CFM through the HB week of 2/7: A Flood of Info about Noah

 

Two Separate Flood Stories 

Okay, if you haven’t read my previous posts, you need to know that much of Genesis is a weaving together of at least two sources: A later source well-represented by Genesis 1 and written by one or more post-exilic Aaronic Priests (P) and an earlier source to whom God is known as Yahweh (J). A good example of the J source is Genesis 2. I know this stuff can be boring or complicated sometimes, but once you get the hang of this stuff, it really opens up new understanding in the Bible. 

Starting In Genesis 6, things get more tightly woven. The ancient editor (often known as the Redactor or R)  who joined these two sources together, decided to weave the two stories of Noah and the global flood together into one story, likely to avoid having two flood narratives back to back in the text. This explains why you have two separate motivations for the flood (Genesis 6:5-7 vs. 6:11-12), two separate and conflicting instructions for how many of each animal to bring (Genesis 7:2-3 vs. 6:19-20), two different birds sent from the ark to find land (A dove in Genesis 8:8 vs. a raven in Genesis 8:7). There are many other examples as well that have helped scholars identify which verses come from which source so you can actually read each complete account of the flood totally separately from the other if you want. 

J’s account of the flood and its aftermath is in the following verses:

• 6:5-8 

• 7:1-5, 7, 10, 12

• 7:16b-20, 22-23

• 8:2b-3a, 6, 8-12, 13b

• 8:20-22

• 9:18-27 (Noah’s drunken-ness / curse of Canaan) 

• 11:1-9 (Tower of Babel)

The P source includes the these verses detailing the deluge:

• 6:9-22

• 7:8-9, 11

• 7:13-16a, 21, 24

• 8:1-2a, 3b-5

• 8:7, 13a, 14-19

• 9:1-17

Notice that the stories of Noah’s drunkenness, the curse of Canaan, and the Tower of Babel are only found in the J source and not the P source. This is pretty typical. Most of the stories people remember from the Torah are from J. 

When we understand what’s going on here, we can better understand the kind of God J is describing versus the kind of God P is describing, and we can also attempt to synthesize the two and learn something else entirely. A synthesis of the apparent contradictions of the Genesis story is in many ways what the Joseph Smith translation and the Pearl of Great Price is trying to do. Smith filled in the gaps in the text and added what needed to be added to find a harmonious reading, and if you believe that the resulting harmony is inspired, then you’ll really appreciate the theological message of this Latter-day scriptural synch-up. When we don’t understand that there are two sources, however, we run the risk of devaluing one side of each contradiction in pursuit of a harmonious interpretation. This is perhaps okay from a theological standpoint, but I think it’s a shame to miss out on what each text is saying separately and what it has to say about the nature of God. 

Why did God flood the earth? 

In other ancient flood narratives (like the Epic of Gilgamesh), the gods flood the earth mostly because humans are annoying–they are too loud and the God’s want rest and so they flood the earth. But the J and P writers offer different explanations. 

First, it’s worth noting something from J that I thought was the motivation for the flood in my first reading. In Genesis 6:1-3, God seems disappointed that the sons of God married the daughters of men. And that precedes the flood story, so I figured that was why Yahweh decided to drown the baby in the bathwater. This motivation parallels some other divine actions in the J source in interesting ways. In Genesis 2, a human woman (Eve) makes a decision that blurs the distinction between human and God. She chooses to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, making her and Adam like God. In response, God guards against the possibility that Eve and Adam will eat the fruit of the tree of life (arguably the same tree) again or continuously and thus become both knowledgeable and immortal, threatening God’s (and the divine council’s) status distinctly above humanity. Here again preceding the flood, it’s human women (the daughters of men) who blur the distinction between gods and humans by bearing children with the sons of God-–presumably members of the divine council. 

But upon closer reading, it’s clear that the result of god-human intermarriage is not the flood–it’s Yahweh’s shortening of human lifespans in verse 3. It’s still an interesting parallel since guarding the tree of life also had the effect of shortening human lifespans. The theme of God preventing humans from reaching god-like status is repeated again in the story of the Tower of Babel. 

Here’s the real reason Yahweh flooded the earth, as described by J (Genesis 6:5-7)

• The wickedness of humankind was great in the earth

• Every inclination of human thought was only evil continually

It’s interesting to me that the J text does not qualify what it means by “Evil.” Maybe it did have to do with human’s desire to usurp the gods. Maybe humans weren’t inclined to obey the command to replenish the earth by their labor in the field. Or maybe they were inclined to break other arbitrary and unknown-to-us standards of morality god had established beyond what is recorded in J. We just don’t know. 

Here’s the reason God (not known as Yahweh until after that name is revealed to Moses) floods the earth in the P version of the story (Genesis 6:11-12)

• The earth was corrupt in God’s sight

• The earth was filled with violence

The P source, maybe in correction of the earlier J source, clarifies that at least part of the problem was violence. Ironically, God’s solution to this is more violence, but I think it’s instructive that one of the first moral imperatives the God of P enforces is a prohibition of excessive violence. 

Why did God choose Noah? 

The title of this week’s Come Follow Me lesson is “Noah Found Grace in the eyes of the LORD.” (side note—the word “LORD” before Moses is a good indicator that we are dealing with the J source. LORD is how most versions translate the word Yahweh). This comes from Genesis 6:8 which is J. How did Noah gain grace or favor in the eyes of the Lord? J doesn’t tell us. It doesn’t give a single qualifier for God’s grace. Perhaps a reason existed at some point in J, and perhaps P restored the reason, but if we take the J source at face value, this is the kind of unearned grace that Paul described and that many modern Christians have said much about, making it a central tenet of Christian belief. 

