The Flood and the Scattering

The flood narrative opens with a toledot in 6:9, which tells you the book thinks a new section is beginning, and with a character sketch: 'Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation; Noah walked with God.' That last phrase was used of one other person in Genesis, Enoch in 5:24, so the line connecting them is drawn by vocabulary. Hold it beside 6:8, where Noah found favour in the eyes of the LORD, and notice that the text asserts both grace and righteousness without feeling any need to rank them. The grounds of the judgement are stated twice and they are moral: 6:5 on the inclination of the human heart, and 6:11 and 6:13 on an earth corrupt in God's sight and full of violence. Whatever else Genesis is doing with this story, it is not reporting a natural disaster.

Then the vessel, and the Hebrew word for it is an exegetical gift. It is tevah, and it occurs in only two places in the Hebrew Bible: here, and in Exodus 2:3 and 2:5 of the papyrus basket in which the infant Moses is placed in the Nile. Hebrew does not use its ordinary words for ship or boat. It uses a word for a box, and it reserves that word for two containers that carry a rescuer through water. Everything about the thing is a container rather than a craft: three hundred cubits by fifty by thirty, three decks, one door, one window, no sail, no oar, no rudder. It does not sail. It floats, and it is shut in from the outside.

The flood itself is constructed as the undoing of Genesis 1, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. Genesis 7:11 says that all the fountains of the great deep burst forth and the floodgates of the heavens were opened (the Hebrew word is windows), which is the separation of the waters on day two reversed from both directions at once. The dry land that appeared on day three goes back under. The creatures of days five and six are blotted out. What is left is water over everything with a vessel on it, which is close to the picture of 1:2. Then the hinge. Genesis 8:1 says, 'But God remembered Noah and all the animals and livestock that were with him in the ark', and what follows is the creation week again in miniature: a wind, which is ruach, the same word as in 1:2, passes over the earth; the waters recede; the tops of the mountains appear; dry land emerges; birds are sent out; and living things come out of the ark to be fruitful on the earth.

Gordon Wenham's commentary sets out the whole narrative from 6:10 to 9:19 as a palistrophe, a mirror structure in which the elements before the centre are matched in reverse order after it, with 8:1 and God remembering Noah at the pivot. Whether every element of his diagram holds, the shape of the thing is not in doubt, and the centre is the right one. The hinge of the flood story is not the rain stopping; it is a verb of remembering.

The restart is then made explicit. Genesis 9:1 blesses Noah and his sons and tells them to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, which is 1:28 word for word. Genesis 9:2 to 3 revises the arrangements: the animals will now fear humanity, and every moving thing that lives is given as food, where 1:29 to 30 had given plants. Genesis 9:6 reaches back to 1:27 and makes the image of God the reason that killing a human being is answerable. So Noah is set up as a second Adam, in a world under modified terms, with the same commission and a new sanction. And since the text has gone to that much trouble to parallel the two, you should expect it to say something about how the second Adam turns out, which it does, in 9:20 to 27, and it is not flattering.

A note on the seams, since students who read commentaries will meet it. The narrative has features that look like doubling: two of every kind in 6:19 to 20 and seven pairs of clean animals in 7:2 to 3 (the BSB footnotes 'Or by sevens'), forty days in 7:12 and a hundred and fifty in 7:24. Source critics take these as two accounts interwoven, in the manner the earlier lesson on Genesis 2 described. Literary readers take them as a deliberate device, noting that the distinction between clean and unclean is exactly what a story ending in sacrifice at 8:20 requires, since Noah has to have spare clean animals to offer. Both explanations are available and the choice between them does not change what the narrative says.

In 1872 George Smith, a former banknote engraver working on the Nineveh tablets at the British Museum, read a cuneiform account of a flood, a ship and a bird sent out to find land, and announced it to the Society of Biblical Archaeology in December of that year. The text was the eleventh tablet of the Standard Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, in which the survivor Utnapishtim tells the hero how he came by his immortality. Behind it stands the older Akkadian epic Atrahasis, whose third tablet carries the same story, and behind that the Sumerian account of Ziusudra. Any serious discussion of Genesis 6 to 9 has to deal with these texts, and the way to do it is to be precise about both the overlaps and the differences, because both are substantial.

