Was Noah's flood a made-up story or a real global flood?

Biblically Speaking

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Hello, Dr. Christopher Carr. How are you? I'm fine.

00:07

I'm so glad to have you back on the podcast. It's been a really long time. How have you been? Oh, I am busy.

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I just got 40 essays to grade for the weekend. So yay, me. Yay, you. Well, thanks for making time in this hour.

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I mean, I continue to be curious and confused. So thank you for being a consistent resource that I can go to on this.

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All right. Happy to help. How do you feel about the topic of Noah and the Flood? What's your like initial understanding of it from like a non -academic perspective?

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Oh, well, I think for as a non -academic perspective, it's an apologetic,

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I don't want to say it's an apologetic nightmare, but it is one of those passages in the Bible that people look at the Bible and then they say, well,

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I don't know if I can take the rest of the book seriously. You know, it's one of those ancient texts, which is so ancient and so different in terms of its writing style that a modern reader goes to it with their own perspectives of how a text should be written.

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And this text is so foreign to our own standards that it almost becomes impossible to accept that it has anything true to say.

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So it's very, very difficult. Right. I was thinking a lot about this and I wanted to cover this because I definitely fall within the camp of logistics and how is it built and how could a man build an ark like that and how could animals survive?

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And before even having this recording, I posted it on the Instagram like, hey guys,

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I'm going to talk about Noah and the Flood. Who's got questions so I can add them? And every single question was a very similar question to what

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I have of like, how did the animals not kill each other? Where is the ark now? Have they found it?

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And I think that that falls within that conspiracy theory of where and how and what, but do you feel like that's not how we should interpret this text?

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I mean, we shouldn't approach it with an archaeological logistic approach. We should maybe think of it in a different sense.

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Well, I think if we are a sort of person who accepts the inspiration of the

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Bible, we have to accept that the Flood account does tell us something true. And so if we bring all of these, what we might call more scientific questions to that particular text, a text, you know, the

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Genesis account isn't designed to answer those sorts of questions. It probably didn't even occur to the sacred authors to even consider them.

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Then we'll miss out because, you know, everything in the Bible has to be taken seriously if you're a person of faith.

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And so you just can't dispense with parts of the Bible that you think are, you know, not modern enough.

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So what? People write different texts in different ways. So let them.

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And now all we have to do is try to recall the best that we can, what were the sorts of attitudes that the authors had when they wrote the text so that we can tap into that perspective and get something out of it for ourselves.

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Yeah, that's super fair. I mean, how are we to discredit a text just because it doesn't answer the questions that we're posing to it when it was never designed to answer those types of questions?

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Yeah. And by the way, I mean, having reviewed the text a bit before our conversation, you know, it's not like those sorts of material concerns aren't addressed at all.

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I mean, I do recall, and don't ask me for chapter and verse at the moment, Noah gets all the animals on board.

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I think one of the commands was to make sure there was enough food for them. I mean, there's specificities on the cubits and the measurements of it.

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Yes, that's right. Now, I don't think I have my biblical weights and measurements transition chart in front of me.

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So, you know, is this sitting a football field or is it three miles long or what it is? I'm sure there's something specific, but I don't have those figures handy.

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Yeah. Well, okay. So leading into what, how we should interpret it and what maybe the perspective it is,

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I want to highlight that you're going to take a Catholic perspective, obviously. And would you say that this would differ with other denominations?

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Well, it is certainly the case that if you're thinking about looking at the text literally in some way, there are certainly going to be non -Catholic traditions whose understanding of the text means to be literal will be different from what the

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Catholic sense of the word literal means. So I would suspect that there are some currents in Protestant thought, and I don't know how broad they are.

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That literal means historical along the scientific lines that you were just suggesting.

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Now the Catholic line would be, yeah, well, if it's, there is always a literal sense to a text, but maybe the literal sense was meant to be symbolic, you know, that maybe it isn't written, the literal sense of the text isn't written in the way that we would expect the literal sense to be in our minds or whatever.