This interpretation is further supported by something I was surprised to see (or not to see) in J. If you read the J text closely, you’ll notice that it doesn’t include God’s instructions on building the Ark. You’ll find no command to build one, no details of the ark’s dimensions. Those things are unique to the P source. The J ark just shows up without any explanation whatsoever. Who made it? I think it was maybe God who made it for Noah. In fact, the last few words of Genesis 7:16 (the only part of that verse that comes from J) says “the LORD shut him [Noah] in” the ark. Reading J, it seems like God chose Noah with no regard to Noah’s qualifications, built him an ark requiring no human effort, and when the ark was filled, the LORD shut the door behind him. It is not the effort of Noah that saves him from the flood; it is the grace and power and mysterious wisdom of God. 

The P source, however, does qualify Noah’s found favor with God. “Noah was a righteous man,” we read in Genesis 6:9, “blameless in his generation, Noah walked with God.” And Noah’s salvation from the flood is dependent on his actions. God commands Noah to build an ark. He gives him specific instructions to do so, but the work itself belongs to Noah. In J, the promise God makes post-flood is one-sided: The LORD promises not to flood the earth again, in spite of the unchanged inclination of humanity toward evil (Genesis 8:21). But in P, the Noahic covenant contains both promises and commandments–prefigured by the promises tied to commandments that God gives Noah about the ark. The emphasis on covenant and partnership in the P source is likely because P was written by priests, the Israelite administrators of God’s covenant. The construction of the ark even resembles the tabernacle in the desert and the temple which was being reconstructed during the likely time of P’s writing. The God of P is clearly a God of covenant-based-access to his full grace and power. 

Synthesizing J and P

So what is God really like? I think the first lesson of separating J and P is that human ideas about God evolve and change over time. The Bible does not speak with one clear and consistent voice. Are later interpretations of God more true because humans have had longer to think about it and receive revelation? Are earlier interpretations of God more true because they are closer to original revelations? Or was the redactor who joined the two stories together acting under divine inspiration to encourage a kind of combined view of God–one who’s grace is undeserved but it accessed fully through a covenant path established by chosen representatives of his priesthood. 

If you’re a latter-day saint, then you likely have lived with the tension between God’s grace and God’s covenants and commandments for a long time. The Book of Mormon develops this tension quite a bit. The Book of Moses’s account of Noah’s Ark fills some gaps and “corrects” some contradictions in ways that are sometimes interesting to me and sometimes, honestly, a bit annoying, but I think it shows us a God somewhere in between the gods of J and P–(though it seems to me). And that makes sense to me. 

I recently saw a TikTok that tried to argue that the difference between Mormon salvation and Christian salvation is that in Christianity, God does all the work required for salvation, and in Mormonism, we do much or at least some of that work. The thing is, I think if you were to talk at length with any Christian about salvation, you would find that she doesn’t truly believe that no effort is required on our part. And if you were to talk at length with any Mormon about salvation, she would likewise articulate that she doesn’t believe that anything we do can save us–it’s all the grace of God in some form or another, in spite of what his covenants require. Can either group totally understand the grace offered to Noah, or Abraham, Elizabeth, the thief on the cross, Nephi, Abish, or Emma Smith? I’m not sure they can. But that doesn’t mean they can’t draw on that grace to save and empower their souls. 

Other thoughts this week

The story of Noah’s drunkenness and the curse of Canaan in Genesis 9:20-27 has been used to justify the mistreatment of people of color throughout the ages. This is damningly true on many levels, including American slavery and its ongoing effects and the priesthood and temple ban in Mormonism that ended with Official Declaration 2. But it’s important to note that while Ham is the perpetrator of the sin in the story, God doesn’t curse all of Ham’s descendants. It’s true that Ham is identified by the text as the father of African nations, but the curse is explicitly upon Canaan who is not identified as an ancestor to Africa. Instead, this curse was most likely in J to justify the conquest of the land of Canaan by the Israelites (we’ll talk much more about this in future weeks). That’s still bad, and it needs to be named that even anciently, the scriptures were used to justify oppression, but it was and is an entirely false reading to say that any mistreatment of people of color was because of Ham’s actions here. It’s also worth saying that contrary to some traditions, Ham probably didn’t have sex with Noah. Instead, his son was cursed because he failed to perform the expected familial duty to take care of drunken fathers like Shem and Japeth did. 

The commandment to multiply and fill the earth is not in the J source. And the story of the fruit and the fall is not in the P source. If you believe in the Book of Abraham, then you believe that the P creation story in Genesis 1 is the spiritual creation of earth, so Eve and Adam weren’t commanded after the veil was drawn to procreate. A few weeks ago, I thought this meant that the bit in the Family Proclamation to the World about the command to multiply remaining in force is non-scriptural, but it is repeated several times in the P account of what happens after the flood. And it’s even implied by the Tower of Babel story in J when God scatters the people in response to their unity which is contrary to the command to fill the earth. 

Speaking of the Tower of Babel, that story is kind of comical when you read it for what it is. The people wanted to build a tower, not to get to heaven and meet God, but to “make a name for themselves.” God seems not to like that, so he comes down and messes things up for them, confusing their languages and scattering them to fill the earth. I think it functions primarily for that last effect. The J writer was trying to explain how the family of Noah ended up all over the earth. P directly contradicts this narrative by explicitly referring to different languages before the time of the J Babel Tower (Genesis 10:5, 20, 22, 31)

Sources

This week, I used two sources almost exclusively for the facts of the Biblical structure and translation. I identified which verses were P and which were J by comparing footnotes in the New Oxford Annotated Study Bible with a breakdown of the Pentateuch structure in an Appendix of the book Who Wrote the Bible by Richard Elliot Freidman. All my “well actually” comments about what is actually in the text and how it should be translated as come from the New Oxford Annotated Study Bible, which uses the NRSV translation. 

Interpretations and insights are my own.