The Fucking Flood

Genesis 5-9…

Genesis 5-9 is the story commonly known as Noah’s Ark. It’s the flood account found in Genesis 5-9. Genesis 5 begins with a lineage, and Genesis 9 ends with Noah cursing his sons and dying. Between those events the entire world is destroyed.

It’s a weird fucking story.

One reason I wanted to reread the Bible and write these reflections is that stories like The Flood or Noah’s Ark that take on their own Proper Noun Format have so much significance, yet are so fucking weird.

In standard, Christian tradition, The Flood is used to account for the extinction of almost every animal, is the Christian rebuttal for all scientific (read: evolutionary) advancement, and somehow is also the basis for God’s compassion. Yet, each of those things should be easily be debunked by:

1. Zero animals should have gone extinct by The Flood if they came 2x2 to the ark.

2. If all animals were on a singular vessel 7,500 years ago, how did they spread over the entire earth - including the Americas, Antartica, and Australia - in such a short period of time.

3. The story begins by God killing all but 8 people, and all but a few animals. Saying “he” won’t do it again is the basis of compassion.

What we teach children, and what most adults remember, are the basics: humans became evil sans Noah. God told the only righetous person to build a boat to save himself, all the animals, and his family. God sent rain to the earth for 40-days and 40-nights. After the waters cleared, Noah and his family left the ark and made a covenant with God. The covenant was a rainbow. And that shit is all in there, but I think this is one of the stories that certainly needs a deeper look and that really fucks up the story early on for most people.

Firstly, God destroyed the world. God’s creation, in a few years, became so evil that God was going to ruin the planet. These same people had just been called “good”. Yet, now they’re so evil they deserve to be destroyed.

Secondly, when they left the ark (unless one of Shem, Ham, Japeth, or Noah’s wives had a child) there were eight people. It’s from these 8, 7500 years ago, that everyone esle - all races, ethnicities, cultures, and geographies - stem. Which means we’re all related. Which means we should all treat one another A LOT better.

Thirdly, Noah was a dick. At the end of the story - chapter 9 - Noah curses his own grandchild, Canaan. He literally says, “Cursed be Canaan!” Then he adds, “The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers” (Gen 9:25). Which means that in the only family spared by the flood, they had slaves. That slavery was a part of the hierarchy. Which means that the humans - after being spared and seeing first hand what happens to evil people - decided to make their own children and grandchildren be slaves.

Lastly, the story ends with Noah drunk and naked. (Admittedly, the fact that he was the righteous one gives me a bit of comfort for some of my own dumb mistakes).

This story, the more I think on it, may be the most important story in the entire Old Testament. It’s certainly where modern Christianity stands in direct contrast to The World. It’s also a great example of recency bias, and is where the story becomes incredibly complicated - and shitty - if taken literally.

Many Evangelical Christians read the Bible literally, thinking they’re getting God’s direct words, supernaturally. So they take it at face value, finding the “lesson” from God. When you do this with the flood, you notice two or three times that the “heart of man is evil all the time”. God regrets making humans, so decides to destroy the world. So God gives Noah the building plans for a boat, commands rains to come, and kills everything that “he” made 6.5 chapters earlier.

As readers, we shift our focus quickly to Noah, and follow his family to ‘salvation’, and then we see the rainbow. For the rest of time, when we see this beautiful image in the sky, we’re to remember God’s saving graces.

Then, Noah gets drunk and curses his grandson.

From here we have two options. We can: a. read it literally or b. read it figuratively.

If we choose option 2, we have choices. We can have a dialogue about what it means. We can discuss what this means about both God and Man. We can look at history, archeology, science, discovery and be fine.

If we choose option 1, we’re pretty much fucked. If we take this story literally we have problems on nearly every front, in nearly every industry. Firstly, God sucks. In this reading, God fucked up God’s creation. After doing “his” work 4 chapters earlier, every single person - sans Enoch and Noah - are wicked. And the hearts of the people “he” created are now “all evil, all the time”.

If we chose option 1, God has zero problem killing 99.9% of everything - except fish. God’s idea of fixing a problem would be complete destruction and death. And, “he” could make something in “his” image that in a short period of time goes from God’s image to evil.

If we chose option 1, God has a bad memory. The rainbow isn’t for man to remember, but rather for God to. According to Gen 9:16, God says, “I will see it and remember”. This is the second time God’s memory failed. The first was a few chapters earlier, 8:1, when God remembered Noah. So were they just floating on the ark for a while and God didn’t remembrer?

If we chose option 1, only 8 people were alive at the end of this flood. The most they could have represented pre-flood was 5-separate families. These families would have joined through marriage to Noah and then his sons. It would be up to their kids to bang and create kids. So the design plan to lead to all the diversity in people would have to start from this one family. When family members have sex, we call that incest. And we know that incest is prone to disease.

If we chose option 1, humans would have had to very quickly spread across the world to all the remote locations - like Australia, the Amazon, various islands - and then live there untouched or unknown until the present day. And they would have had to do this really quickly.

If we realize option 1 doesn’t make any sense AND makes God not very cool, we’re all of a sudden open to possiblities that throw the literal intreptation of scripture out the window right away.

But luckily we have other options.

We can start from a completely different place. We can think of the Bible as a book of wisdom. WE can think of it as having something offer us that is Divine and inspiring, which then makes us ask other questions and come to different conclusions. Which goes a lot better with all sciences, logic, and love.