HISTORICITY OF NOAH
BY
ALVIN ESAU
NOVEMBER 3O, 2011
Is the Noah narrative in Genesis 6-9 a story about an actual historical character, (Noah), and actual events that took place in history (building ark, Noah and family and animals go in ark; catastrophic flood destroys animal and human life, etc.)? My tentative conclusion is that the narrative is probably like a “parable” and not about actual events in history, even if there may have been some actual character (a hero like Noah), or events (like a big flood) that served as a background to the eventual narrative.
Historicity Generally:
One factor in judging the historicity of any story is the question of who is telling the story and when. We do not need to debate the documentary thesis here, other than to affirm the considerable historical gap between the date of the writing of the story in whatever form, and the events it purports to deal with. The Noah story is said to be a weaving together of two separate (and sometimes contradictory) accounts from the J and P source.[1] The counterargument that it is an elaborate chiastic structured whole[2] has been disputed,[3] but even if it is written in a unified way, it might be artistically structured by the final narrator by using various earlier sources. The historicity issue still arises as what sources the narrator has used, and the undeniable gap in time between these sources and the events in question. It is not wholly implausible that some very old historical events are preserved within an oral tradition of storytelling from generation to generation. However, when we deal with our own memories of events over periods of time, we are told that aspects of our memory fade, and also aspects of our recovered memories can be false, even though honestly recalled, because of the introduction of post-event information, or by our own psychological process of integrating the memory into our desired identity. If memory is malleable in individuals in a lifetime, it is likely also more so when we deal with oral cultural memory involving thousands of years of retelling.[4]
Aside from questions about who is telling the story and when and on what authority, we also make judgments about the historicity of a story by evaluating the story itself (internal). We might call this “content analysis” rather than abstract “credibility” analysis.[5] Looking at the story itself, does it have plausibility in terms of its own chronology, event details, context, coherence, causation and motivation? The judgment that we make as to the story itself is obviously subject to our own presuppositions about the way the world works. If you come to the narrative with a presumption that God is a “primitive” figment of our imagination, and that miracles do not happen, you obviously will dismiss much of the narrative as unhistorical.
However, even a person of faith may look critically at a narrative in terms of inconsistencies, gaps, lack of details, and so forth. Arguably, for example, we have very little detail in this story (aside from the release of the raven and doves), and Noah is rather a flat character, with very little dialogue, or character development.[6] He seems more typology then character. As a person of faith we also believe that “all truth is God’s truth”[7] and thus the way the world works is also part of the revelation of God. Given scientific data, do we still believe that all of humanity today is progeny of the three sons of Noah, or that all animals are progeny of those preserved in an ark?
Another factor of historicity, aside from the credibility of the narrator and the content analysis of the story, is what corroborating evidence we have external to the text that might support the historicity of it. But when we look outside of the text, what part of the story could possibly be corroborated by external evidence? Do we expect some evidence of Noah’s righteousness, longevity, sacrifices, drunkenness, or his curse on the lineage of one of his sons?[8] Can we dig up evidence of God, who is the main character in the story, sending the flood, remembering Noah, and making a preservation covenant with creation, and formulating basic commands for a creation that seems incapable of living without violence? A great deal of the biblical narrative is thus unverifiable.[9]
However, to the extent that we do argue about external corroborating evidence, we might distinguish direct evidence from contextual evidence. In the Noah narrative, direct evidence for the story might be the discovery of the Ark itself. However, absent such direct evidence, we are most often left with contextual evidence that supports historical probability, or undermines it. Evidence of a catastrophic flood in history would be contextual evidence, but notice that such evidence does not prove the historicity of the story at all. One may tell a completely fictional story that is set in a perfectly reconstructed historical context. Contextual evidence only gives us some reason to give the historicity of the story some plausibility.
External Corroborative Evidence: Direct
Taking the story as historically true, in the modern sense of historicity, there have been lots of people through the centuries who have searched for the ark on various mountains thought to be the Ararat region of the Biblical story. That the ark might have survived the flood, (now buried in ice perhaps), and might be found today with measurable qualities matching the Biblical story would obviously be fantastic proof of the historicity of the Biblical story. Alas, as Dr. Bailey recounts, the various expeditions, purported pictures, and alleged eyewitness testimonies, as well as studies on various wood relics said to be from the ark, have proved to be false and we have no credible evidence whatsoever for the survival of the ark.[10] I assume that with the advance of satellite images in the last decades, if an ark of biblical proportions is visible somewhere, it would by now surely have been noticed? Not having a surviving ark, literalists have resorted to internal arguments that the ark, as described, really was seaworthy, and the purported numbers of animals might well have been housed and fed, or maybe placed in “supernatural hibernation.”[11]
External Corroborative Evidence: Contextual
We now know that the distribution of fossil remains cannot be explained as being a result of a world-wide flood, nor that the age of the earth conforms to any literal reading of the Genesis account.[12] However we still have all sorts of arguments about global floods, or big local floods as contextual evidence for the plausibility of the Noah account. For example, Filby argued that at some stage after the last great ice age:
.. a great flood caused either by the close approach of some heavenly body, or by the movement of the continents, or both, swept from the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Indian Oceans over much of Europe and Asia to Alaska and even beyond. During that period Paleolithic man disappeared; the entire climate of Siberia was radically changed; herds of mammoths were completely eliminated.[13]
According to Filby, the flood was widespread, but not global, and thus Noah only had to take the animals from his known world into the ark. This large, but limited, flood makes it more feasible to believe that Noah could house and feed the animals in the ark.
