Noah: One of the Most Moral Stories Ever Told (Why the Movie won't do it Justice)

Having taught the Torah (the Five Books of Moses) from the Hebrew for more than 40 years (hundreds of hours are available by download through my website), I consider the Biblical flood story one of the world’s most profound moral teachings. As I will show, it means that God cares about goodness more than anything else.

A: Because “the Lord saw how great was man’s wickedness on earth. . . . And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth and His heart was saddened” (Genesis 6:5–6).

When God created the world, He announced after each day’s creations that “it was good.” But only after His final creation — the human being — on the sixth day, did God say that “it was very good.” God was particularly pleased with, and had the highest hopes for, this creation, the only one created “in His image.” This is not about man having God’s physical attributes (God is not physical). It is about humans’ being infinitely more precious than all other creations. Only man, like God, has moral knowledge and therefore moral free will.

When God saw how cruelly human beings treated one another, He decided that He would start over. Once people reach a certain level of widespread evil, life is pointless.

A: In the Biblical worldview, the purpose of all creation is to benefit man. This anthropocentric view of nature and indeed of the whole universe is completely at odds with the current secular idealization of nature. This secular view posits that nature has its own intrinsic meaning and purpose, independent of man.

All of creation, in the Biblical view, was to ultimately prepare the way for the creation of man. But one does not need the Bible alone to hold this view. A purely scientific reading of the universe is entirely in keeping with this view. Everything — every natural and physical law — is exquisitely tuned to produce life, and ultimately man, on earth.

First, this is so only if you believe that the Biblical flood story states that the entire earth from the North Pole to the South Pole was flooded and that every living creature from penguins to polar bears, except for the animals and the people on Noah’s ark, was killed. But that is not what the story says. The narrative speaks of the world where Noah lived: It is expressly stated in Genesis 9:10 that there were other animals in the world that were not killed by the flood.

Second, the primary purpose of the flood story — like other stories in the Bible, such as the Creation story — is to convey enduring wisdom and moral insight, not geology or science. And the lessons of the flood story influenced civilization for millennia.

A: One has already been mentioned: If evil becomes widespread enough, there is no longer a purpose to human existence.

Second, God values goodness more than any other human trait. Thus, the only reason Noah was saved was that “Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations” (Genesis 6:9). This alone renders the Biblical story unique among the flood stories of the ancient world. In those stories, a very common reason the gods saved a man was that the gods found him physically, not morally, exceptional.

A fourth lesson is the moral necessity of divine revelation. God created man without giving him a Ten Commandments or any other revealed moral instruction. The only moral code was the one God built in to the human being: the conscience. Clearly this was not enough to make a good world. The world sank into evil. This is another Biblical lesson that runs entirely counter to a dominant belief of the modern age. The secular world holds that religion and God are morally unnecessary, that the individual’s conscience is sufficient to guide moral behavior. The Bible, as usual, knew better.

After the evil that led to the flood, God decided to reveal basic moral rules — such as that murder is wrong. So wrong that one of the moral rules revealed after the flood is that murderers must be put to death (yet another way in which this story runs counter to the prevailing doctrines of our time). No wonder the secular world ignores the Bible and the Left largely loathes it.

Given the unprecedented ignorance of the Bible in contemporary America, it is likely that more young Americans will know only the Noah of Noah than that of the Bible. We can only hope that the film offers even a fraction of the wisdom of the original.

— Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His most recent book is Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph.

Universality of the Deluge

The Biblical account ascribes some kind of a universality to the Flood. But it may have been geographically universal, or it may have been only anthropologically universal. In other words, the Flood may have covered the whole earth, or it may have destroyed all men, covering only a certain part of the earth. Till about the seventeenth century, it was generally believed that the Deluge had been geographically universal, and this opinion is defended even in our days by some conservative scholars (cf. Kaulen in Kirchenlexikon). But two hundred years of theological and scientific study devoted to the question have thrown so much light on it that we may now defend the following conclusions:

The geographical universality of the Deluge may be safely abandoned

Neither Sacred Scripture nor universal ecclesiastical tradition, nor again scientific considerations, render it advisable to adhere to the opinion that the Flood covered the whole surface of the earth.

(a) The words of the original text, rendered “earth” in our version, signify “land” as well as “earth”; in fact, “land” appears to have been their primary meaning, and this meaning fits in admirably with Genesis 4, 5 and 10; why not adhere to this meaning also in Genesis 6:9, or the Flood story. Why not read, the waters “filled all on the face of the land”, “all flesh was destroyed that moved in the land”, “all things wherein there is the breath of life in the land died”, “all the high mountains under the whole heaven (corresponding to the land) were covered”? The primary meaning of the inspired text urges therefore a universality of the flood covering the whole land or region in which Noah lived, but not the whole earth.

