Atrahasis, an ancient mesopotamian creation and flood story.

Let’s talk about the flood. A lot.

January 26, 2022 /

I want to break this post into a few distinct parts, and other parts I will offload to links instead of reprinting massive amounts of text. There’s a lot to explore here, and a lot to talk about.

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Let me make the three most important points first, and then I’ll elaborate further down.

I start from the position of someone who affirms, with King Benjamin,1Mosiah 4:9-10 the existence  of God and his knowledge and power to do all things. My arguments here don’t come from doubting scripture or God nor from “prioritizing science,” but reading scripture literally, in context, and trying to understand it the way ancient Israelites would have.

In my view, a literal reading of Genesis 6-9 reveals that its primary doctrinal teaching and purpose is not teaching the historical reality of a “global” flood any more than Jesus’ intent was to teach the historical reality of a good Samaritan.2NB: I am not claiming the flood story as “parable.” That’s not its genre. Moreover, scripture itself suggests that we are not supposed to read Genesis 6-9 as a documentary, as if it were modern journalistic history.

What was the point then? Summarized, Israelites knew flood stories from

Atrahasis, an ancient mesopotamian creation and flood story.

surrounding cultures. In one of these stories,3I’m going from memory here. the gods (plural) were arbitrary and uncaring. The reason for the humanity-destroying flood was.. humans were too loud and the high god couldn’t sleep. The high god was annoyed and casually went for a  “just kill’em all” response to the problem. The lone family to survive the flood only does so because a low-level trickster god violates divine secrecy and reveals the plan to kill all humans where he knows a human can hear. (In the Finkel video below, this is the line starting “reed wall, reed wall!”)

Compare that with Genesis, with its One God vs many gods. The reason for the Mesopotamian flood on the one hand is an annoyed and callous divinity, whereas in Genesis, God is mourning for the constant human corruption and violence on the earth. (If I were writing a manual, I might insert a Mormon-like “And thus we see, the God of Israel is just and caring, not petty and callous.”) And God himself chooses to save the best specimen of humanity— Noah and family— to try again, instead of humanity surviving because of a rebellious trickster god who thwarts the high god.

This is all very similar to some of the lessons taught in the creation chapters of Gen 1-3. Whereas Mesopotamian creation frameworks portrayed humanity as the mud-slaves of the lowest class of gods and, in essence, “creation sucks and then you die,” Genesis 1 teaches repeatedly at the end of every creation day that Creation is Good, that Humanity is Very Good (Gen 1:31), and that all Humans— not just the king— are in the Image of God (Genesis 1:26-27).

Israelites knew those stories from their neighbors but WE don’t.  (It’s an implicit context.) And consequently, we focus our orthodoxy and our lessons on scientific conflict which would have been quite foreign and meaningless to Israelites. Did Israelites believe there had been some catastrophic flood in the distant past? Probably. Was there actually a global flood c. 3000 bc? All the science says no, and scripture certainly doesn’t contain a first-hand account of it. But that’s not the lesson of the flood in Genesis. For much more detail on this, including a handout comparing flood stories, see my post here.

None of this means Noah wasn’t a real person; we tell stories about George Washington throwing a silver dollar across the Potomac, or chopping down a cherry tree. Those didn’t happen. But it doesn’t mean Washington wasn’t a real person, only that the traditions that have come down about him aren’t accurate or historical traditions. (They are perhaps Washington “parables” meant to illustrate or model his goodness and honesty?)

Now, with very rare exceptions, it is certainly true that LDS tradition has treated the flood as a real event, and Genesis 6-9 more-or-less as “historical documentary.” I think several things factor in to that tradition.