Rather than some flood caused by the retreating of glaciers at the end of an ice age, the historical foundation for the various flood stories might be some catastrophic flood in the Mesopotamian region. However, this theory seems to have been discounted. While layers of alluvium (sediment deposited by flowing water) were found at various archeological sites, many other sites, of the same or greater antiquity in Mesopotamia, show no evidence of flooding. Bailey argues that “there is no archeological evidence for the flood, but rather for floods.”[14]
More recently, based on various oceanographic studies of sea beds, Columbia University scientists, William Ryan and Walter Pitman argue that a catastrophic flood occurred in around 5,500 B.C. when the salt-water Mediterranean broke through the Bosporus straight and inundated what was then the fresh water Black Sea, 500 hundred feet lower and much smaller in size than today. When the natural dam was broken:
Ten cubic miles of water poured through each day, two hundred times what flows over Niagara Falls, enough to cover Manhattan Island each day to a depth of over half a mile.[15]
Rather than drowning in the deluge, people fled from the coasts of the Black Sea as their settlements were flooded, and they brought the story of the great flood to the Mesopotamian and Palestinian areas, and after many generations of oral tradition, it was this Black Sea Flood that laid the historical foundation for the various written flood myths, including Noah’s flood.
Perhaps the more interesting external evidence is not the scientific evidence for floods, but the relationship, if any, of the Noah account to the various other ANE creation and flood myths, notably the Gilgamesh epic (Utnapishtim segment), the Atrahasis epic, and the Ziusudra epic. There are remarkable similarities in details (and differences) between the Noah narrative and these Mesopotamian accounts.[16] Cohn argues that the Genesis flood story is derived from these much earlier accounts, but then transformed into the monotheistic worldview of having a God who “not only punishes the guilty but purifies a polluted earth.”[17] J. David Pleins, a mythologist scholar, argues that the biblical writers transformed the ANE flood myths to reflect their own monotheistic theological purposes.[18] Filby, on the other hand, sees the similarities of the Babylonian accounts as further evidence for the historicity of the Genesis account:
They are independent of each other yet alike in so many points as to convince the honest reader that they are both very ancient records of a real historical event.[19]
Indeed, Filby argues that the story of the flood in some form is so widespread “that there is no story of an ancient event in all the world so widely accepted.”[20]
However, the fact that we have these other primeval flood stories is ambiguous in terms of the historicity of the Noah narrative. On one hand, the widespread existence of flood stories might indeed point to the historicity of the flood, pointing to “a common ancient event,” and a “common framework,”[21] presumably passed down through Abraham to Moses and then properly expressed within the correct theological rendering. As noted earlier, however, contextual evidence does not prove the historicity of the story at all. That there may have been a big flood does not verify any of the details of the story in terms of building a huge boat and having a remnant of humanity preserved in it, etc. On the other hand, the existence of earlier Mesopotamian flood stories that are clearly mythical supports the argument that the genre of the Genesis story (even if the narrator may have expressed it in the world view of ANE) is also a “parable”, but infused with the theological truth we believe is the Word of God.
Genre:
Even conservative scholars admit what we should not over historicize the Biblical text.[22] The Bible is a large anthology of many different kinds of writings. Arguably the flood story is not about geology or hydrology, but about values and identity.[23] The stories are psychic artifacts, and we are wasting time in trying to find direct or contextual external evidence. The flood story is intimately related to the creation story,[24] and we should not interpret the Noah story as literal history, unless we are also going to interpret the Adam story as literal history. Noah is said to be the first human to be born after the death of Adam, which implies his status as a kind of new Adam. Obviously there are lots of people who argue that these accounts are literally true and science is wrong, or that true science accords with these biblical accounts. However, I have never read the creation account as a narrative about science or history. The first chapters in Genesis, (until 11:27), appear to be primeval narratives; or what might be called pre-historical or supra-historical parables/metaphors that set the stage for history in terms of giving us an explanation for the world of nature and the nations, and their relationship to God.[25] The truth of the story is “constitutive” of a deeper reality, giving us the structure of reality, rather than literal history.[26] Then on this stage the subsequent biblical play will take place, of which the patriarchal narratives will be the first act.