The overlaps first, and they are dense. A divine decision to destroy humanity by water. One man warned in advance. Instructions to build a vessel, with dimensions given. The vessel is sealed with bitumen. Family and animals are brought aboard and the door is shut. A catastrophic storm of some days' duration. The vessel grounds on a mountain, Mount Nimush in Gilgamesh, the mountains of Ararat in Genesis 8:4. Birds are released to test whether the waters have gone down: Utnapishtim sends a dove, then a swallow, then a raven; Noah sends a raven and then a dove three times, so even the order and the species are partly shared. The survivor sacrifices after landing. The deity or deities smell the offering. The survivor receives a blessing and a promise about the future. That is not a list of generic similarities. It is the same story told twice.

Now the differences, which fall almost entirely in the areas a theologian cares about. On motive: in Atrahasis the gods act because humanity has multiplied and the noise of them disturbs Enlil's sleep, and plague and famine are tried first; the flood is population management by an irritated deity. Genesis states a moral cause twice over, violence and corruption, and the word for violence in 6:11 and 6:13 is chamas, the word the prophets use for social brutality. On the manner of the warning: Ea cannot tell Utnapishtim directly because the council has sworn secrecy, so he speaks to a reed wall and lets the man overhear, which is a deception of the other gods. In Genesis God tells Noah to his face and tells him why. On the gods during the storm: the Babylonian deities lose control of what they have started, and the text says they cowered like dogs against the outer wall while Ishtar wailed over the destruction of her own people. On the sacrifice: when Utnapishtim offers, the gods collect round the sweet savour like flies, having sat out the storm weeping with their lips parched, and the detail is not satire, it is how that world understood sacrifice. Israel's God does not cower and is not hungry, and Psalm 50:12 to 13 makes the point explicitly for anyone who missed it.

The endings diverge hardest of all. In Gilgamesh, Enlil is furious that anyone survived, Ea rebukes him, and the resolution is a proposal that in future individual judgements, lion, wolf, famine and plague, should be used instead of a flood. Nobody is bound to anything. There is no promise, no oath and no sign. Genesis ends with a covenant in which God restricts his own future options, swears to it, and attaches a sign that he himself undertakes to look at. And the survivors end differently: Utnapishtim and his wife are given immortality and removed to the mouth of the rivers, out of the human world altogether, while Noah plants a vineyard, gets drunk, and the episode produces a family rupture. Genesis keeps its hero inside the human condition and then tells you he failed in it. That is a remarkable thing for a national literature to do to its own survivor, and it is the clearest sign that Genesis is not writing propaganda.

On the question of dependence, say what can be said and no more. The density of shared detail has persuaded most scholars that there is a real literary relationship somewhere in the chain, and the Mesopotamian versions are, on the manuscript evidence, older. Beyond that, the options are that Genesis reworks the Mesopotamian material, that both draw on a common older tradition, or that both preserve memories of a real catastrophe and have shaped them according to their own theologies, and the evidence does not force a choice. What is demonstrable, and what a student can take away and use, is what Genesis does with the material: it reduces many gods to one, replaces divine irritation with moral judgement, removes fear and hunger from the deity, keeps its hero human and flawed, and adds a covenant. For the primary texts, Andrew George's translation of Gilgamesh is the standard one and the eleventh tablet is short; older public-domain translations, including Smith's own, are free online, and they are adequate for seeing the parallels even where the readings have since improved.

The extent question has to be handled without bluffing in either direction, and the two main positions are both held by people who take the text as true. The case for a global flood is first of all the language, and it is strong. Genesis 6:17 and 7:21 to 23 speak of every creature, in Hebrew all flesh (the BSB footnotes this at 6:12 and 7:15); 7:19 says the waters completely prevailed, so that all the high mountains under all the heavens were covered; 7:20 gives a depth above them; and 9:11 promises that never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth, which the global reading says would be falsified by every regional flood since if the first one had been regional. 2 Peter 3:6 says that the world of that time perished in the flood. Then four further arguments from inside the narrative, which are often left out when the position is summarised by people who do not hold it. The scale of the engineering is an argument: a vessel of those dimensions, loaded with animals for a year, is a strange response to a regional event that could be escaped by walking. The duration is an argument: 7:24 gives a hundred and fifty days before the waters even begin to abate, and 8:9 has the dove finding no place to rest her foot, which is hard to picture for a valley flood. The covenant is an argument: 9:10 makes the promise to every living creature and 9:13 to the earth itself, which reads oddly as the sequel to a local disaster. And the New Testament takes the event as a type of universal judgement, in Matthew 24:37 to 39 and Luke 17:26 to 27, where the comparison is to a day on which nobody outside is left unaffected. John Whitcomb and Henry Morris's The Genesis Flood in 1961 built a whole geological programme on this reading, and the modern creationist movement descends from it.