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So yeah, I definitely will say something about the literal sense of the text, but it's going to be not the literal in the same sense as other people.

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So that's the way the Catholic church looks at it. This literal sense has more to do with the literary forms, the style of writing, all of this, all of these things that are lost to us because of the time difference between when the text was written and when we're reading it.

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Okay, then I've got two questions for you. One is, how do you, from the Catholic perspective, believe the text should have been received in ancient times?

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And then kind of fast forward to current times, how is the flood interpreted in the Catholic perspective today?

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So it was written in a certain way back then, and now it's written now. How would you interpret that? All right, well, since the text wasn't written for me, at least in any immediate sense,

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I can say that those first dozen chapters or so of Genesis, in fact, the entire book of Genesis, is a way to set up a complete history of the chosen people.

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So one of the things that I learned in the process of getting reacquainted with this particular account of the flood in Genesis 6 is that, yes, it goes all the way back to creation, but as time goes on, there is a narrowing of the focus, so it eventually arrives at just the chosen people.

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So you've got Adam, the first parents, Eve, then they have the two brothers, Cain and Abel, and then

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Cain murders Abel, and then there are apparently other children, but the

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Cainites, who'd be the descendants of Cain, they're mentioned, and then they're never mentioned again, and the entire shift then goes to the other sibling, or the later sibling of Cain, and then that particular person has a number of children, and then some of the other branches get ignored, and it keeps narrowing down until you get to Noah, and then after the flood, you'll see that happen again, because Noah has sons, three, and the only one whose history gets followed after that is

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Shem, who eventually becomes the forefather of Abraham, who is the founder of, you know, the chosen people, the

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Israelites. So I think the grand purpose of Genesis is to provide, as far back as the beginning of the earth, a history of the

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Israel people, the Israelite people, and it's not to acknowledge, to discount the fact that these other people who are not

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Israelites don't exist, they do, but the text itself kind of quietly drops that line over there, and drops that lineage over there, and just narrows the focus by process of elimination to get to Abraham, and by the way,

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Shem is where we get the word Semite from. Semite, Sem is an older and alternative traditional spelling of Shem, so when your people complain about being anti -Semite, you're talking about people who are intrinsically hostile to descendants of Shem, who are the

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Israelites, the Jews. Wow, and that's really interesting to look at Genesis as almost a funnel, and a preamble to the chosen people, and how we got there, not to disclude or disclose the value of anybody that's been excluded, but the purpose of it was to be a funnel.

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Well, that was the method used, yes. The purpose was to provide the history. Yeah, okay.

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So the flood, how did it happen in your belief system? All right, so now, speaking as a

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Catholic tradition has, in her own belief system, a authority, the teaching authority that's exercised through officers of the

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Church, and because the officers of the Church were founded by Christ himself, so Catholics believe,

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God works through those decision makers in order to be sure that divine revelation and its interpretation doesn't get corrupted.

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So as a Catholic myself, I try to pay attention to what definitive statements have been made by authoritative persons throughout the history of the

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Church, and there are gradations and levels of authority in certain statements, but with respect to what a certain text must mean, there are very, very few, what you might call like dogmatic statements, this verse has to be taken in this way, or this verse can't be taken in that way, that kind of thing.

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I think you'd be pleasantly surprised how much openness there is with respect to what a

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Catholic can do in terms of studying Scripture. So when we're talking about the flood, in fact,

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I have my, I'm going to return, where did my note go? I have a note on this, wait a minute, you have editing equipment, right?

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So if it turns out that I start shuffling papers and stuff, you can sort things out. What did

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I do with it? Hold on a second. Yeah, I'm sure this makes for a great podcast for somebody. I'm looking around for papers.