The historicity of the play itself, especially the early acts, are hotly disputed by scholars, but the stage setting is most often described as mythical; as the author/narrator gives a theological explanation for various received cultural stories that evolved over a very long time.[27] The purpose of myth is to give an explanation of the primordial past, (an era different from, but setting the stage for, the current historical era), that “enables people to understand who they were and what their purpose was.”[28] Even conservative scholars writing historical accounts, tend to start with Abraham and have nothing much to say about the historicity of the primeval narratives, although they are foundational in terms of theology.[29] The purpose of the flood narrative, for example, might be that the moral boundaries that constitute the integrity of creation have been so undermined that the flood is needed to wipe the creation clean and to begin with a new constitution-covenant intended to control the violence endemic to humanity.[30] It may be that the flood was imagined as an act of grace, as much as judgment, allowing for humanity to flourish again. The next pre-historical story deals with the Tower of Babel and we again have humanity breaching the boundaries between the human and divine. The issue in the primeval materials is not whether it really happened or not, but rather about what information about God is being communicated.
Probably what makes us uncomfortable about this position is “the slippery slope” or “domino effect.” If historicity is irrelevant to the theological value of the narratives in the first part of Genesis, we perhaps are already on the road to viewing all or most of the other narratives of the Bible, including the Gospels, in this way. I would not want to go down that road, but this paper is not about what actual historical events are indeed essential for Christian faith, or whether the razing of Jericho must be as historical as the raising of Jesus. In commenting on genre, Kenton Sparks has recently stated, “it is very likely that the Bible contains more fictional literature than some evangelical readers can stomach. If we aim to take the Bible seriously as God’s Word, this leaves us with only one possible solution: perhaps fiction is a more valuable genre for conveying truth than conservative evangelicals normally suppose.”[31]
[1] J. David Pleins, When the Great Abyss Opened: Classic and Contemporary Readings of Noah’s Flood (New York: Oxford U. Press, 2003). In the appendix we have the J and P versions presented side by side for comparative purposes. In one account, for example, we have the seven pairs of clean animals; in the other we just have just pairs of animals, etc.
[2] G. J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15 (Waco: Word, 1987). Also see, I. Kikawada and A. Quinn, Before Abraham Was: The Unity of Genesis 1-11 (Nashville: Abingdon, 1985).
[3] Pleins, Great Abyss at 23 argues that Wenham’s structure is “full of holes” in that it is achieved by leaving out important aspects of the narrative.
[4] A leading text we use in law school on memory is E. F. Loftus, J. M. Doyle and J. Dysert, Eyewitness Testimony: Civil & Criminal (Charlottesville, Va: Lexis Law Publishing, 4th. ed., 2008).
[5] A witness might have high credibility due to demeanor, or past behavior, or “high social status” etc., but the content of their testimony should be crucially examined, and someone with low credibility might nevertheless be telling the truth.
[6] T. Fretheim, “Commentary on Genesis” in The N.I.B. Bible Commentary (Nashville: Abingdon, 1994) Vol.1, 389.
[7] Taken from the title of A.F. Holmes, All Truth is God’s Truth (Downer’s Grove: I.V. P. Press, 1983).
[8] There is a vast literature on the drunkenness of Noah and the curse on Canaan. Andreas Schuele, “Noah” in NIB Dictionary of the Bible (Nashville: Abingdon, 2009), 279.
[9] Philip R. Davies, Memories of Ancient Israel: An Introduction to Biblical History (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 155.
[10] Lloyd R. Bailey, Noah: The Person and the Story in History and Tradition (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989), Chapter Four, “Has Noah’s Ark Survived?” 54-115.
[11] J. C. Whitcomb and H. Morris, The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1961); J. Woodmorappe, Noah’s Ark: A Feasibility Study (Santee, Cal.: Institute for Creation Research, 1996).
[12] Davis Young, “The Discovery of Terrestrial History” in Portraits of Creation: Biblical and Scientific Perspectives on the World’s Formation, H. J. Van Till, ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990) 26.
[13] Fredk. A. Filby, The Flood Reconsidered (London: Pickering and Inglis, 1970) 31-32.
[14] Bailey, Noah., 35.
[15] William Ryan and Walter Pitman, Noah’s Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event That Changed History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 234.
[16] Stephen L. Bridge, Getting the Old Testament (Peabody, Mass: Hendrickson, 2009) 37-51.
[17] Norman Cohn, Noah’s Flood: The Genesis Story in Western Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996) 16.
[18] Pleins, Great Abyss,115.
[19] Filby, Flood, 43.
[20] Ibid., 56.