The case for a limited flood is also linguistic, and it is not a dodge. Hebrew eretz means land as often as it means earth, and is regularly translated 'land' a few verses later in any English Bible. The word kol, all, is used in restricted senses throughout the Hebrew Bible: Genesis 41:57 says, in the Hebrew, that all the earth came to Egypt to buy grain (the BSB renders it 'every nation came'), which did not include China, and the BSB itself says the famine was severe 'over all the earth'. The Hebrew phrase behind 'under all the heavens' in Genesis 7:19 is the one in Deuteronomy 2:25, where it describes nations who will hear of Israel and tremble, which is plainly the peoples the Israelites would meet. On this reading the account describes the known world of its narrator and the experience of its participants, which is a flood from horizon to horizon, universal with respect to the humanity the story concerns and not necessarily with respect to the globe. Four further arguments belong to it. The first is the vantage point: 'all the high mountains under all the heavens were covered' is what a man in a boat on a shoreless sea would say, and the narrative gives you no other observer. The second is the ancient reader, who had no concept of a globe at all, so 'the whole earth' in his mouth cannot have carried the meaning a modern reader hears in it without anachronism. The third is the book's own geography: the Table of Nations in Genesis 10 traces Noah's descendants across the Near East, Anatolia, Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean, and that is the extent of the world Genesis is working with when it says all the earth. The fourth is the parallel usage, which is not confined to Genesis 41:57: Daniel 2:38 and 4:22 give Nebuchadnezzar dominion to the ends of the earth over all mankind, and Acts 2:5 has Jews from every nation under heaven in one city. John Walton and Tremper Longman argue a related case in The Lost World of the Flood, holding that the narrative makes a theological claim and was never making a geological one, and the geologist Davis Young has argued the same conclusion from the other direction in The Biblical Flood.

Each position has an objection to answer and each has an answer, and a class is owed both pairs. The objection to the global reading is geological: the mainstream consensus, which includes a great many Christian geologists, is that there is no single worldwide flood deposit and that the sedimentary and fossil record requires far more time than one year. The reply, made by Whitcomb and Morris and developed since by writers including Steven Austin and Andrew Snelling, has three parts. Thick sedimentary sequences can be laid down fast, as the Mount St Helens eruption of 1980 demonstrated on a small scale when tens of feet of finely layered deposit formed in hours. The ordering of the fossil record can be explained by ecological zonation and by hydrodynamic sorting during a catastrophe rather than by elapsed time. And inferring deep time from present-day rates of deposition is itself a uniformitarian assumption about the past rather than a direct observation of it. Whether that reply works is contested, including among Christians who hold a global flood on exegetical grounds while rejecting flood geology, but it is a reply and a student should be able to state it.

The objection to the limited reading is the text: 9:11 promises that never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth, and the limited reading has to explain why the Mesopotamian and Chinese and Bangladeshi floods of recorded history have not broken that promise. Its reply is that the promise concerns a judgement of that kind and scope, destroying all flesh, which no subsequent flood has been. A second objection cuts deeper: the limited reading has to take the universal vocabulary of 6:17 and 7:21 to 23 as phenomenological, and then take the same vocabulary in 9:10 and 9:16 at face value when the covenant is extended to every living creature, which looks like reading one set of words loosely and the neighbouring set strictly. Its reply is that phenomenological language is normal in scripture and that the New Testament does the same thing in Colossians 1:23, where the gospel is said to have been proclaimed to every creature under heaven. Note also that specific regional proposals exist and are themselves contested: William Ryan and Walter Pitman's 1997 hypothesis of a catastrophic breach of the Bosporus flooding the Black Sea basin around 5600 BC is debated among geologists and should not be presented as established. The honest state of this question is that the text's language can carry either reading, that the decision is driven mainly by what a reader concludes about evidence outside the text, and that nothing in the chapter's theology depends on the answer.