    1. Our inherited way of reading scripture from the 1800s. See this article, for example, but especially Barlow’s Mormons and the Bible. Our interpretation of scripture’s genre and meaning may be highly skewed by the assumptions we bring to it, even if those assumptions are deeply embedded into LDS tradition. And we tend to default to “history” in our assumptions.
    2. The JST expansion of Genesis in the Book of Moses, which seems to lend support to the “history” reading.
      1. However, what is the JST? Is it pure textual restoration? The Book of Moses changes the text of the KJV with the result that God destroys the entire world because Noah feels threatened!4I suspect that Joseph Smith was uncomfortable with KJV connection of “God” and “repent,” and changed the text accordingly. (This kind of change— and specific change with “repent”— is evident elsewhere in the JST.) But is the solution here actually worse than the problem? How should we think about that? See this link for textual comparison of Genesis and Moses.
    3. But also, especially in the last 70 years, deep and serious Seventh-day Adventist and Fundamentalist influence on how LDS read scripture, which encouraged very wooden so-called “literal” understandings and elevated them to “orthodoxy.” (Y’all know I don’t like that use of “literal.”) This kind of influence and thinking is quite evident in this 1998 Ensign article on the flood. I wrote a response to it here, and have since acquired a lot of information and backstory on it as part of my dissertation research. I also note that that article has never been cited or listed as a part of any Church curriculum or lesson I’ve ever seen.5If you’ve seen it somewhere, let me know. I suspect Church HQ got a real earful about it, and wishes it would just go away. The reading of the flood as a worldwide historical event in 3000BC owes at least some of its staying power to these fundamentalist “philosophies of men” which we have vigorously mingled with scripture.
    4. It’s exactly in this time period of the last 70 years that Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic scholars of the Bible-&-Ancient-Near-East have really been recovering and understanding the ancient flood stories (especially from Mesopotamia) that Israelites were interacting with and responding to. Do we hear anything from LDS sources about how those ancient contextual sources should inform our understanding of Genesis 6-9? No. Instead we get looney articles doubling-down on literalism, suggesting that God teleported kangaroos back to Australia after they got off the ark.
    5. On that topic, Evangelical Old Testament scholar John Walton expresses my viewpoint exactly.

      “Any solution [to the problems posed by the flood narrative] must take the text seriously, yet be willing to see the text in ways that the original author and audience may have seen it. It likewise needs to take logistical problems seriously. It is a weak interpretation that has to invent all sorts of miracles that the text says nothing about in order to compensate for the logistical problems.”

      – Walton, Genesis, The NIV Application Commentary 

I strongly recommend reading my post here on the flood.

 

What about the Book of Mormon?

  • Neither Alma 10:22 (entire post) nor Ether 13:2 (entire post) prove a worldwide flood in recent history. Those authors had their own traditions, and I suspect we also misread them, in the case of Ether.

Doesn’t the flood as baptism of the earth prove a “global” flood?

    • I’d say “no.” This idea, loosely, is one we inherited from Protestants and then expanded on, like the “curse of Cain” being black skin and slavery6And we all know how that went., and the Catholic Church as the great and abominable Church.7See https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1188&context=jbms This flood-as-baptism idea started with the assumption of a worldwide flood, which then lent itself easily to the image of baptism. But you can’t then turn around and argue that the flood MUST have been worldwide, because the earth needed baptism. That’s both circular and illogical. Why does the earth need baptism, but animals and such do not? See this article from BYU’s Religious Studies Center on this topic. See also this popular follow-up from one of the authors.

    Does scripture itself undermine the idea of a global all-destroying flood?
    Well, it at least complicates it.

    • Moses 7:52. Enoch is promised that a remnant of his seed will always survive. But since Enoch’s descendent is Noah, and supposedly everyone today is a direct descendent of Noah (and therefore Enoch), what value does that promise have? It doesn’t make much sense with a supposedly-“global” all-destroying flood.
    • Similarly, as I point out in my post, the Old Testament talks about several groups of people who seemingly survive the flood or have descendants not represented among the 8 people on Noah’s boat.
    • There are other internal inconsistencies and hints away from reading Genesis 6-9 as documentary.

The Flood in Scripture and the Ancient World

  • Again, see my post with details about this and the handout.
  • Genesis presents a cosmological flood, not “global” or “local.” Both terms of “local flood” and “global flood” make the assumption that Genesis 6-9 is simply describing a historical occurrence in the last 5000 years. The move to “local flood” is an interpretive strategy to account for the lack of scientific evidence for such a recent and massive flood that covered “all the mountains.” (And the evidence for such should be massive and abundant, in multiple fields. It’s simply not there.)
    But these chapters strongly reflect Genesis 1-3, where the cosmology is a flat earth above the cosmic waters below, with a solid dome overhead restraining the cosmic waters above. The sun moon and stars are embedded in that dome.
    The flood story describes a reversion back to the watery pre-creation state of the first verses of Genesis, where everything is cosmic waters, the tehom (KJV “deep”) of Genesis 1:2; the exception is Noah’s boat.
    In other words, Genesis does not envision or conceptualize this as a flooding of an earthly globe as much as a wiping away, an undoing of creation in its entirety. It is de-creation or un-creation, followed by re-creation, with Noah as the new Adam who is to “multiply and replenish” (Gen 9:1) just as Genesis 1:28 had it. (Catholic scholar Joseph Blenkinsopp has a commentary on Genesis 1-11 titled Creation, Un-creation, Re-recreation.) Added to this, the narrative both draws on and argues against the theology of Mesopotamian flood stories; I’m not convinced it was intended as a historical narrative at all. (This is a genre question.) This is why I prefer the term “cosmological flood,” instead of “local flood” or “global flood.”
  • I recently went on Saints Unscripted for a third videoto talk about flood.8The first two were about the history of evolution in the Church, and creation.

