I am trying to understand Genesis from a local flood perspective and I want to construct the best argument I can. Genesis 9:8-11 reads as follows:
8 Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, 9 “Behold, I establish my covenant with you and your offspring after you, 10 and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the livestock, and every beast of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark; it is for every beast of the earth. 11 I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of the flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”
Based on a reading of all major commentaries on this verse, it would appear that the author/source indicates the following:
The Flood is universal for both man and animals, as the subsequent covenant is made with both Noah and all flesh (animals) at the time (as many as came out of the ark).
The “all flesh” of the text would include all humans as well as animals.
Since most commentators would place the flood around 2300-3000 BC, and since most scientific fields would place other humans on the earth in that time, it follows that either the flood was not universal (no mass destruction of Mesopotamia at the time). What explains discrepancies in the text? Thanks for your help!
Hypothetically speaking, a genealogical Noah (analogous to the genealogical Adam and Eve promoted on this site) would probably fix your difficulties. “Your offspring” would by some point include all humans. There would however be a problem with extending this to “every beast”.
Another possibility is to restrict the meaning of “the earth” in the way that local flood proponents tend to.
There’s a problem with your last paragraph: you have an either without an or. And you are not clear on what discrepancies you find in the text.
I am not the right person to help you with the text, but @AllenWitmerMiller might have a few things to say. Most here will agree that a worldwide Flood is unlikely. Certainly to anyone living in the ANE at the time, a very large flood might encompass the entire world as they knew it.
A quick google…
… and that’s in today’s very mobile society. How far would most people travel if they had to walk?
What are these “discrepancies in the text” that you are talking about? The only discrepancies you bring up are discrepancies between what the text says and some claims from science, which is not in the text. So these aren’t textual discrepancies, unless you mean something else.
The Book of Genesis including the Noah and the flood story was based on the different sources likely compiled and redacted between 500 and 350 BCE. It is not a commentary about actual historical event.
Ancient DNA going back 100,000 years of Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Modern Humans and the millions of genomes sequenced today obliterate the claim that there was a global flood that only Noah, his wife, three sons, and their wives survived. Same with every animal sequenced.
FWIW Prof Idan Dershowitz has a fairly decent argument that the story was originally Noah, hero of the great primeval FAMINE, before it became redacted into a flood story.
Adam got the land cursed. Noah fixed it.
Phase 1: Edenic life—Humanity is created to work the garden but live comfortably.
Phase 2: Curse of famine—After Adam’s curse, humanity must work extra hard for a meager yield.
**Phase 3: Return to Edenic life—**After Noah’s sacrifice and YHWH’s promise, humanity returns to a pre-curse life of work with sufficient return.
I’m busy with the Offshore Technology Conference this week—yes, that might seem a little odd for a retired computational linguist and never-all-that-great Biblical scholar, yet stuff happens—but I will eventually try to jump in when time permits.
[Hmmm. Offshore Technology Conference. Perhaps I should be working to reduce the cost of Biblical commentary via offshore exegesis. However, in view of the proposed tariffs on films produced outside of the USA, a foreign exegesis tariff could thwart my prospects. Holy σπλάγχνα.]
Thank you for this thoughtful reply. Do you have any sources for a genealogical Noah? I’m trying to put the best case together for a regional flood for my own understanding of how to best interpret the passage historically.
I’m trying to put the best case forward for a local flood. I am studying the text with the goal of understanding it as either truth (specifically, what KIND of truth) or error.
I will answer further when I finish with this Offshore Technology Conference (by swimming back to land, @Dan_Eastwood) but for now I will say this:
My best argument for a local flood versus a global flood is that there is tons of evidence for local/regional floods all over the world and zero evidence for a 4000+ years ago global flood. (Yes. Zero.)
I’m not trying to be facetious. Instead, I’m starting with the key reason I was a Young Earth Creationist who long ago who affirmed a global flood but I changed my mind. More reasons will follow.
(It is also worth mentioning that many of those individuals who pioneered modern geology started out in search of evidence for Noah’s Flood in the earth’s crust. They weren’t atheists trying to deny God as creator. They were Christians who believed the Bible. What they found changed their minds and made them realize that they had apparently misunderstood/misinterpreted the Book of Genesis.)
[@Dan_Eastwood, there are some offshore archaeology technology conferences which could be quite interesting and scuba gear is discussed.]
I don’t really understand that answer. No one doubts that many local floods have happened over the course of human history. We don’t need any part of the Bible to be true to determine this.
Genealogical Noah is more or less the same as genealogical Adam, with a little head start. Did you follow the link? Basically, within a few thousand years everyone in the world ends up descended from nearly everyone alive at the time of the flood, including all three of Noah’s sons.
It seems to me that you are assuming that the text must be literally true. Could it not be hyperbole ? Could the story be a myth ? If it was then worrying about the literal truth of the story is rather like worrying about the literal truth of a parable.
And further, @Jonah_Williams, that could be the case even if there were millions of other people on earth at the time Noah lived, and who were not affected by this flood.
Whenever I see that hideous word “exegete” I think of Nietzsche’s observation: "It is a curious thing that God learned Greek when he wished to turn author–and that he did not learn it better.” (BGE, Epigrams and Interludes 121)
"It is a curious thing that God learned Greek when he wished to turn author–and that he did not learn it better.” — Nietzsche
This quote happens to land squarely in my own [former] field of expertise, particularly concerning the history of the languages of the Bible. Nietzsche lived at a time when there was still a great deal of bias towards any Greek text which did not conform to Attic Greek (i.e. Classic Greek of the 5th and 4th centuries BC.) Because the Greek New Testament of the 1st century AD is quite different from Classical Greek—and meant to communicate in the style of the average Greek speaker/reader of the time—Nietzsche found it clumsy, limited in vocabulary, and grammatically flawed.
Of course, Nietzsche’s criticism of the language of the Greek New Testament is quite stupid. It is like complaining that the English texts in this morning’s Washington Post don’t read and conform to the standards of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets.
Even by the early 1900’s there were plenty of scholars who found Koine Greek “ghastly”, “vulgar”, “mundane”, and “common.” Of course, that is why the dialect of Greek used throughout the Roman world as lingua franca in the first century A.D. became known as KOINE Greek, because “koine” is the Greek word for “common”, as in “the Greek spoken by the common people.”
I’ve always gotten a kick out of Nietzsche’s famous quote because it is an excellent example of the “snobbishness” of classically trained people of that era. (And Nietzsche was very well trained in the Greek and Latin classics.)
By the way, the First Epistle of John is probably one of the best examples of a Koine Greek text easily read by the average Greek speaker of the time. Both the vocabulary and grammar are very simple. On the other hand, The Gospel of Luke and The Acts of the Apostles are much more “sophisticated” in being much closer to Attic Greek.
It should also be mentioned that the Greek of the NT is also influenced by the Greek dialect(s) of the Septuagint
In any case, Nietzsche’s criticism that the Greek New Testament is evidence of poorly learned Greek is both snobbish and silly. The GNT was meant to be understood by the average Greek speaker of its era.
The quip demonstrates that Nietzsche, in his characteristic way, is playfully mocking God and the notion that God would actually write something so awful both in substance and style. The connection, to me, is simply that a divinely written or inspired text should need no “exegesis” whatsoever–it should be absolutely crystalline to anyone. One certainly cannot make that case with the bible…
