The traditional understanding of the reason for the great flood described in Genesis 6–9 is that man was being punished for his wickedness by being obliterated from the face of the earth. Genesis 6:5–7 would seem to lead to such a conclusion:
And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.
But there are some serious problems associated with this interpretation. If God wanted to punish man for his sin, would it be necessary to destroy all animal life as well? And then we are told in Genesis 8:21 that because of the wickedness of man, God would never again destroy all of life:
And the Lord smelled a sweet savour; and the Lord said in his heart. I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.
Here is a seeming paradox. The very reason the flood was sent in the first place is also given as the reason why God promised never
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again to destroy every living thing. How can we reconcile this? Perhaps archaeology can come to our aid and give us a deeper insight into the purpose and meaning of the Genesis flood.
Archaeology gives us a better understanding of the Bible in a number of ways: by providing a historical and cultural background of Bible times, by providing ancient texts which help us better understand the languages of the Bible, and by putting the Bible into its proper context in the ancient world, to name just a few. A case in point is the recent work of Prof. Tikva Frymer-Kensky of Wayne State University. By studying the Babylonian version of the flood story, Prof. Frymer-Kensky believes that she has found the key to understanding the biblical account of the flood. The following is a summary of her analysis.
The Babylonian Flood Stories
Three different Babylonian stories of the flood have survived: the Sumerian Flood Story, the ninth tablet of the Gilgamesh Epic, and the Atrahasis Epic. The Sumerian Flood Story is not much help since it is in a very fragmentary state and it can only be understood with the aid of the other known flood stories. In the Gilgamesh Epic the story of the flood is related as part of the tale of Gilgamesh’s quest for immortality. Utnapishtim, the Noah of this version, tells his descendant Gilgamesh the story of the flood in order to tell him how he became immortal and, in so doing, to show Gilgamesh that he cannot become immortal in the same way. He only tells those parts of the story that relate to his immortality and says nothing about the reason for the flood nor the events following.
The Atrahasis Epic
The Atrahasis Epic, on the other hand, provides new perspectives on Genesis because it presents the flood story as part of a Primeval History, as we have in Genesis. The Epic, composed no later than 1700 B.C., begins with a depiction of the world as it existed before man was created: “When the gods worked like man” (the first line and ancient title of the composition). At this time, the universe was divided among the great gods, with An taking the heavens, Enlil the earth and Enki the great deep. Seven gods established themselves as the ruling class, while the rest of the gods provided the work force. These gods, whose “work was heavy, (whose) distress was much,” dug the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and then rebelled, refusing to continue their labors. On the advice of Enki, the gods decided
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The first tablet of the Atrahasis Epic.
to create a substitute to do the work of the gods, and Enki and the mother goddess created man from clay and from the flesh and blood of a slain god, “We-ilu, a god who has sense,” from whom man was to gain rationality.
The creation of man, however, causes new problems. In the words of the Epic:
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Twelve hundred years [had not passed]
[when the land extended] and the people multiplied.
The [land] was bellowing [like a bull].
The gods were disturbed with [their uproar].
[Enlil heard] their noise
land addressed] the great gods.
“The noise of mankind [has become too intense for me]
[with their uproar] I am deprived of sleep.”
To solve this problem, the gods decided to bring a plague, which ends when Enki advises man to bring offerings to Namtar, god of the plague, and thus induce him to lift the plague. This plague does not solve the problem permanently, for twelve hundred years later the same problem arises again and the gods bring a drought, which ends when men (upon Enki’s advice) bribe Adad to bring rain. Despite the fragmentary state of the text at this point, it is easy to see that the same problem recurs, and the gods bring famine (and saline soil), which again do not end the difficulties. At last Enlil persuades the gods to adopt a “final solution” to the human problem, and they resolve to bring a flood to destroy mankind. Their plan is thwarted by Enki, who has Atrahasis build an ark and so escape the flood. After the rest of mankind have been destroyed, and after the gods have had occasion to regret their actions and to realize (by their thirst and hunger) that they need man, Atrahasis brings a sacrifice and the gods come to eat. Enki then presents a permanent solution to the problem. The new world after the flood is to be different from the old, for Enki summons Nintu, the birth goddess, and has her create new creatures, who will ensure that the old problem does not arise again. In the words of the Epic:
In addition, let there be a third category among the people,
Among the peoples women who bear and women who do not bear.
Let there be among the peoples the Pasittu-demon
to snatch the baby from the lap of her who bore it.
Establish Ugbatu-women, Entu-women and Igisitu-women
and let them be taboo and so stop childbirth.
Other post-flood provisions may have followed, but the text now becomes too fragmentary to read.