What the chapter's theology does depend on is 8:20 to 22, and the exactness here is worth a class on its own. In 6:5 the LORD saw that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was altogether evil all the time, and that observation is the ground of the flood. In 8:21, after the sacrifice, the LORD says in His heart, in the BSB's words, 'Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from his youth.' Almost the same observation, now set beside the restraint. One caution about the BSB: it reads the Hebrew particle ki as concessive, 'even though', where other versions read it as causal, 'for', making the evil heart the reason for restraint. Both are legitimate renderings of the Hebrew, and the lesson's point does not need to choose: on either reading the diagnosis has not changed, and what has changed is what God resolves to do about it. A student who sees that will never again think the flood story is about water.

Then the covenant, and the word matters. Berit, covenant, makes its first appearance in scripture at 6:18, and it is formally established in 9:8 to 17, which is why this is usually called the first covenant scripture names. Be precise about that claim: covenant theologians argue for an earlier covenant in Eden, appealing to the structure of Genesis 2, to Hosea 6:7, which the BSB renders 'they, like Adam, have transgressed the covenant' (with a footnote offering 'As at Adam, they have transgressed', a place name rather than the first man, while the KJV reads 'like men', taking adam as humankind) and which is therefore disputed, and to Jeremiah 33:20 to 25, which speaks of a covenant with day and night. So the careful statement is that the word berit first occurs here, not that no earlier arrangement deserves the name.

Four features of this covenant should be nailed down, because every later covenant in the Bible is measured against them. It is unilateral: God makes promises and imposes no stipulations within the covenant itself, so there are no conditions Noah could fail. It is universal: 9:9 to 10 extends it to Noah, to his offspring after him, and to every living creature, and 9:13 makes it a covenant between God and the earth. It is everlasting and it is explicitly a self-restriction, since God is the only party who gives anything up. And it has a sign, which is the most arresting detail in the chapter. The word in 9:13, which the BSB translates 'rainbow', is qeshet, the ordinary Hebrew word for a bow, the weapon, the word used in Psalm 7:12, Lamentations 2:4 and Habakkuk 3:9 of God's own weapon drawn against his enemies. The sign of the covenant is a weapon, hung up in the cloud, whatever the English translation calls it. And according to 9:16, the one who sees it and remembers is God. Most signs in scripture are for people to see; this one is described as a reminder to the party who swore. Isaiah 54:9 to 10 later uses exactly this covenant as the guarantee of God's unshakeable commitment, which tells you how Israel came to read it.

One thing must not be skipped, because it has done real damage. Genesis 9:20 to 27 has the second Adam plant a vineyard, get drunk, and lie uncovered, with nakedness and shame back in the story within a chapter of the new start. Noah's curse falls, in the text, on Canaan, not on Ham, and the passage says nothing whatever about skin or race. For centuries that curse was quoted to justify the enslavement of African people, and the reading is a fabrication with a body count. Teach the passage, read it exactly, and name the abuse, because students will meet the claim and should be able to answer it from the verse.

Genesis 10 is the table of nations, seventy of them descended from Noah's three sons, and it is the Bible's map of the human race. Note that it stands before the Babel account even though Babel explains how the nations came to be spread and separated in language, so the arrangement is thematic rather than chronological: Genesis shows you the result and then tells you the cause. Note also the figure in 10:8 to 12, Nimrod, the first mighty man after the flood, whose cities are Babel (the BSB writes 'Babylon' at 10:10; the Hebrew is the same name as in 11:9) and Nineveh. By the time you reach 11:1 the two great imperial capitals that will oppress Israel have already been named.

Then 11:1 to 9, which is nine verses long and almost perfectly symmetrical. The people migrate and settle in the plain of Shinar, which is Babylonia. They say to one another, 'Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly', and the narrator adds a detail that proves he knows the place: they used brick instead of stone, and tar (in Hebrew, bitumen) instead of mortar. In the alluvial plain of southern Mesopotamia there is no building stone, so you fire mud bricks and set them in bitumen, which is exactly how the ziggurats were built. And the tower that reaches to the heavens is standard temple-tower language: the great ziggurat of Babylon was called Etemenanki, the house of the foundation of heaven and earth. These towers were not staircases for human beings to climb up to God. They were platforms with a shrine on top, built so that the god could come down and be present in the city.