(b) As to the cogency of the proof from tradition for the geographical universality of the Flood, it must be remembered that very few of the Fathers touched upon this question ex professo. Among those who do so there are some who restrict the Deluge to certain parts of the earth’s surface without incurring the blame of offending against tradition.
•The earthly paradise, e.g., was exempted by many, irrespective of its location on the top of a high mountain or elsewhere;
•the same must be said of the place in which Mathusala must have lived during the Flood according to the Septuagint reading;
•St. Augustine knows of writers who exempted the mountain Olympus from the Flood, though he himself does not agree with them;
•Pseudo-Justin hesitatingly rejects the opinion of those who restrict the Flood to the parts of the earth actually inhabited by men;
•Cajetan revived the opinion that the Flood did not cover Olympus and other high mountains, believing that Genesis spoke only of the mountains under the aerial heaven;
•Tostatus sees a figure of speech in the expression of the Bible which implies the universality of the Flood; at any rate, he exempts the earthly Paradise from the Deluge, since Henoch had to be saved.
If the Fathers had considered the universality of the Flood as part of the body of ecclesiastical tradition, or of the deposit of faith, they would have defended it more vigorously. It is true that the Congregation of the Index condemned Vossius’s treatise “De Septuaginta Interpretibus” in which he defended, among other doctrines, the view that the Flood covered only the inhabited part of the earth; but theologians of great weight maintained that the work was condemned on account of its Protestant author, and not on account of its doctrine.
(c) There are also certain scientific considerations which oppose the view that the Flood was geographically universal. Not that science opposes any difficulty insuperable to the power of God; but it draws attention to a number of most extraordinary, if not miraculous phenomena involved in the admission of a geographically universal Deluge.
•First, no such geological traces can be found as ought to have been left by a universal Deluge; for the catastrophe connected with the beginning of the ice-age, or the geological deluge, must not be connected with the Biblical.
•Secondly, the amount of water required by a universal Deluge, as described in the Bible, cannot be accounted for by the data furnished in the Biblical account. If the surface of the earth, in round numbers, amounts to 510,000,000 square kilometres, and if the elevation of the highest mountains reaches about 9000 metres, the water required by the Biblical Flood, if it be universal, amounts to about 4,600,000,000 cubic kilometres. Now, a forty days’ rain, ten times more copious than the most violent rainfall known to us, will raise the level of the sea only about 800 metres; since the height to be attained is about 9000 metres, there is still a gap to be filled by unknown sources amounting to a height of more than 8000 metres, in order to raise the water to the level of the greatest mountains.
•Thirdly, if the Biblical Deluge was geographically universal, the sea water and the fresh water would mix to such an extent that neither the marine animals nor the fresh-water animals could have lived in the mixture without a miracle.
•Fourthly, there are serious difficulties connected with the animals in the ark, if the Flood was geographically universal: How were they brought to Noah from the remote regions of the earth in which they lived? How could eight persons take care of such an array of beasts? Where did they obtain the food necessary for all the animals? How could the arctic animals live with those of the torrid zone for a whole year and under the same roof?
No Catholic commentator will repudiate an explanation merely for fear of having to admit a miracle; but no Catholic has a right to admit Biblical miracles which are not well attested either by Scripture or tradition. What is more, there are traces in the Biblical Flood story which favour a limited extent of the catastrophe: Noah could have known the geographical universality of the Deluge only by revelation; still the Biblical account appears to have been written by an eye-witness. If the Flood had been universal, the water would have had to fall from the height of the mountains in India to the level of those in Armenia on which the ark rested, i.e. about 11,500 feet, within the space of a few days. The fact that the dove is said to have found “the waters . . . upon the whole earth”, and that Noah “saw that the face of the earth was dried”, leaves the impression that the inspired writer uses the word “earth” in the restricted sense of “land”. Attention has been drawn also to the “bough of an olive tree, with green leaves” carried by the dove in her mouth on her second return to the ark.
The Deluge must have been anthropologically universal, i.e. it must have destroyed the whole human race

After limiting the extent of the Flood to a part of the earth, we naturally ask whether any men lived outside the region covered by its waters. It has been maintained that not all men can have perished in the Flood for the following reasons: Tribes which certainly sprang from Noah were preceded in their earliest settlements by other tribes whose origin is unknown to us: the Dravidic tribes preceded the Aryans in India; the proto-Medians preceded the Medians; the Akkadians preceded the Cushites and Semites in Chaldea; the Chanaanites were preceded in Palestine by other races. Besides, the oldest Egyptian monuments present the Negro race just as we find it today, so that even at that remote age, it was wholly different from the Caucasian race. Again, the languages of the races springing from Noah are said to be in a state of development different from that in which we find the languages of the peoples of unknown origin. Finally, the Biblical account of the Flood is said to admit a restriction of its anthropological universality as readily as a limitation of its geographical completeness; for if “land” be substituted in our translation for earth, the Book of Genesis speaks only of the men inhabiting a certain district, and not of the men of the whole earth, as being the victims of the waters. Considerations like these have induced several Catholic writers to regard as quite tenable the opinion that the Deluge did not destroy all men outside the ark.