Despite the blanks, the structure presented by the Atrahasis Epic is clear. Man is created… there is a problem in creation… remedies are attempted but the problem remains… the decision is made to destroy man… this attempt is thwarted by the wisdom of Enki… a new remedy is instituted to ensure that the problem does not arise
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again. The problem that arose and that necessitated these various remedies was that of overpopulation. Mankind increased uncontrollably, and the methods of population control that were first attempted (drought, pestilence, famine) only solved the problem temporarily. This overpopulation led to destruction (the flood), and permanent countermeasures were introduced by Enki to keep the size of the population down. The myth tells us that such social phenomena as non-marrying women, and such personal tragedies as barrenness and stillbirth (and perhaps miscarriage and infant-mortality) are in fact essential to the very continuation of man’s existence, for humanity was almost destroyed once when the population got out of control.
Atrahasis and Genesis
The importance of the Atrahasis Epic to our understanding of the Genesis flood is that it focuses our attention away from the deluge itself and onto the events immediately after the rains subside. In Genesis, as in Atrahasis, the flood came in response to a serious problem in creation, a problem which was rectified immediately after the flood. A study of the changes that God made in the world after the flood gives a clearer picture of the conditions prevailing in the world before the flood, of the ultimate reason that necessitated the flood which almost caused the destruction of man, of the essential differences between the world before the flood and the world after it, and thus the essential prerequisites for the continued existence of man on the earth.
Turning our attention to Genesis 9 then, we see that God offered Noah and his sons a covenant in which He promised never again to bring a flood to destroy the world, and He gave the rainbow as a token of this promise. At this time God gave Noah and his sons several laws, and the difference between the pre- and post-flood worlds can be found in these laws. These laws are thus the structural equivalent of the new solutions proposed by Enki in the Atrahasis Epic. In Atrahasis the problem in man’s creation was overpopulation, and the solutions proposed by Enki were designed to rectify this problem by controlling and limiting the population. In the Bible the problem was not overpopulation, but “the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth” (Genesis 8:21). God had to do something if He did not want to destroy the earth repeatedly. That something was to create laws for mankind, laws to ensure that matters did not again reach such a state that the world would have
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to be destroyed. Man’s nature is inherently evil and is naturally prone to violent and unrighteous acts. Therefore, man cannot be allowed to live by his instincts alone, but he must be directed and controlled by laws; laws are necessary for human existence. It was for this reason that God’s first act after the flood was to give man laws.
The realization that the granting of laws after the flood was a direct response by God to the problem posed by man’s evil nature resolves the apparent paradox between the statement that the wickedness of man somehow caused the flood and the statement that the wickedness of man caused God to take steps to ensure that He would never again have to bring a flood. However, it does not answer the question of why the flood was necessary, why God could not simply have announced a new order and introduced laws to mankind without first destroying almost all of humanity. To find the answer we must look at the nature of the evil that existed before the flood. The best way to find out the nature of this evil is to look at the solution given to control the evil, i.e., to the laws given immediately after the flood.
The Post-Flood Laws
According to Genesis 9, God issued three commandments to Noah and his sons immediately after the flood which were to apply to mankind from that time on: (1) He commanded man to be fruitful; to increase, multiply and swarm over the earth (Genesis 9:1); (2) He announced that although man may eat meat he must not eat animals alive (or eat the blood, which is tantamount to the same thing — Genesis 9:4); and (3) He declared that no one, neither beast nor man, can kill a human being without forfeiting his own life, providing for the execution of all killers, “whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed” (Genesis 9:6).
The first commandment shows us that, unlike Atrahasis, the flood story in Genesis is emphatically not about overpopulation. Genesis 9:1 is an explicit and probably conscious rejection of the idea that the cause of the flood was overpopulation and that overpopulation is a serious problem. It echoes the original command to Adam (Genesis 1:28) and is repeated again in Genesis 9:7.
It is not surprising that Genesis rejects the idea of overpopulation as the reason for the flood, for the Bible does not share the belief of Atrahasis and some other ancient texts that overpopulation is a
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serious issue, Barrenness and stillbirth (or miscarriage) are not considered social necessities, nor are they justified as important for population control. On the contrary, when God promised the land to Israel He promised that “there shall nothing cast their young (miscarry), nor be barren, in thy land” (Exodus 23:26). The continuation of this verse, “the number of thy days I will fulfill,” seems to be a repudiation of yet another of the “natural” methods of population control, that of premature death.