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All right, so there is, and I can show you, but it's a

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Catholic introduction to the Bible, and you can see it just says the Old Testament down there. At some point, there will be a

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New Testament. Yeah, I heard they're coming out with that soon. But this guy Berksma and this other author,

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Grant Petrie, are relatively young guns, but they're very, very good, and they have the reputation of always trying to stay within Catholic bounds.

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So that particular book provides a very nice overview in a condensed way of literally the entire

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Old Testament. So it's just one of many resources, but the reason I like it is because they actually have a little box in their pages here to give you the options that are available for Catholics when they're looking at the flood.

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And so there are, in fact, three. It is possible for someone to assent to the proposition that there really was a worldwide planet -encompassing flood.

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Scientifically, I think that might be a hard sell, but it's a possibility.

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Then there is the option of a local flood. Since we're talking about the ancient world and much of the population,

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I guess you could say, in terms of civilization in the ancient world was in Babylon, Babylonia, where you've got both the

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Tigris and Euphrates rivers right next to each other. It is quite possible that a massive flood occurred at some point where those rivers basically merged and it was just like one ocean -sized river going down to the

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Persian Gulf. That obviously would have been terribly devastating and would have been ingrained in the minds of people for centuries after that.

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So the basis of the flood could have been a really massive flood, but still a very local one in certain respects.

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You could sort of argue that there would be kind of a relative universality since maybe most people or most known people would have been living along those rivers so that it seemed like the entire race was wiped out because there weren't many people left in that area as a result of the flood.

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Not to say there weren't people elsewhere. So you can have a universal flood option, you can have a really big local flood option, or you can take the myth option which basically says this is just kind of a story which may likely not have any basis in any particular flood, but it's a kind of narrative that uses a kind of a symbolic structure or language or images to convey certain truths.

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So those are at least options. You can say there's a big flood, a little flood, or no flood. I personally go with the middle option.

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I'm sort of inclined to think that if you're going to talk about a flood there probably was one. So and I don't think that and I can tell you the church hasn't really ruled on that because it's not really a matter of divine revelation or salvation how big do you think the flood was or if there was at all.

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I think you can go either way without compromising the inspiration of scripture because the lessons of the flood are the real revelation there, not the flood itself.

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Right, and it almost feels like we're getting so caught up in the technicalities of how big was the flood versus the actual message of what it might be representing which

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I don't know. I think if I'm an early Christian I'm going to approach this conversation with wow our god is so big he can cause a flood that big and start over whenever he wants and that's what makes him so almighty is that if he wants to wipe off you know the whole population of the world except for his chosen people he can do that.

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No like we don't know anybody anything any that's just not doesn't exist in our realm so that is an almighty god but maybe that's just not the main takeaway.

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Maybe the strength of god isn't what he's trying to communicate here and for I don't know focus on the size of the flood it's a little distracting.

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Well listen I happen to think the might of god is a legitimate point an illegitimate takeaway from the text.

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I personally think there are probably some other more dominant themes but I would not throw that one away.

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Okay so if we look into like what kind of preempted the flood it was people were super corrupt and that was what he was noting is that you know we have that the descendants and then the people but then they started being very corrupt and god said everybody is bad except for noah essentially.

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I mean genesis six five nine I have it um the lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on earth and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.

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The lord regretted that he had made humans on the earth and his heart was deeply troubled so the lord said

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I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created and whip them the animals and the birds and the creatures and I move along the ground for I regret that I made them but noah found favor in the eyes of the lord.

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So with this middle option um do you think that this is a bit of a hyperbole that it's only noah or do you think that noah was just extremely special and sinless and like what was it about noah was it is this like supposed to represent something or was he truly just the only person without wicked thoughts?

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I don't I don't know about that I having wicked thoughts is one thing acting on them is another.

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I mean I don't know how given the doctrine of original sin you can escape wicked thoughts altogether that doesn't seem to be possible to me on other grounds um but certainly noah is special that he is somebody with extraordinary sanctity and that sanctity was in fact a protective cover for him you might say with respect to god's anger um so if I were to kind of launch into a direction such a way