Subsequently this "Flood" never ran ON the Earth at all and there was NO reason for such a "flood of divine revenge". This flood myth is simply a cosmological describing part of the creation stories all over the world.
There's a lot of parallels in our views it seems like, though of course different details.
One of the more interesting things to me personally is the particulars of the reason for the Flood in the common bible -- something pretty profound, and challenging.... It's in the prelude, in the verses before the disaster is set up. What is says about us isn't something we'd always like to know or admit, but it's wiser to recognize. And that's not all. But, first to look --
5 The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. 6 And the LORD regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.
These are 2 of the most shocking verses in the bible I think. That total evil could take over a nation or region, that's shocking in a way. It's not a partial evil.
Look at the words: "
every" ... "
only evil"...."
continually" (or "
all the time" in some translations). !
At first we (or at least myself) don't want to quite accept the words just exactly what they say. We tend to want something more like this:
"The people were pretty bad, with quite a bit of evil going on, and not many good things" -- but it
doesn't say something even slightly like that! It says a radically different thing: it says they got into a situation with
zero love. Not simply little love, but none at all. No compassion. No mercy. None.
We don't like that kind of possibility (or I certainty don't).
But it's quite real.
Humanity really
can get into situations like this one, and a couple of examples that came to mind are the sudden genocide in Rwanda, or the increasing evil in Germany in the 1930s and early 40s, for example, and there are many more examples. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and on and on. We find archaeological sites where a huge number of bodies have been violently killed. It's a lot more common than we'd like to think.
And then the next verse: God simply regrets entirely that we exist.
It's just not how many imagine God, in churches, because they just haven't read the real text, as it really is.
The prelude continues:
7 So the Lord said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.”
...(Noah is the exception) ...
11 Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence. 12 God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways. 13 So God said to Noah, “I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth."
Here it's a basic reality we find later in the collection called the bible: our evil is too much to be acceptable in the end: we are not fit to live forever, like this.
Ready to suddenly become a lynch mob, or a genocide, or murder our neighbor....
Peace one month, murders the next.
We just aren't ready for an eternal life.
We need profound change. And this is why the cross was necessary, and the way it changes us, if we really see it as it is, and that God himself suffered our evils, our slanders and vile hatreds and murder. That's how much it takes to break our evil, to destroy our hatreds of each other.
