Noah and the great flood: the story of an evil god?

A friend of mine, firm and devout in her Christian faith, asked my view on a tricky moral dilemma, relating to the biblical story of Noah and the great flood.

I found the question so fascinating, and indeed hard to answer myself, that I’ve decided I would rather share it, and the answers I’ve come up with, for anyone interested in Christianity, or simply debates and arguments about religion.

The great flood story is recounted in chapters 6-8 of the Book of Genesis. God, fed up with the wickedness of humankind, decides to destroy all but the righteous man Noah and his family, who take refuge in Noah’s ark along with 2 of every living thing rescued by Noah before the raging waters. The flood subsides, and God promises never to destroy the earth again in this way.

Many will dismiss the moral question by casting doubt upon the truthfulness of the story, arguing that it is symbolic and metaphorical. Much of the early creation narrative, in my view, is symbolic, in that it mediates great mysteries beyond our comprehension in terms that can be grasped by the human imagination. I do not propose to go in to that debate, but to look at the meaning behind the story.

However, it’s an important starting point for explaining how I understand this story. Supposing it tells us something about God, what might that be?

My friend’s question concerned why God slaughtered thousands of innocent people? There would, after all, have been many children, babies born and not yet born, all innocent and incapable of wickedness.

Many Christians have no trouble loving and praying to meek and gentle Jesus, but often struggle with the god of the old testament, who at times comes across as possessive, vindictive, fickle and, frankly, a pretty incompetent creator. He reminds me of the computer user who fixes every problem by banging the machine, then holding the on/off button until everything goes dark. Only this user is the very engineer who made it.

I think that if we take a step back and look at the story more carefully, however, we won’t be so prone to such misinterpretations of the nature of God.

We don’t know who wrote these early books of the Hebrew Bible; a popular theory is that Moses wrote the book of Genesis. Yet we have absolutely no idea from where he got his facts, or whether he wrote them as a matter of historical record, or as fables to demonstrate greater truths through symbolic depictions, for example an infinite God that apparently had a voice, a finite presence while walking the earth, and who spoke a particular language.

Similarly, did the flood really destroy the earth beyond the visible boundaries of any witnesses, especially given that the one Hebrew word can be translated as both earth and land? I would argue that this doesn’t matter. It only matters to atheists who, in a bid to attack religion and discredit God, apply a level of historical criticism to the text that few believers do.

I do not believe that this story should be approached with the eyes of a historian, but a philosopher, or a believer in God seeking to access new insights to his nature.

The first thing to note is that God is aggrieved and saddened by the wickedness of human beings. According to the story, God takes no pleasure or delight in bringing about the flood. Indeed, he goes on to make a covenant with Noah never to destroy humankind in a similar manner again. This can be seen as a foreshadowing of the final covenant made through the life and death of Jesus, and a sign that God desires good things for humankind.

Remember that evil has come into the world by the human choice to disobey God. True love can never be forced. It is a thing of the heart and must be chosen, hence God permits human beings to disobey and reject him.

What does it mean to disobey God? To me, it is to act contrary to the instinct to love. It’s not an expansive list of sins drawn up by the church, or a failure to quite literally let my attacker whack me on the other cheek as well. It is the choice to be selfish, to harm others and assert one’s freedom in a manner that has a detrimental effect on someone else’s.

So what, then, does that mean for the innocent people who died? The bible is apparently silent about their fate, which might suggest that even the children and pregnant women were considered evil in God’s sight and worthy of destruction. Again, not a very nice god eh? Was no-one other than Noah and his kin innocent?

Whilst some books of the bible, notably Job, do look at the question of innocence and suffering, Genesis does not in my opinion. We have to untangle ourselves from thousands of years of theology to detach this story from notions of guilt, innocence and punishment.

The book of Genesis tells us that by eating from the tree of knowledge and good and evil, Adam and Eve chose to disobey God. The result is an end to immortality, having to labour, a sense of shame over our naked state, and pain in childbirth.

Whilst it logically follows that the fall has an enduring effect from age to age, theologians read far more into it. They assumed that the fallen state means that we are all born with an inherently, unalterably corrupt nature. It’s not just that we make mistakes as we feel our way imperfectly through life and navigate a complex and uncertain world, but we are literally born evil. This is what is known as original sin and it goes back to St Augustine.

Following from this insight, various other elements of theology are added to the mix. Baptism, for example, becomes more than a cleansing and symbolic representation of one’s choice to turn away from one’s old life, as it is portrayed in the book of Acts, instead becoming the mechanism through which the stain of this first sin is removed, and thus essential for eternal salvation.

