them off the face of the earth. The story of the Nephilim now becomes just one more example of the spread of evil. In J’s version, YHWH’s actions are morally justified because of the wickedness of human beings. Only Noah found favor in the eyes of YHWH.

The only remaining issue to clear up is the fate of the Nephilim. With only Noah and his family surviving the Flood, it seems that “the fallen ones,” true to their name, end up dead. So why are they still around to scare the living daylights out of the scouts Moses sends into Canaan? I guess we have to assume those randy “sons of God” couldn’t keep their hands off our women. As Gen 6:4a specifies, “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward [emphasis mine].” Nothing like a little editorial comment to bring consistency to the story.