  • Ancient Israelites, living in a world of already very ancient stories of a catastrophic deluge (likely occurring around 2900 BCE) that left ancient peoples scrambling for answers about why the gods would do such a thing, adapted that story to say something of theological significance for them by way of contrast with these other ancient stories. This is not to suggest, however, that the entire earth was actually, geologically, in space and time covered with water, nor does it even suggest that this story give us permanent, let alone primary, information about of God’s ‘character.’ But it does suggest that this story had some significant religious value for its writers, and we ought to try to understand what that might be rather than capturing the story in a misleading slogan that will set up our children for a faith crisis once they get old enough to read the story for themselves or watch The History Channel and learn about the other ancient flood stories or NOVA and learn about geology and the age of the earth.

Irving Finkel’s very entertaining and informative lecture at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago9my not-so-alma mater, “Noah’s Ark Before the Flood”

And his book, The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood

The Flood, Science, and History

Geologist David Montgomery  has a very accessible book and lecture about the history of geology, the flood, and modern fundamentalism. His book is The Rocks Don’t Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood.10Rocks may not “lie” but we can certainly misinterpret them. That said, I trust mainstream geology here. Here’s a summary lecture at Harvard, “Noah’s Flood and the Development of Geology”

Did the flood create all the fossils, like dinosaur bones and stuff?

“You don’t have to know any geology to know that trilobites, dinosaurs, and saber-toothed tigers no longer live among us (unless you count birds as modern dinosaurs). Given this, it makes no sense to argue that Noah’s Flood explains the world’s fossils. If that were the case, it would mean the Flood not only caused extinctions but killed off almost all the world’s then living species—the very thing that Noah supposedly built his ark to prevent in the first place.”

– Montgomery, The Rocks Don’t Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood.

Hasn’t everyone believed in a global flood, like, forever?

    • Surprisingly, no. As Stiling’s dissertation below demonstrates,

by 1859 even the most conservative Christian writers agreed that the earth was very old and that the fossil-bearing strata had been generated by successive creations and catastrophes spanning millions of years. In addition, by 1859 most Christian commentators believed that the Flood had been confined to Central Asia or the Middle East, leaving the Flood and the ark with little or nothing to do with the present distribution of animals on the face of the earth.

 

Further reading on Geology, Genesis, and Concordism

1. Edward Davis, “The Word and the Works: Concordism and American Evangelicals” in Perspectives on an Evolving Creation  (Eerdmans)
2. Stiling, “Scriptural Geology in America,” in Livingstone, Hart, and Noel, eds. Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective
3. James R. Moore, “Geologists and Interpreters of Genesis in the Nineteenth Century,” in Lindberg and Numbers, eds. God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science (University of California Press, 1986)
4. Rudwick, Martin J.S. “The Shape and Meaning of Earth History.” In ibid., 296–321
5. “George Cuvier and the Use of Scripture in Geology” in Nature and Scripture in the Abrahamic Religions: 1700-Present
6. Stiling, The Diminishing Deluge: Noah’s Flood in Nineteenth century American thought PhD Diss, UW-Madison, 1991
7. Janet Browne, “Noah’s Flood, the Ark, and the Shaping of Early Modern Natural History” and
8. Mott T. Greene “Genesis and Geology Revisited: The Order of Nature and the Nature of Order in Nineteenth-Century Britain” in Lindberg and Numbers, eds. When Science and Christianity Meet (University of Chicago Press, 2003)

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Categories: Genesis, Old Testament, science and religion

23 Comments

  1. Logan

    January 26, 2022 at 3:45 pm

    Hey Ben, I’m a current missionary. I’ve read your entire syllabus about evolution, Genesis, and creation that you have on your main page. One thing I still really struggle with though is the Fall. I’ve tried to look search things on your site about it, but can’t really seem to find the answers I guess I’m searching for. What is your opinion on a literal Fall, literal Adam and Eve. I can’t seem to find how that would fit in to earth’s history, but the Fall is one of the “3 pillars of eternity,” so any help I can get would be great.