It follows that this great deep-clean of the soul needs topping up once in a while with a dusting of divine forgiveness, historically mediated through the priesthood, and in more modern times through the dramatic conversions popularised by evangelical movements.

Worse, however, these great men of the church possessed an extraordinary ability to insist upon the mysterious nature of God, whilst coming up with logical fudges to explain these apparent mysteries away, and constantly failing to appreciate that God is God, who can save or destroy what and whoever he wants in whatever way he pleases.

The notion of Limbo is perhaps the most unforgivable. This is the idea, believed for thousands of years, that there is some special destination for babies who die unbaptised. Even these torturous logicians couldn’t quite bring themselves to defend the natural conclusion that if such babies can’t go to heaven, a toasting in hell inevitably awaits them. Limbo was the fudge that resulted from hard logic colliding uneasily with the grains of empathy and innate sense of justice and morality that we all possess and that make us human.

My point is simply that, given that these dilemmas form the historic backdrop to the theological underpinnings of contemporary Christianity, it’s easy to see how Christian thinking has long rested on notions of guilt and innocence, sin and redemption, good and evil, righteousness and punishment.

How does this digression relate back to the flood? For me, it is in the notion that the contemporary Christian psyche means that we are hard-wired to read this story as one of goodness and innocence. We are programmed to assume that, since God acts as a judge in this story, the nature of his judgement is one that scrutinises each and every one of us as individuals.

If innocent women and children perished in the flood, they must have been less innocent in God’s all-knowing eyes than they are in ours. Similarly, the good man Noah must have been uniquely good and uniquely righteous to be saved.

Yet we never make such an assumption about any of the other creatures that were saved. There’s no sense, even from the sentimental retellings of this story in Sunday schools, that the dogs, cats, birds, horses or fish were all cherrypicked as exemplars of their species. Instead, we tend to assume that they served the purpose of ensuring the preservation of the species after all was destroyed in the flood.

Why is Noah different? The bible simply tells us of Noah that he found favour with God. It goes on to say that “Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation; Noah walked with God” (Genesis 1:9, NRSV).

This is all we learn about Noah before the text dives into the flood story, recounting how God determines to make an end of all flesh since they had corrupted the earth with violence. Noah may have been a good and faithful man. Maybe he was somehow unique, but only through our all-too common intellectual prism of God as a judge and punisher are we forced to conclude that Noah was the beneficiary of a divine judgement about the deserving and the undeserving.

IF we take a much deeper look, I believe that we see God simply thinking about preserving a creation he loves, despite the choice of so many to follow the instincts of evil rather than the ways of the good.

There’s one final thing we need to understand about sin and evil: it is what harms the innocent. As I write this, British news is dominated by court proceedings against a teenaged boy, accused of throwing a 6-year-old boy from the 10^th floor of an art gallery, causing a fractured spine and serious head injuries. No-one is asking what the child did to deserve that. No-one is assuming that the child was anything other than the victim of a despicable crime, the blame for which rests solely with the person who carried out the dreadful attack.

The results of evil are felt by everyone, not just those who themselves are evil by any measure we may choose to apply. The claim in the flood story that the earth was filled with violence, suggests a lack of care existed for one another, and that there were probably victims and villains.

Supposing it is true that climate change will bring about many great weather disasters in the future, it won’t just be those who have the biggest carbon footprint that will feel the impact.

The truth of the flood story, for me, is the moral lesson that when we do evil, we do harm to each other. Indeed, when evil triumphs, it is that evil, not God, that pays scant regard to any notion of innocence, blamelessness or justice.

We have become so accustomed to the rather frightening notion of a god who judges us as individuals and who, as many Christians unfortunately seem to think, apparently takes offence quite easily. That’s why many of us would rather overlook the nasty bits of the Old Testament and say that they don’t matter anymore. Alternatively, we may use the idea that the stories may be symbolic rather than factual, to simply dismiss them on the grounds that this stuff probably didn’t happen.

Instead, whatever the facts, we should not walk away from this story and pretend that it tells us nothing useful about God. IT does. However, it isn’t that God is fickle, incompetent, jealous or angry. Rather, it’s a god who feels great sorrow for the consequences of sin, whilst never losing his love for creation.

IT’s not a God who handpicks the doomed and the saved, or who blames everyone for a few people’s misdeeds. The story asks us to consider where God is in the face of great suffering. The answer, for me, is that God is found in the hope for better, the sense that not all is lost, or that we are not forever abandoned.

In the end, I feel confident to make this statement: yes, we can read Noah and the flood and still conclude that God is good.