Now what the builders actually wanted, because this is where most teaching of the passage goes wrong. Genesis 11:4 gives two motives in the builders' own words: 'that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of all the earth.' A name, and no dispersal. There is nothing here about storming heaven, deposing God or becoming gods, and reading the passage that way imports a Greek story about Prometheus into a Hebrew one about bricks. The second motive is the theologically loaded one. Being dispersed over the face of the earth is not a threat in Genesis; it is the command, given in 1:28 and repeated word for word to Noah in 9:1, to fill the earth. The builders state, as the purpose of their project, the avoidance of the thing God told them to do.

Three readings of the sin are serious and they are compatible. The first is hubris, which fastens on the self-made name and on God's comment in 11:6 that nothing they devise will be beyond them; on this reading the problem is unified human capability without reference to God. The second is disobedience, which fastens on the refusal to scatter. The third is imperial, and it reads the passage against the fact that this city is Babylon, that Nimrod built it, and that the project is a centralised state raising a monument with mass-produced bricks; on this reading Genesis 11 is the Bible's first anti-imperial text, and the thing being judged is the consolidation of power in one place under one name. Each of the three is supported by something in the nine verses.

The response is written as a mirror. The builders say, 'Come, let us make bricks'; the LORD says, 'Come, let Us go down and confuse their language.' (The BSB's capital on 'Us' is the translators' reading, as with 'Let Us make man' in the image lesson; the Hebrew has no capitals.) The same opening, the same self-exhortation, and the second one undoes the first. The verb for confuse is balal, and 11:9 turns it into the name of the city: Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. The Babylonians derived their city's name from bab-ilu, the gate of the god. Genesis hears the same syllables and says: confusion. It is the sharpest pun in the Hebrew Bible and it is aimed at the most powerful city its readers knew.

Is the scattering judgement or mercy? Both answers have textual support, which is probably the point. It frustrates the project, which is judgement, and it accomplishes the filling of the earth that 1:28 and 9:1 had commanded, which is the blessing arriving against the builders' will. Deuteronomy 32:8 and Acts 17:26 both treat the division of humanity into nations with their own boundaries as God's doing rather than an accident. (At Deuteronomy 32:8 the BSB follows the Dead Sea Scrolls for the last phrase, 'the number of the sons of God', and footnotes that the Masoretic Text reads 'the number of the sons of Israel'; the point about God setting the boundaries stands on either text.) And Christians have long read Acts 2 as the answer, where the languages are not abolished but each person hears in his own; it is a canonical reading rather than a stated citation, and Revelation 7:9 points the same way, with a multitude from every nation, tribe, people and language standing together without any of them being erased.

Which brings this module to its last point, and it is the one Gerhard von Rad made famous. Every earlier cycle in Genesis 1 to 11 ends with a word of mercy after the judgement: the man and woman are clothed in 3:21, Cain is given a protective sign in 4:15, Noah and his family are brought through the water and given a covenant in 9:11. After Babel, there is nothing. The nations are scattered, the city is abandoned, and the chapter simply runs into a genealogy. The toledot of Shem in 11:10 to 26 narrows from Shem to Terah, and 11:27 to 32 leaves the family stranded in Haran, out of Ur of the Chaldeans and not yet anywhere, with 11:30 recording the one fact that matters: 'But Sarai was barren; she had no children.' A scattered world, a halted journey, and a childless couple.

Then Genesis 12:1 to 3, which is where the Old Testament Survey track picks the story up, and which you should now be able to hear properly. God tells Abram to leave, promises him a land, and says he will make his name great. That is the exact phrase the builders used of themselves in 11:4. The thing they tried to manufacture out of fired brick is handed to one childless man as a gift, and the promise ends by saying that in him all the families of the earth, the families whose seventy names you have just read in chapter 10, will be blessed. The answer to the scattering is not a bigger tower. It is a call, a blessing, and a man walking out of Mesopotamia with no map, and the next lesson in this track begins there.