[21] K. A. Kitchen, “The Old Testament in its Context: 1: From the Origins to the Eve of Exodus” TSF Bulletin 59 (1971) 3, 4. Kitchen also notes the Sumerian King list that has antediluvian kings v. postdiluvian kings, obviously indicating the belief in a catastrophic flood that brought an end to one era.
[22] Temper Longman III, and Raymond B. Dillard, An Introduction to the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2d ed., 2006).
[23] Pleins, Abyss, 111.
[24] Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “What the Babylonian Flood Stories Can and Cannot Teach Us About the Genesis Flood,” Biblical Archeology Review 4 (1978) 32-41.
[25] Michael D. Coogan, The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2d ed, 2011). Coogan calls them myths and folklore.
[26] Philip R. Davies and John Rogerson, The Old Testament World (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005) 114; James L. Mays, The Harper Collens Bible Commentary (San Francisco: Harper, 1988) 84.
[27] Philip R. Davies, Memories, 105.
[28] Eric M. Meyers and John Rogerson, “The World of the Hebrew Bible”, in The Cambridge Companion to the Bible, ed. Bruce Chilton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 2008), 39-325, 55
[29] Eugene H. Merrill, Kingdom of Priests: A History of Old Testament Israel (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2nd ed., 2008); Jens Kofoed, Text and History: Historiography and the Study of the Biblical Text (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2005) argues for the reliability of the texts of the Bible, but then mainly looks at 1 and 2 Kings; I. Provan, V. Phillips Long, and Tremper Longman III, A Biblical History of Israel, Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003) starts with the patriarchs.
[30] Meyers and Rogerson, Hebrew Bible, 61; Frymer-Kensky, “Teach Us”, 40
[31] Kenton L. Sparks, God’s Word in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Bible Scholarship (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008) 214-15.
Bibliography:
Bailey, Lloyd R. Noah: The Person and the Story in History and Tradition. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989.
Bridge, Stephen L. Getting the Old Testament. Peabody, Mass: Hendrickson, 2009.
Cohn, Norman. Noah’s Flood: The Genesis Story in Western Thought. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.
Coogan, Michael D. The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2d ed., 2011.
Davies, Philip R. Memories of Ancient Israel: An Introduction to Biblical History. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008.
Davies, Philip R. and John Rogerson. The Old Testament World. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005.
Filby, Fredk. A. The Flood Reconsidered. London: Pickering and Inglis, 1970.
Fretheim, T. “Commentary on Genesis.” In The N.I.B. Bible Commentary, ed. Leander Keck, 1: Nashville: Abingdon, 1994.
Frymer-Kensky, Tikva. “What the Babylonian Flood Stories Can and Cannot Teach Us About the Genesis Flood.” Biblical Archeology Review 4 (1978): 32-41.
Holmes, A.F. All Truth is God’s Truth. Downer’s Grove: I.V. P. Press, 1983.
Kikawada, I., and A. Quinn. Before Abraham Was: The Unity of Genesis 1-11. Nashville: Abingdon, 1985.
Kofoed, Jens. Text and History: Historiography and the Study of the Biblical Text. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2005.
Longman III, Temper, and Raymond B. Dillard. An Introduction to the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2d ed., 2006.
Kitchen, K. A. “The Old Testament in its Context: 1: From the Origins to the Eve of Exodus.” TSF Bulletin 59 (1971) 2-10.
Loftus, E. F., J. M. Doyle, and J. Dysert. Eyewitness Testimony: Civil & Criminal. Charlottesville, Va: Lexis Law Publishing, 4th ed., 2008.
Mays, James L. The Harper Collins Bible Commentary. San Francisco: Harper, 1988.
Merrill, Eugene H. Kingdom of Priests: A History of Old Testament Israel. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2nd ed., 2008.
Meyers, Eric M. and John Rogerson. “The World of the Hebrew Bible.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Bible, ed. Bruce Chilton, 39-325. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 2008.
Pleins, J. David. When the Great Abyss Opened: Classic and Contemporary Readings of Noah’s Flood. New York: Oxford U. Press, 2003.
Provan, I., V., Phillips Long, and Tremper Longman III. A Biblical History of Israel. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003.
Ryan, William and Walter Pitman. Noah’s Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event That Changed History. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998.
Schuele, Andreas. “Noah.” In NIB Dictionary of the Bible, ed. K. D. Sakenfeld, 1:278-280. Nashville: Abingdon, 2009.
Sparks, Kenton L. God’s Word in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Bible Scholarship. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008.
Wenham, G. J. Genesis 1-15. Waco: Word, 1987.
Whitcomb J. C., and H. Morris, The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications. Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co.1961.
Woodmorappe, J. Noah’s Ark: A Feasibility Study. Santee, Cal.: Institute for Creation Research, 1996.
Young, Davis. “The Discovery of Terrestrial History.” In Portraits of Creation: Biblical and Scientific Perspectives on the World’s Formation, eds. H. J. Van Till, 26-81. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990.
