Didnt God Promise Never to Destroy the Earth Again
The story of Noah, the ark, and the Flood in Genesis half dozen-9 is one of the nearly famous and controversial passages in the entire Bible. The story, centered around a global calamity and a floating wooden zoo, has captured the imagination of people for millennia. Until modern times, most Christians assumed the story referred to an actual worldwide event that happened in the relatively recent by, and this interpretation of the Flood continues to be a central characteristic of Young Earth Creationism. However, the discoveries of mod science, every bit well every bit an explosion of new knowledge about the ancient world of the Bible, have decisively challenged whether this interpretation is the best reading of the text. This includes the work of many Christian scholars and scientists who were (and keep to exist) guided by a conventionalities that all truth is God's truth, that Scripture is inspired, and that the testimony of God's creation should not be ignored.The scientific and historical bear witness is now articulate: there has never been a global alluvion that covered the unabridged earth, nor do all mod animals and humans descend from the passengers of a single vessel.
Relating science and Scripture
When discoveries in God's globe conflict with interpretations of God's Word, Christians have three options:
- Carelessness our faith in guild to have the results of science,
- Deny the scientific evidence to maintain our interpretations of Scripture,
- Reconsider our interpretations of Scripture in light of the evidence from God's creation
Christians, past definition, reject Option 1. Selection 2 has a terrible historical track tape, and many prominent historical theologians accept urged Christians not to ignore or dismiss the findings of science. Pick 3 represents the best tradition amidst Christians, and history provides many examples of our knowledge of the natural globe helping to right faulty interpretations of Scripture. The discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo (that the Earth is non the middle of the universe), for instance, inverse the Church building's perspective on whether the Bible intends to teach us almost Earth'south place in the solar system.
Because we take God to be the writer of the "book of nature" besides as the divine author of the book of Scripture, we believe the proper interpretation of the Flood story will not exist in conflict with what nosotros have discovered in the natural world.
The Bible in ancient context
The Bible is a record of encounters between Omnipotent God and ordinary humans that lived thousands of years ago. As biblical scholar John Walton puts information technology, the Bible was writtenfor us all, but it was not writtentousa. Thus, for u.s. to sympathise what Genesis means, we first demand to understand what it meant to those who wrote and received it.
It was common practice in the ancient world to use an event (or retention of an event) and retell it in a figurative fashion to communicate a message to the hearers. There is good scriptural and historical prove that the Flood story is an interpretation of an bodily historical result retold in the rhetoric and theology of ancient Israel. The Genesis account is one of many stories of catastrophic floods in the ancient earth, including the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, which bears hitting similarities to the story of the Overflowing.
This doesn't mean that Genesis 6-nine is borrowed from the stories of other cultures, but that it is based on a mutual cultural memory of a watery cataclysm.
The exact nature or date of this historical alluvion is not important to the meaning of the Genesis business relationship, notwithstanding, because the purpose of the biblical story is non to give a list of facts about that inundation, but to communicate a message about God and humanity to the original hearers (and, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to all God'due south people throughout history)
Interpreting the Overflowing story
The Genesis Overflowing story contains many literary clues that its writers (and original audience) were not intended to narrate an bodily serial of events. The story employs the literary device known as "hyperbole" throughout, describing a massive ark which holds representatives of "every living creature on Globe", and a flood which flows over the tops of the highest mountains in the globe. These are not meant to challenge readers to effigy out the practicality of such descriptions, but rather they are important clues that we are dealing with a theological story rather than ancient journalism.
There are other clues that the writers are not intending to relate a literal series of events. One is the command given to Noah to treat "clean" animals differently than "unclean" animals, even though those categories were not given to the Hebrew people until the time of Moses, much later in the biblical story. Some other clue about how to interpret the Flood story comes from its place in the book of Genesis and specifically in the "primeval narratives" of Genesis 1-11.
Biblical scholars nearly universally see these chapters as having a dissimilar purpose than the rest of the volume of Genesis. The earliest narratives cover a huge swath of cosmic history and are highly figurative in their linguistic communication. They serve as the grand and poetic "introduction" to the story of God's people which commences with the call of Abraham in Genesis 12. While they speak of real events (such equally the creation of the universe and the special calling of humankind), they practice so in rhetorical and theological ways that have more to practice with the purposes of the story than a plain narration of facts. This is completely typical of how aboriginal people (including the Israelites) wrote historical accounts, specially concerning "primeval" events nearly the beginning of history.
Ancient cosmology in the Flood story
Not simply do we need to read the Inundation story through the lens of aboriginal literature, but also aboriginal cosmology. Considering the ancient Israelites (like all people in the aboriginal Near East) lacked telescopes, satellites, and other mod scientific equipment, they pictured the universe equally information technology appeared to everyday ascertainment. Ancient Almost Eastern people thought that rain comes from an ocean above the sky (which explains why the sky is bluish), and that this ocean wraps all the mode around the earth (which explains why deep wells always hit water). They as well idea of the "whole Earth" every bit simply the edges of their current maps, which mostly consisted of today's Heart East.
The Alluvion narrative relies on this same ancient understanding of the world. As the "firmament" (a solid dome in the heaven which holds the cosmic ocean in place) collapses and the "fountains of the deep" explode upwardly, the Globe experiences a cataclysmic return to the watery chaos described in Genesis 1:2. To deal with the chaos of sin, God returns the Globe to chaos, and then restores social club with a "restart" and renewal of creation.
Modernistic people read the Flood story with a completely dissimilar perspective on the shape of the Earth and universe. Those who say the story portrays a "global" overflowing, for instance, are imposing that term upon the text, considering the original audience had no idea that the World was a world. Similarly, any speculation almost the water sources or ark buoyancy or geologic effects or mail-Flood creature migrations or similar questions is missing the signal of the story.
The meaning of the Flood
To some, the view outlined hither of the Flood business relationship denies the divine inspiration of the text and instead makes the story entirely a human invention. Just information technology's of import to remember that God chose to communicate his message through ordinary people, accommodating himself to their limited knowledge in order to draw themselves to him. God did not requite the ancient Israelites scientific information, nor did he requite the Israelites new genres of literature.
The story of Noah, the Ark, and Flood speaks an inspired and powerful bulletin about judgment and grace, that has instructed God's people throughout the ages most God's hatred of sin and his love for his cosmos. Most importantly, we see God's hope never to destroy the Earth again fully realized in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, where God takes the judgment for sin upon himself rather than humanity. Thus, through the lens of Christ, the biblical Flood story proclaims the marvelous news of God's grace and dearest for his people.
Source: https://biologos.org/common-questions/how-should-we-interpret-the-genesis-flood-account/