Together the other two commandments introduce a very clear differentiation between man and the animal kingdom: man may kill animals for food (while observing certain restrictions in so doing), but no one, whether man or beast, can kill man. The reason for this “Absolute Sanctity of Human Life,” as it is usually called, is given in the text: “for in the image of God made He man” (Genesis 9:6). Taken independently, these two commandments — the prohibition against eating blood (and the living animal) and the declaration of the principle of the inviolability of human life with the provision of capital punishment for murder — embody two of the basic principles of Israelite law.
The Bible views blood as a very special substance. (See Bible and Spade, Autumn 1973, pp. 105-114.) Israel is seriously enjoined against eating the blood of animals, and this prohibition is repeated six times in the Pentateuch (Genesis 9:4; Leviticus 3:17, 7:26, 17:10–14; Deuteronomy 12:16 and 12:23–24). This prohibition is called an external ordinance (Leviticus 3:17), and the penalty for eating blood is karet, which is some form of outlawry, either banishment or ostracism (Leviticus 7:27; 17:10, 14). The reason for this strict prohibition is explicit: the spirit (nephes) of the animal is in the blood (Leviticus 7:11, 14; Deuteronomy 12:23). The greatest care must be exercised in the eating of meat. The slaughtering of animals (other than creatures of the hunt) can only be done at an altar. Failure to bring the animal to the altar was considered tantamount to the shedding of blood (Leviticus 17:4). The sprinkling of the animal’s blood upon the altar served as a redemption (Leviticus 17:11). In Deuteronomy, which centralized the cult thus making it no longer feasible to bring the animals to an altar, permission was given to eat and slaughter animals anywhere. However, as with the animals of the hunt in Leviticus, care had to be taken not to eat the blood, which was to be poured on the ground and covered (Deuteronomy 12:24).
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The cuneiform writing of the first column of the first tablet of the Atrahasis Epic which begins: “When the gods like men/Bore the work and suffered the toil…”
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The Sanctity of Human Life in the Bible
The idea expressed in the third commandment, that of the incomparability and inviolability of human life, is one of the fundamental axioms of Israelite philosophy, and the ramifications of this principle pervade every aspect of Israelite law and distinguish it dramatically from the other Near Eastern legal systems with which it otherwise has so much in common. In Israel, capital punishment was reserved for a direct offense against God and was never invoked for offenses against property. The inverse of this was also true; the prime offense in Israel was homicide, which could never be compensated by the payment of a monetary fine and could only be rectified by the execution of the murderer.
Despite the importance of this principle, if we look at the world before the flood, it is immediately apparent that this demand for the execution of murderers was new. Only three stories are preserved in Genesis from the ten generations between the expulsion from the Garden and the bringing of the flood. Two of these, the Cain and Able story (Genesis 4:1–15) and the tale of Lamech (Genesis 4:19–24) concern the shedding of human blood. In the first account Cain, having murdered his brother Abel, became an outcast and lost his home, However, he was not killed.. In fact, he became one of “god’s protected” and was marked with a special sign on his forehead to indicate that Cain’s punishment was the Lord’s and that whoever killed him would be subject to sevenfold retribution. The next story preserved — that of Lamech five generations later — also concerns murder, for Lamech killed “a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt” (Genesis 4:23). Lamech, too, was not killed and, in fact, claimed the same protection that Cain had, declaring that as Cain was protected with sevenfold retribution he, Lamech, would be avenged with seventy-sevenfold (Genesis 4:24). The main difference between the world before the flood and the new order established immediately after it was the different treatment of murderers, and the cause of the flood should therefore be sought in this crucial difference.
Pollution of the Ground
Murder has catastrophic consequences, not only for the individuals involved, but for the earth itself, which has the blood of innocent victims spilled upon it. As God said to Cain after Abel’s murder (Genesis 4:10–12):
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The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground. And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand; when thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.
The innocent blood which was spilled on it made the ground barren for Cain, who therefore had to leave his land and become a wanderer. This process of the cursing and attendant barrenness of the ground had become widespread. The explanation of the name given to Noah makes this point: “This same shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground which the Lord hath cursed” (Genesis 5:29). Noah’s name is explained by Genesis as related to the conditions which caused the flood, the “cursing” of the ground and Noah’s role somehow was to alleviate that condition.