BY
ALVIN ESAU
NOVEMBER 3O, 2011
Is the Noah narrative in Genesis 6-9 a story about an actual historical character, (Noah), and actual events that took place in history (building ark, Noah and family and animals go in ark; catastrophic flood destroys animal and human life, etc.)? My tentative conclusion is that the narrative is probably like a “parable” and not about actual events in history, even if there may have been some actual character (a hero like Noah), or events (like a big flood) that served as a background to the eventual narrative.
Historicity Generally:
One factor in judging the historicity of any story is the question of who is telling the story and when. We do not need to debate the documentary thesis here, other than to affirm the considerable historical gap between the date of the writing of the story in whatever form, and the events it purports to deal with. The Noah story is said to be a weaving together of two separate (and sometimes contradictory) accounts from the J and P source.[1] The counterargument that it is an elaborate chiastic structured whole[2] has been disputed,[3] but even if it is written in a unified way, it might be artistically structured by the final narrator by using various earlier sources. The historicity issue still arises as what sources the narrator has used, and the undeniable gap in time between these sources and the events in question. It is not wholly implausible that some very old historical events are preserved within an oral tradition of storytelling from generation to generation. However, when we deal with our own memories of events over periods of time, we are told that aspects of our memory fade, and also aspects of our recovered memories can be false, even though honestly recalled, because of the introduction of post-event information, or by our own psychological process of integrating the memory into our desired identity. If memory is malleable in individuals in a lifetime, it is likely also more so when we deal with oral cultural memory involving thousands of years of retelling.[4]
Aside from questions about who is telling the story and when and on what authority, we also make judgments about the historicity of a story by evaluating the story itself (internal). We might call this “content analysis” rather than abstract “credibility” analysis.[5] Looking at the story itself, does it have plausibility in terms of its own chronology, event details, context, coherence, causation and motivation? The judgment that we make as to the story itself is obviously subject to our own presuppositions about the way the world works. If you come to the narrative with a presumption that God is a “primitive” figment of our imagination, and that miracles do not happen, you obviously will dismiss much of the narrative as unhistorical.
However, even a person of faith may look critically at a narrative in terms of inconsistencies, gaps, lack of details, and so forth. Arguably, for example, we have very little detail in this story (aside from the release of the raven and doves), and Noah is rather a flat character, with very little dialogue, or character development.[6] He seems more typology then character. As a person of faith we also believe that “all truth is God’s truth”[7] and thus the way the world works is also part of the revelation of God. Given scientific data, do we still believe that all of humanity today is progeny of the three sons of Noah, or that all animals are progeny of those preserved in an ark?
Another factor of historicity, aside from the credibility of the narrator and the content analysis of the story, is what corroborating evidence we have external to the text that might support the historicity of it. But when we look outside of the text, what part of the story could possibly be corroborated by external evidence? Do we expect some evidence of Noah’s righteousness, longevity, sacrifices, drunkenness, or his curse on the lineage of one of his sons?[8] Can we dig up evidence of God, who is the main character in the story, sending the flood, remembering Noah, and making a preservation covenant with creation, and formulating basic commands for a creation that seems incapable of living without violence? A great deal of the biblical narrative is thus unverifiable.[9]
However, to the extent that we do argue about external corroborating evidence, we might distinguish direct evidence from contextual evidence. In the Noah narrative, direct evidence for the story might be the discovery of the Ark itself. However, absent such direct evidence, we are most often left with contextual evidence that supports historical probability, or undermines it. Evidence of a catastrophic flood in history would be contextual evidence, but notice that such evidence does not prove the historicity of the story at all. One may tell a completely fictional story that is set in a perfectly reconstructed historical context. Contextual evidence only gives us some reason to give the historicity of the story some plausibility.
External Corroborative Evidence: Direct
Taking the story as historically true, in the modern sense of historicity, there have been lots of people through the centuries who have searched for the ark on various mountains thought to be the Ararat region of the Biblical story. That the ark might have survived the flood, (now buried in ice perhaps), and might be found today with measurable qualities matching the Biblical story would obviously be fantastic proof of the historicity of the Biblical story. Alas, as Dr. Bailey recounts, the various expeditions, purported pictures, and alleged eyewitness testimonies, as well as studies on various wood relics said to be from the ark, have proved to be false and we have no credible evidence whatsoever for the survival of the ark.[10] I assume that with the advance of satellite images in the last decades, if an ark of biblical proportions is visible somewhere, it would by now surely have been noticed? Not having a surviving ark, literalists have resorted to internal arguments that the ark, as described, really was seaworthy, and the purported numbers of animals might well have been housed and fed, or maybe placed in “supernatural hibernation.”[11]
External Corroborative Evidence: Contextual
We now know that the distribution of fossil remains cannot be explained as being a result of a world-wide flood, nor that the age of the earth conforms to any literal reading of the Genesis account.[12] However we still have all sorts of arguments about global floods, or big local floods as contextual evidence for the plausibility of the Noah account. For example, Filby argued that at some stage after the last great ice age:
.. a great flood caused either by the close approach of some heavenly body, or by the movement of the continents, or both, swept from the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Indian Oceans over much of Europe and Asia to Alaska and even beyond. During that period Paleolithic man disappeared; the entire climate of Siberia was radically changed; herds of mammoths were completely eliminated.[13]
According to Filby, the flood was widespread, but not global, and thus Noah only had to take the animals from his known world into the ark. This large, but limited, flood makes it more feasible to believe that Noah could house and feed the animals in the ark.
