Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Two Intrigues about Noah's Flood Written by Bart Ehrman, Read by Ken Teutsch the Flood of Noah is one of the most familiar stories of the Bible. But even those who know it well often don't think about how it actually envisions the world, or rather universe, or know about comparable stories from other, even more ancient Near Eastern cultures, though some will know about the Epic of Gilgamesh.
[00:00:32] If you are among that crowd, here is the post for you.
[00:00:35] These are two more side boxes from my book the A Historical and Literary Introduction, Second Edition, Oxford University Press, slightly edited here, Box 3.4 the Three Storied Universe the mythical thought world of ancient writers, including the writers of the Bible, was entirely different from the one we inhabit today.
[00:01:02] Nowhere does that become more clear and obvious than in considering their cosmology, their understanding of the world we live in.
[00:01:10] Modern cosmologists tell us that our little planet is part of a solar system circling a rather average star in a galaxy with something like 200 billion stars, that there are some 100 billion other galaxies, and that this is just within our own universe. There may in fact be many, many universes, the so called multiverse.
[00:01:35] The ancients literally had no idea at all things were like that. The authors of Genesis were no exception. They lived, they thought, in what we might call a simple three storied universe.
[00:01:48] For them, of course, the Earth was not part of a solar system of planets circling around the sun, the Earth, or was the center of the universe. When God created the universe, he first formed a firmament that is a solid boundary to separate the waters above from the waters below.
[00:02:09] This firmament is the sky.
[00:02:13] Above the sky is water. That's why it rains when there are holes in the sky. And below the dry ground which God made to appear the next day, there is also water.
[00:02:24] That's why there are rivers and oceans and lakes. It is the water from underneath seeping up, and that's our world.
[00:02:33] Note that God did not create the water. It was there already, but was a huge chaotic mess.
[00:02:40] His creation involved separating it to make room for Earth.
[00:02:45] When Noah's flood came, it was not simply that it rained a lot. God was reverting the world back to the chaos that existed before the creation, when the whole thing was water.
[00:02:56] And so water came down from above and water surged up from below. See Genesis 7:11.
[00:03:04] It was a very dangerous situation.
[00:03:08] In ancient three storied cosmologies, God lives up above the sky. We live down here on the dry land and the dead live somewhere underneath us, up down and the middle.
[00:03:21] That may be why it was a problem when the people of Earth wanted to build a tall tower in Genesis 11, they they were getting up close to where God was. A bit further and they would have been there. And so God had to confuse their languages so they could no longer communicate with each other and complete the task. God didn't want any mortal company up there.
[00:03:43] Box 4.2 the Story of Atrahasis There are a number of ancient tales from around the world about a flood that destroyed the human race. These stories are not limited to Genesis and Gilgamesh. Another ancient Near Eastern text that tells the tale is called Atrahasis, after the name of the main character. The old version of the story comes from Babylon, written on clay tablets that date to the beginning of the 17th century BCE, many centuries before the J and P sources of Genesis.
[00:04:18] In this account, the gods are upset that the earth has grown so overpopulated, all the noise is causing a disturbance and so decide to destroy it with a flood. Atrahasis is instructed to build a boat. It is to have both upper decks and lower decks, and is to be covered with bitumen, presumably for waterproofing.
[00:04:39] He does as he is told and then gathers all the animals aboard along with his family before sealing the door. And then it happens. The flood roared like a bull, like a wild ass, screaming. The winds howled. The darkness was total. There was no sun.
[00:04:57] In this version of the story, the flood lasts just seven days and nights, but it has its intended effect of, well, controlling the population.
[00:05:07] Afterward, Atrahasis makes a sacrifice to the gods.
[00:05:11] Some modern readers have suggested that the reason there are so many flood stories in ancient texts is because there really was a worldwide flood that destroyed the entire human race except one man, Noah Utnapishtin Atrahasis and his family and the animals he saved.
[00:05:32] Unfortunately for this view, it is physically impossible for a flood to cover the Earth. And as it turns out, there is no geological evidence for any such thing.
[00:05:42] And so it is more logical to think that these various texts arose in cultures that were rooted in areas susceptible to occasional floods, some of which were so severe that they became the stuff of myth, and the stories circulated and influenced one another over the centuries.