    • Scott

      January 26, 2022 at 10:43 pm

      Logan, I know that you asked Ben, but may I toss an idea or two in? So much could be unpacked on such a question! But consider that as Adam all die, so in Christ all shall be made alive. Jesus is the Second Adam (along with Noah, as Ben mentioned). And if Jesus is the LAST MAN (as it says in scripture), perhaps we don’t exist? Because if Jesus was the last man, no other man or woman should have been born. Do you see where I am driving with that? In the same sense that Jesus is the last Man, and yet people have come after, so to could Adam be the first man, but people could come before. These are firsts and lasts that are not about chronology, but about something else.

      All who are in Jesus (his oneness theology of John 17) are members of the Second Adam. We are of his flesh and bone. It is in this sense that Jesus is the Last Man, because we are in HIM! And so too it was with Adam. Humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years. This does not take away the literal Adam and Eve, or the fall, anymore than the later rendition takes away the atonement.

  2. Matt W.

    January 26, 2022 at 6:10 pm

    Ben! I’m so excited you posted this. I’ve been reading this article all week and been hoping for a way to get your thoughts in this space.

    I was super excited to see this from BYU. Would love your take on it. (Apologies if this is out of scope for this post)

    https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/studiaantiqua/vol13/iss1/1/

  3. Jared*

    January 26, 2022 at 7:24 pm

    Ben, fantastic job fitting a complicated topic into a single post!

    Logan: that’s a complicated topic, but my bottom line advice is that instead of focusing on the Atonement as the solution to the Fall as an event, focus on the Atonement as the solution to the fallen conditions of sin and death.

    • Logan

      January 27, 2022 at 6:35 am

      Thanks for the reply! That’s something I’ve tried doing, but one thing that catches me still is that modern prophets claim to have had visions of Adam, seeing him in the Celestial Kingdom, or seeing that he was given the Priesthood, etc. And other prophets give many talks on the Fall, and Adam and Eve. I’m not too sure where I’m going with this, just voicing concerns haha

      • Bryan

        January 27, 2022 at 10:15 am

        Logan, you’re totally right. I teach seminary, and this is something a few students have asked me about. Some thoughts of my own:

        1. Gordon Wenham calls the early Genesis stories “protohistory,” a term that “captures both the lively social comment that [Genesis 1-11] enshrines and the historical realities on which it is commenting.” I like this term because I can assume here that there was a real Adam, and something happened, but the story WE HAVE of Adam may be much more figurative than we’ve figured. President Kimball has suggested that the story of the rib is figurative; if *that* is, could other parts be figurative, as well? I think so! Which, I can’t say.
        2. A variant on the above position: read a summary of S. Joshua Swamidass’ book on “The Genealogical Adam.” He has a position on Adam and Eve that is creative, doesn’t conflict with genetic science, and works with the “protohistory” definition above.
        3. Given that God has historically “adapted” myths to make points, I wonder if God ever “adapts” figures from scripture that the current culture takes literally and uses that persona to make a revelatory point. That is, if Joseph (and everyone around him) believed Adam to be real, would God give a long history lesson explaining, “Hey, no, I mean this as myth and y’all have literalized it?” Or would God accommodate to Joseph’s understanding and use the persona of Adam in revelatory vision to make larger points about God’s plan (i.e. he’s the same yesterday, today, and forever). I don’t think this perspective would get much traction in our church, and I’m not sure I believe it, but it’s at least a possibility.
        4. There’s a long list of other LDS interpretations of the Fall in Julie Smith’s article “Paradoxes in Paradise”. See especially the section “Alternative templates.” That might be helpful.

  4. Matt W.

    January 26, 2022 at 10:15 pm

    I should clarify. That’s what happens when I try to comment while at work. I feel like the article I link is so similar to your work, it felt like you could have written it, so I thought it would be something you’d enjoy seeing.