Rather than some flood caused by the retreating of glaciers at the end of an ice age, the historical foundation for the various flood stories might be some catastrophic flood in the Mesopotamian region. However, this theory seems to have been discounted. While layers of alluvium (sediment deposited by flowing water) were found at various archeological sites, many other sites, of the same or greater antiquity in Mesopotamia, show no evidence of flooding. Bailey argues that “there is no archeological evidence for the flood, but rather for floods.”[14]
More recently, based on various oceanographic studies of sea beds, Columbia University scientists, William Ryan and Walter Pitman argue that a catastrophic flood occurred in around 5,500 B.C. when the salt-water Mediterranean broke through the Bosporus straight and inundated what was then the fresh water Black Sea, 500 hundred feet lower and much smaller in size than today. When the natural dam was broken:
Ten cubic miles of water poured through each day, two hundred times what flows over Niagara Falls, enough to cover Manhattan Island each day to a depth of over half a mile.[15]
Rather than drowning in the deluge, people fled from the coasts of the Black Sea as their settlements were flooded, and they brought the story of the great flood to the Mesopotamian and Palestinian areas, and after many generations of oral tradition, it was this Black Sea Flood that laid the historical foundation for the various written flood myths, including Noah’s flood.
Perhaps the more interesting external evidence is not the scientific evidence for floods, but the relationship, if any, of the Noah account to the various other ANE creation and flood myths, notably the Gilgamesh epic (Utnapishtim segment), the Atrahasis epic, and the Ziusudra epic. There are remarkable similarities in details (and differences) between the Noah narrative and these Mesopotamian accounts.[16] Cohn argues that the Genesis flood story is derived from these much earlier accounts, but then transformed into the monotheistic worldview of having a God who “not only punishes the guilty but purifies a polluted earth.”[17] J. David Pleins, a mythologist scholar, argues that the biblical writers transformed the ANE flood myths to reflect their own monotheistic theological purposes.[18] Filby, on the other hand, sees the similarities of the Babylonian accounts as further evidence for the historicity of the Genesis account:
They are independent of each other yet alike in so many points as to convince the honest reader that they are both very ancient records of a real historical event.[19]
Indeed, Filby argues that the story of the flood in some form is so widespread “that there is no story of an ancient event in all the world so widely accepted.”[20]
However, the fact that we have these other primeval flood stories is ambiguous in terms of the historicity of the Noah narrative. On one hand, the widespread existence of flood stories might indeed point to the historicity of the flood, pointing to “a common ancient event,” and a “common framework,”[21] presumably passed down through Abraham to Moses and then properly expressed within the correct theological rendering. As noted earlier, however, contextual evidence does not prove the historicity of the story at all. That there may have been a big flood does not verify any of the details of the story in terms of building a huge boat and having a remnant of humanity preserved in it, etc. On the other hand, the existence of earlier Mesopotamian flood stories that are clearly mythical supports the argument that the genre of the Genesis story (even if the narrator may have expressed it in the world view of ANE) is also a “parable”, but infused with the theological truth we believe is the Word of God.
Genre:
Even conservative scholars admit what we should not over historicize the Biblical text.[22] The Bible is a large anthology of many different kinds of writings. Arguably the flood story is not about geology or hydrology, but about values and identity.[23] The stories are psychic artifacts, and we are wasting time in trying to find direct or contextual external evidence. The flood story is intimately related to the creation story,[24] and we should not interpret the Noah story as literal history, unless we are also going to interpret the Adam story as literal history. Noah is said to be the first human to be born after the death of Adam, which implies his status as a kind of new Adam. Obviously there are lots of people who argue that these accounts are literally true and science is wrong, or that true science accords with these biblical accounts. However, I have never read the creation account as a narrative about science or history. The first chapters in Genesis, (until 11:27), appear to be primeval narratives; or what might be called pre-historical or supra-historical parables/metaphors that set the stage for history in terms of giving us an explanation for the world of nature and the nations, and their relationship to God.[25] The truth of the story is “constitutive” of a deeper reality, giving us the structure of reality, rather than literal history.[26] Then on this stage the subsequent biblical play will take place, of which the patriarchal narratives will be the first act.