But if the reason advanced for limiting the Flood to a certain part of the human race be duly examined, they are found to be more specious than true. The above scientific arguments do not favour a partial destruction of the human race absolutely, but only in so far as the uninterrupted existence of the various races in question gives them more time for the racial development and the historical data that have to be harmonized with the text of Genesis. Those who urge these arguments grant, therefore, implicitly that the allowance of a proper length of time will explain the facts on which their arguments are based. As there is nothing in the teaching of the Bible preventing us from assigning the Flood to a much earlier date than has usually been done, the difficulties urged on the part of science against the anthropological universality of the Flood may be easily evaded. Nor can the distribution of the nations as described in the tenth chapter of Genesis be appealed to, seeing that this section does not enumerate all races of the earth, but confines itself probably to the Caucasian.

Science, therefore, may demand an early date for the Deluge, but it does not necessitate a limitation of the Flood to certain parts of the human race. The question, whether all men perished in the Deluge, must be decided by the teaching of the Bible, and of its authoritative interpreter. As to the teachings of the Bible, the passage which deals ex professo with the Flood (Genesis 6-9), if taken by itself, may be interpreted of a partial destruction of man; it insists on the fact that all inhabitants of the “land”, not of the “earth”, died in the waters of the Deluge, and it does not explicitly tell us whether all men lived in the “land”. It may also be granted, that of the passages which refer incidentally to the flood (Wisdom 10:4; 14:6; Sirach 44:17 sqq., and Matthew 24:37 sqq., may be explained, more or less satisfactorily, of a partial destruction of the human race by the inundation of the Deluge; but no one can deny that the prima facie meaning of 1 Peter 3:20 sq., 2 Peter 2:4-9, and 2 Peter 3:5 sqq., refers to the death of all men not contained in the ark. The explanations of these passages, offered by the opponents of the anthropological universality of the Deluge, are hardly sufficient to remove all reasonable doubt. We turn, therefore, to authority in order to arrive at a final settlement of the question. Here we are confronted, in brief, with the following facts: Up to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the belief in the anthropological universality of the Deluge was general. Moreover, the Fathers regarded the ark and the Flood as types of baptism and of the Church; this view they entertained not as a private opinion, but as a development of the doctrine contained in 1 Peter 3:20 sq. Hence, the typical character of both ark and Flood belongs to the “matters of faith and morals” in which the Tridentine and the Vatican Councils oblige all Catholics to follow the interpretation of the Church.

Collateral questions

These may be reduced to the time of the Deluge, its place, and its natural causes.

Time of the Deluge

Genesis places the Deluge in the six-hundredth year of Noah; the Masoretic text assigns it to the year 1656 after the creation, the Samaritan to 1307, the Septuagint to 2242, Flavius Josephus to 2256. Again, the Masoretic text places it in B.C. 2350 (Klaproth) or 2253 (Lüken), the Samaritan in 2903, the Septuagint in 3134. According to the ancient traditions (Lüken), the Assyrians placed the Deluge in 2234 B.C. or 2316, the Greeks in 2300, the Egyptians in 2600, the Phoenicians in 2700, the Mexicans in 2900, the Indians in 3100, the Chinese in 2297, while the Armenians assigned the building of the Tower of Babel to about 2200 B.C. But as we have seen, we must be prepared to assign earlier dates to these events.

Place of the Flood

The Bible teaches only that the ark rested on a mountain in Armenia. Hence the Flood must have occurred in a place whence the ark could be carried towards this mountain. The Babylonian tradition places the Deluge in the lower valley of the Tigris and Euphrates.

Natural causes of the Flood

Scripture assigns as the causes of the Deluge the heavy forty days’ rains, the breaking up of the fountains of the great deep, and the opening of the flood-gates of heaven. This does not exclude the opinion that certain natural forces were at play in the catastrophe. It has been suggested that the axis of the earth was shifted on account of the earth’s collision with a comet, or that powerful volcanic eruptions raised new mountains in the sea, or that an earthquake caused a tidal wave to overrun certain portions of the dry land. Thus, Süss speaks of the frequency of earthquakes and of storms in the Gulf of Persia; but this would enclose the Flood within too narrow limits both of space and of time. Another conjecture has been proposed by von Schwartz. He supposes that an inland Mongolian sea, in size about equal to the Mediterranean, situated at a height of about 6000 feet above the level of the ocean and 5000 feet above the surrounding Aralo-Caspian plain, at the time of an earthquake broke through one of its walls, and sent its 3,000,000 cubic kilometres of water into the region north of Persia, Armenia, and the Caucasus, covering the whole plain, until the waters were drained by way of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean into the Atlantic Ocean. Here we have the breaking of the bonds of the great deep, we have an outflow of water lasting for several months, and we find that the ark must have been carried westward by the general drift of the waters till it rested on the mountains of Armenia. But not to mention the improbability of the supposition urged by several scientists, we do not understand why the tops of the mountains should not have been visible even after the mooring of the ark. A number of other hypotheses have been proposed in order to explain by natural causes the phenomena implied in the Biblical account of the Deluge, but thus far they have not satisfied the various details given in the Book of Genesis.

HERE: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04702a.htm

bttt

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.