  5. Eric L.

    January 27, 2022 at 8:54 am

    A deluge of flood information! Thank you. I loved the Montgomery book, having copied numerous paragraphs into my notebook, and I find his “conclusion” that Noah was terrible at his job both funny and stinging. Funny if you’re willing to explore multiple explanations and commentaries, stinging if you’re locked into a 6,000-year-old earth mindset where Allosaurs and Pteranodons lived alongside alpacas and pelicans.

    Logan: sometimes it helps to recognize that “adam” is both a proper name, but also literally (sorry, Ben!) means “Mankind” (Hebrew words ending in -im, (-am in this case), are usually plurals, though I’m far from any kind of expert in that language). That, for me, opens many channels of exploration, and often that exploration is more rewarding than finding one definitive answer; knowing that there is a variety of explanations and commentaries helps me to temper my expectations of both the ancient documents and the interpretations (along with their proponents) of those documents; sometimes our binary either/or, true/false thinking is the problem.

    Where the Fall “fits” into history may be the wrong question. A better one might be “how does this -or any- story, along with its myriad, often conflicting commentaries, inform my relationship with deity and with my fellow-men?” That seems to be the focus of the current CFM manual; it’s subtly steering us away from an ‘all-scripture-is-historical-fact’ interpretation. I think you’re on the right track, having identified that there are a handful of true fundamentals (Creation, Fall, Atonement & Resurrection, Priesthood), with everything else being “gravy”. If all those details (i.e., the mechanics of creation, or whether Adam had a bellybutton…) were really of salvific importance, they’d be in the book! The fact that they’re not is a clue on how to read it.

  6. Logan

    January 28, 2022 at 6:33 am

    Thank y’all so much for the responses and help. It has really helped me to expand the “tunnel vision” belief I have had. One last thing I’ve been thinking about is how black and white the O.T. is with the BoM. The BoM people clearly had a post Christ vision of the doctrine of Christ. Faith, repentance, baptism, etc. Where did they get the idea of baptism and gift of the HG when there’s little or no mention of it in the O.T. It seemed as though they had a modern understanding, while Jerusalem had an ancient understanding. And then in the Pearl of Great Price, we get this same Doctrine of Christ with Adam and Enoch. But this seems so foreign to the O.T. Hope this made sense. Thanks for all the help so far:)

    • Rob

      January 28, 2022 at 7:46 am

      From an LDS perspective there is every reason to believe the flood was both literal and a global catastrophic event. The scriptures teach the flood in a very literal historical way. There so many avenues one could argue from, I will pick just one for now.

      The brother of Jared and his people left the old world at the time of the scattering of the people at the tower of Babel. This would have been not long removed from Noah’s day and the flood. Curious to this story is that they take with them animals of every kind, even fish and bees. Now why would they do this? That seems like a major inconvenience! But not in light of the flood. As the earth re-emerged from the flood there would have been vast portions of the earth where there was a lack of life. The Jaredites thus took animals and seed of every kind to help bring back life to these distant locations.

      If the Jaredites did this, how many other groups left the tower of Babel and did the same? It’s highly probable and this alone answers the question of getting kangaroos to Australia.

      The problem with science as applied to Scripture is that it thinks all ancients were idiots and made up stories. The reality though is that Moses, who wrote most of the early histories was seen in vision the earth, universe, God, etc, and science still thinks he was an idiot.

      The wisdom of man is faulty and as such the science God’s we worship today is laughable.

      • Eric L

        January 28, 2022 at 9:09 am

        Does man’s laughable, faulty wisdom include assuming that all ancient traditions and writings (i.e., traditions of authorship, flat-earth cosmology, etc.) are factually accurate?

      • Eric L

        January 28, 2022 at 9:47 am

        One could as easily say that the problem with scripture as applied to science (or history, archeology … pick any field) is it thinks that all scientists are devilish tricksters hell-bent on misleading mankind. Such binary thinking impedes our ability to recognize and accept *all* truths. Newton’s laws are true, even if he was not a prophet; airplanes fly, even if the Wright brothers were not apostles.

    • Eric L

      January 28, 2022 at 9:03 am

      What a fantastic question! I’ve been reading a book called “From Jesus to Christ” by Dr. Paula Fredriksen (1998). She documents how the first-century Gentile church came to view the man Jesus as the Divine Redeemer, and reinterpreted Jewish scripture to see Him in that light (ignoring any truth-claims, focusing instead on critical historical analysis of the documents.) She says, and I’m oversimplifying here, that reading Christ into the Hebrew Bible is anachronistic, similar to your conundrum. Some of what she says I find jarring. It’s not an outright denial of Jesus as Son of God and Messiah, but it’s close, because she says that such an individual is foreign to the OT and to first-century Jews, some of whom accepted a new and novel interpretation of the scriptures and became the first Christians. (Remember though, much of Paul’s writing -which pre-dates the gospels- documents the conflict between the Jewish and Gentile branches of the early disunified church. Guess who won.)