The historicity of the play itself, especially the early acts, are hotly disputed by scholars, but the stage setting is most often described as mythical; as the author/narrator gives a theological explanation for various received cultural stories that evolved over a very long time.[27] The purpose of myth is to give an explanation of the primordial past, (an era different from, but setting the stage for, the current historical era), that “enables people to understand who they were and what their purpose was.”[28] Even conservative scholars writing historical accounts, tend to start with Abraham and have nothing much to say about the historicity of the primeval narratives, although they are foundational in terms of theology.[29] The purpose of the flood narrative, for example, might be that the moral boundaries that constitute the integrity of creation have been so undermined that the flood is needed to wipe the creation clean and to begin with a new constitution-covenant intended to control the violence endemic to humanity.[30] It may be that the flood was imagined as an act of grace, as much as judgment, allowing for humanity to flourish again. The next pre-historical story deals with the Tower of Babel and we again have humanity breaching the boundaries between the human and divine. The issue in the primeval materials is not whether it really happened or not, but rather about what information about God is being communicated.
Probably what makes us uncomfortable about this position is “the slippery slope” or “domino effect.” If historicity is irrelevant to the theological value of the narratives in the first part of Genesis, we perhaps are already on the road to viewing all or most of the other narratives of the Bible, including the Gospels, in this way. I would not want to go down that road, but this paper is not about what actual historical events are indeed essential for Christian faith, or whether the razing of Jericho must be as historical as the raising of Jesus. In commenting on genre, Kenton Sparks has recently stated, “it is very likely that the Bible contains more fictional literature than some evangelical readers can stomach. If we aim to take the Bible seriously as God’s Word, this leaves us with only one possible solution: perhaps fiction is a more valuable genre for conveying truth than conservative evangelicals normally suppose.”[31]
[1] J. David Pleins, When the Great Abyss Opened: Classic and Contemporary Readings of Noah’s Flood (New York: Oxford U. Press, 2003). In the appendix we have the J and P versions presented side by side for comparative purposes. In one account, for example, we have the seven pairs of clean animals; in the other we just have just pairs of animals, etc.
[2] G. J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15 (Waco: Word, 1987). Also see, I. Kikawada and A. Quinn, Before Abraham Was: The Unity of Genesis 1-11 (Nashville: Abingdon, 1985).
[3] Pleins, Great Abyss at 23 argues that Wenham’s structure is “full of holes” in that it is achieved by leaving out important aspects of the narrative.
[4] A leading text we use in law school on memory is E. F. Loftus, J. M. Doyle and J. Dysert, Eyewitness Testimony: Civil & Criminal (Charlottesville, Va: Lexis Law Publishing, 4th. ed., 2008).
[5] A witness might have high credibility due to demeanor, or past behavior, or “high social status” etc., but the content of their testimony should be crucially examined, and someone with low credibility might nevertheless be telling the truth.
[6] T. Fretheim, “Commentary on Genesis” in The N.I.B. Bible Commentary (Nashville: Abingdon, 1994) Vol.1, 389.
[7] Taken from the title of A.F. Holmes, All Truth is God’s Truth (Downer’s Grove: I.V. P. Press, 1983).
[8] There is a vast literature on the drunkenness of Noah and the curse on Canaan. Andreas Schuele, “Noah” in NIB Dictionary of the Bible (Nashville: Abingdon, 2009), 279.
[9] Philip R. Davies, Memories of Ancient Israel: An Introduction to Biblical History (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 155.
[10] Lloyd R. Bailey, Noah: The Person and the Story in History and Tradition (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989), Chapter Four, “Has Noah’s Ark Survived?” 54-115.
[11] J. C. Whitcomb and H. Morris, The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1961); J. Woodmorappe, Noah’s Ark: A Feasibility Study (Santee, Cal.: Institute for Creation Research, 1996).
[12] Davis Young, “The Discovery of Terrestrial History” in Portraits of Creation: Biblical and Scientific Perspectives on the World’s Formation, H. J. Van Till, ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990) 26.
[13] Fredk. A. Filby, The Flood Reconsidered (London: Pickering and Inglis, 1970) 31-32.
[14] Bailey, Noah., 35.
[15] William Ryan and Walter Pitman, Noah’s Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event That Changed History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 234.
[16] Stephen L. Bridge, Getting the Old Testament (Peabody, Mass: Hendrickson, 2009) 37-51.
[17] Norman Cohn, Noah’s Flood: The Genesis Story in Western Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996) 16.
[18] Pleins, Great Abyss,115.
[19] Filby, Flood, 43.
[20] Ibid., 56.