By the generation of the flood the whole earth had become corrupt, or polluted, and was filled with hamas (Genesis 6:11). The wide range of meanings of the word hamas in the Old Testament encompasses almost the entire spectrum of evil. The term can stand for evil of any sort (Psalm 11: 5, Proverbs 13:2); it may simply stand for falsehood, as in “false witness” (Exodus 23: 1, Deuteronomy 19:15, Psalm 35:1) and it occurs with mirma (Isaiah 60:18; Jeremiah 6:7, 20:8), with the two together meaning something like “plunder and pillage.” Hamas has a very close connection to bloodshed as can be seem from Ezekiel 9:9. Like bloodshed, the term hamas can be used in a physical way, for hamas (or the pollution from it) can cover clothes (Malachi 2:16) and hands (Job 16:17, 1 Chronicles 12:17). In Genesis, the earth was filled with hamas and had itself become polluted because all flesh had polluted its way upon the earth (Genesis 6:11–12).
It was the filling of the earth with hamas and its resultant pollution that prompted God to bring a flood to physically erase everything from the earth and start anew. The flood was not primarily an agency of punishment, but a means of getting rid of a thoroughly polluted world and starting again with a clean, well-washed one. Then, when everything had been washed away, God resolved (Genesis 8:21):
I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every living thing, as I have done.
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He then went on to give Noah and his sons the basic laws, specifically the strict instructions about the shedding of blood, to prevent the earth from becoming polluted again.
Pollution in the Bible
The idea of the pollution of the earth is not a vague metaphor to indicate moral wrongdoing. On the contrary, in the biblical worldview, the murders before the flood contaminated the land and created a state of physical pollution which had to be eradicated by physical means (the flood). Although this concept may seem strange to us, it is not surprising to find it here in the cosmology of Israel, for Israel clearly believed that moral wrongdoings defiled physically. This is explicitly stated with three sins — murder, idolatry, and sexual abominations. These are mentioned in Acts as offenses from which all the nations must refrain (Acts 15:20).
According to Leviticus 18, the pre-Israelite inhabitants of Canaan had defiled the land with sexual abominations, As a result God had punished the land (Leviticus 18:25), and the land had therefore vomited up the inhabitants which had defiled it. For this reason, Israel was admonished not to commit these abominations and defile the land lest it vomit them out in the same way (Leviticus 18:24–28). Later, Israel was told that it had defiled the land (Jeremiah 2:7) and that because Israel defiled the land with their idols and because of the blood which they spilled upon the land, God poured His fury upon them (Ezekiel 36:18).
The most serious contaminant of the land was the blood of those who had been murdered; the concept of “bloodguilt” is well known in Israelite law. Because of the seriousness of the crime of murder, and perhaps also because of the mystical conception of blood in Israelite thought, the blood of the slain physically polluted the land. For this reason, the discovery of a corpse posed a real problem for the people. When such an unsolved murder occurred, recourse was had to the procedure of “the breaking of the heifer’s neck,” a ritual meant to cleanse the land of the pollution of the murder. The elders of the nearest town were to bring a heifer to an uninhabited wadi, strike off its head, wash their hands over it and offer the following prayer:
Our hands have not shed this blood, neither have our eyes seen it. Be merciful, O Lord, unto thy people Israel, whom Thou hast redeemed, and lay not innocent blood unto thy people of Israel’s charge. (Deuteronomy 21:7, 8).
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The shedding of human blood was of concern to the whole nation, for it involved an actual pollution of the land. Israel was enjoined against this bloodguilt pollution and was admonished neither to allow compensation for murder, nor even to allow an accidental murderer to leave a city of refuge, for by so doing they would cause the land of Israel to become contaminated:
Moreover ye shall take no satisfaction for the life of a murderer, which is guilty of death: but he shall be surely put to death. And ye shall take no satisfaction for him that is fled to the city of his refuge, that he should come again to dwell in the land, until the death of the priest. So ye shall not pollute the land wherein ye are: for blood it defileth the land: and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it. Defile not therefore the land which ye shall inhabit, wherein I dwell: for I the Lord dwell among the children of Israel. (Numbers 35:31–34).
The idea of pollution of the earth by murder, of the physical pollution caused by “moral” wrongs such as sexual abominations and idolatry, underlies much of Israelite law. Before the flood, there were no laws to govern and control man in order to prevent these acts from occurring, nor to rectify the deed when a sinful act was committed. As a result, the earth became polluted. God then sent the flood to cleanse the earth and make a fresh start. Immediately following the flood, God gave Noah and his sons laws to follow to prevent the land from ever becoming polluted again. Thus the flood story sets forth the concept that law and the sanctity of human life are the prerequisites of human existence upon the earth.
(The Atrahasis Epic and Its Significance for Our Understanding of Genesis 1–9 by Tikva Frymer-Kensky, in the Biblical Archaeologist, December 1977.)
Christ also loved the church, and gave Himself for it; that He might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, that He might present it to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish.
Ephesians 5:25–27
The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin.
1 John 1:7
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