Board index ‹ Noah's Ark & the Flood

[Newbie]

Here's my question: If Noah decided not to build and ark, then god would have never done any of this?

[jimwalton]

The "what if" question is always difficult, if not impossible, to answer. To me the most honest answer is that God would have motivated him to do it. Case studies:

- Moses, when God called him to approach Pharaoh and lead his people to freedom, said, "Nope, get somebody else" (Ex. 4.13). Um, Moses ended up approaching Pharaoh and leading his people out of Egypt.
- Jonah, when God told him to go to Nineveh to preach against it, ran in the opposite direction (Jonah 1.3). Jonah ended up in Nineveh, for sure.

We are not to infer that God is a bully. Both Moses and Jonah were righteous men, and willing to follow God. They objected to the particular task, but God persuaded them that his presence would go with them.

To continue on, we know that Noah was a righteous man, and that he walked with God. It would certainly be weird for him to defy God, but if he had a distaste for the task (it was a bit on the enormous side of the scale), God would have, presumably, encouraged Noah with reassurances, as was his pattern (that we discover later). What we find through the text is Noah's complete, and apparently unfaltering, obedience (Gn. 6.22; 7.5). Deciding not to build the ark doesn't seem to have been on Noah's mind, according to the record we have.

[J Lord]

I would contend that the flood story of Genesis 6-8 was written as history, not myth.
Well the writers might have thought it was history, but it talks about things that could not realistically have happened. So for me this is why it falls into the category of myth along with all the other flood myths. It would be strange to call all of the flood myths "myths" except for one that appears in your preferred book.

[jimwalton]

> It would be strange to call all of the flood myths "myths" except for one that appears in your preferred book.

I see a radical difference between the Mesopotamian mythologies (the Gilgamesh and Atrahasis epics) and the biblical account. While there are some similarities, the differences are substantial, even in form and purpose. To me there is no reason to doubt that they refer to the same geological event, but the theological perspectives, in my opinion, relegate one to the category of mythography (theological idealism), while the biblical account comes across more like historical narrative. (For instance, the boat in the Mesopotamian accounts is shaped like a cube or a ziggurat [obvious theological symbolism]; Noah's ark is shaped like a barge.)