[21] K. A. Kitchen, “The Old Testament in its Context: 1: From the Origins to the Eve of Exodus” TSF Bulletin 59 (1971) 3, 4. Kitchen also notes the Sumerian King list that has antediluvian kings v. postdiluvian kings, obviously indicating the belief in a catastrophic flood that brought an end to one era.
[22] Temper Longman III, and Raymond B. Dillard, An Introduction to the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2d ed., 2006).
[23] Pleins, Abyss, 111.
[24] Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “What the Babylonian Flood Stories Can and Cannot Teach Us About the Genesis Flood,” Biblical Archeology Review 4 (1978) 32-41.
[25] Michael D. Coogan, The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2d ed, 2011). Coogan calls them myths and folklore.
[26] Philip R. Davies and John Rogerson, The Old Testament World (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005) 114; James L. Mays, The Harper Collens Bible Commentary (San Francisco: Harper, 1988) 84.
[27] Philip R. Davies, Memories, 105.
[28] Eric M. Meyers and John Rogerson, “The World of the Hebrew Bible”, in The Cambridge Companion to the Bible, ed. Bruce Chilton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 2008), 39-325, 55
[29] Eugene H. Merrill, Kingdom of Priests: A History of Old Testament Israel (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2nd ed., 2008); Jens Kofoed, Text and History: Historiography and the Study of the Biblical Text (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2005) argues for the reliability of the texts of the Bible, but then mainly looks at 1 and 2 Kings; I. Provan, V. Phillips Long, and Tremper Longman III, A Biblical History of Israel, Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003) starts with the patriarchs.
[30] Meyers and Rogerson, Hebrew Bible, 61; Frymer-Kensky, “Teach Us”, 40
[31] Kenton L. Sparks, God’s Word in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Bible Scholarship (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008) 214-15.
Bibliography:
Bailey, Lloyd R. Noah: The Person and the Story in History and Tradition. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989.
Bridge, Stephen L. Getting the Old Testament. Peabody, Mass: Hendrickson, 2009.
Cohn, Norman. Noah’s Flood: The Genesis Story in Western Thought. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.
Coogan, Michael D. The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2d ed., 2011.
Davies, Philip R. Memories of Ancient Israel: An Introduction to Biblical History. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008.
Davies, Philip R. and John Rogerson. The Old Testament World. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005.
Filby, Fredk. A. The Flood Reconsidered. London: Pickering and Inglis, 1970.
Fretheim, T. “Commentary on Genesis.” In The N.I.B. Bible Commentary, ed. Leander Keck, 1: Nashville: Abingdon, 1994.
Frymer-Kensky, Tikva. “What the Babylonian Flood Stories Can and Cannot Teach Us About the Genesis Flood.” Biblical Archeology Review 4 (1978): 32-41.
Holmes, A.F. All Truth is God’s Truth. Downer’s Grove: I.V. P. Press, 1983.
Kikawada, I., and A. Quinn. Before Abraham Was: The Unity of Genesis 1-11. Nashville: Abingdon, 1985.
Kofoed, Jens. Text and History: Historiography and the Study of the Biblical Text. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2005.
Longman III, Temper, and Raymond B. Dillard. An Introduction to the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2d ed., 2006.
Kitchen, K. A. “The Old Testament in its Context: 1: From the Origins to the Eve of Exodus.” TSF Bulletin 59 (1971) 2-10.
Loftus, E. F., J. M. Doyle, and J. Dysert. Eyewitness Testimony: Civil & Criminal. Charlottesville, Va: Lexis Law Publishing, 4th ed., 2008.
Mays, James L. The Harper Collins Bible Commentary. San Francisco: Harper, 1988.
Merrill, Eugene H. Kingdom of Priests: A History of Old Testament Israel. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2nd ed., 2008.
Meyers, Eric M. and John Rogerson. “The World of the Hebrew Bible.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Bible, ed. Bruce Chilton, 39-325. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 2008.
Pleins, J. David. When the Great Abyss Opened: Classic and Contemporary Readings of Noah’s Flood. New York: Oxford U. Press, 2003.
Provan, I., V., Phillips Long, and Tremper Longman III. A Biblical History of Israel. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003.
Ryan, William and Walter Pitman. Noah’s Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event That Changed History. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998.
Schuele, Andreas. “Noah.” In NIB Dictionary of the Bible, ed. K. D. Sakenfeld, 1:278-280. Nashville: Abingdon, 2009.
Sparks, Kenton L. God’s Word in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Bible Scholarship. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008.
Wenham, G. J. Genesis 1-15. Waco: Word, 1987.
Whitcomb J. C., and H. Morris, The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications. Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co.1961.
Woodmorappe, J. Noah’s Ark: A Feasibility Study. Santee, Cal.: Institute for Creation Research, 1996.
Young, Davis. “The Discovery of Terrestrial History.” In Portraits of Creation: Biblical and Scientific Perspectives on the World’s Formation, eds. H. J. Van Till, 26-81. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990.