      In answer to your question, this is where the Book of Mormon is truly another, independent witness of Jesus Christ. In my opinion, Nephi (and his successor-prophets) clearly talks about Jesus as the Lamb of God, Messiah and Savior, where his own scriptures largely do not (at least not very plainly, if we assume that the Brass Plates (mostly) mirror the Hebrew Bible/OT). I take it that his understanding of the Doctrine of Christ, and that of the later Nephites, comes directly from his interactions with holy messengers. He says as much. Not so much a modern understanding as a revealed one, though it looks modern to us.

      And you’re right that baptism isn’t mentioned in the Hebrew Bible – it’s a Greek word after all, and that’s part of the problem you’ve identified. The OT was written in Hebrew, and the gospels and letters were written in the lingua franca of the gentiles. The New Testament is thoroughly ‘gentile’ in nature; that’s one reason Paul’s voice is so prominent, and Peter is a) kind of a bit-character in the gospels and b) Paul’s ideological rival in the epistles (here’s a thought exercise: how would Christianity look differently if Peter’s faction had ‘won?’). “Baptism” carries certain religious ideas and meanings to modern ears – and even to medieval ones – but stripped of its religious context it means simply “to dunk” or “to submerge”. And that’s a clue – if you look for little indicators of the idea of ritual bath/cleansing, you’ll find them. John-ben-Zechariah didn’t conjure Baptism out of thin air.

      Keep asking good questions!

      • Logan

        January 29, 2022 at 9:37 am

        Was not aware with the word baptism deriving from Greek, that explanation cleared up a lot. Thank you!

        • Eric L

          February 1, 2022 at 1:42 pm

          It makes for an interesting (academic) puzzle – what word would Nephi have actually used, since he indicates that he knew Hebrew and Egyptian, but doesn’t say he knew Greek as well.

  7. Rob

    January 28, 2022 at 9:44 pm

    Ben, but isn’t angiogenesis “supernatural?
    Anyway, just because we do not understand something within the laws of the universe doesn’t mean it’s supernatural. That’s pretty faulty reasoning Ben. I’m sure God does everything within the laws of science. Even Jesus performed all of his miracles within the laws of science.

    I have been witness to blessings where tumors were suddenly gone, where disease was eradicated. Surely none of this priesthood power is outside of science.

    I think you are afraid of God and a higher understanding of science.

    • benspackman (Post author)

      February 2, 2022 at 10:09 am

      No Rob, the development of new blood vessels is not supernatural. And organic evolution, strictly speaking, doesn’t concern itself with abiogenesis.

  8. Rob

    January 28, 2022 at 11:16 pm

    The censoring lefts agenda…

    • Eric L

      February 2, 2022 at 7:32 am

      Censorship implies limiting the information available, not providing gobs more of it than you ever knew about before.

  9. Logan

    January 29, 2022 at 9:38 am

    Was not aware with the word baptism deriving from Greek, that explanation cleared up a lot. Thank you!

  10. Jack

    January 30, 2022 at 3:19 am

    I agree–the flood story really sounds like a dissolution of creation. The waters crashing in from both above and beneath are like unorganized matter collapsing in on a crumbling creation. And the ark has the feel of a microcosm–a temple as it were–protecting all within from the chaos without.

    However literal or “non” the story may be I find it interesting that after the flood there seem to be fewer vestiges of Eden in creation. It’s almost as if the Lord, in his grace, allowed certain elements of paradise to continue with us after we left the garden–but we ultimately chose to utilize those gifts for evil and thereby forfeited our opportunity to make good use of them. The world–or creation–just seems to be a bit different after the flood than it was before–less enchanted; more fallen.

  11. Ken Kyle

    February 21, 2022 at 6:57 pm

    Brigham Young referred to many of the Old Testament accounts as “baby stories”. I agree with the prophet. It is unbelievable to me that some believe that penguins from Antarctica and polar bears from the Arctic walked to the Middle East to board the Arc.