The story of the Great Flood is a story I already largely know. I’m not certain where I heard it, but I know that when I was very young I attended a sort of preschool/daycare that was held in a church. While I don’t remember the story of the Great Flood, I do remember them singing Christian songs with us and, one time, showing us cards with pictures of what would happen to the world at the end, in the events of the Book of Revelation. I don’t blame my parents at all in this choice; daycare costs are fucking ridiculous and they had undergone some recent hardships despite all their bests efforts to make a good and stable life for me. It was likely cheaper than secular daycare, and they probably didn’t quite know what was going on there. It was a different denomination, Presbyterian, I think; my mother (now a brilliantly existential atheist) was Christian Scientist, and I was mostly raised this way as well. I’ll write of that another time, and of my later finding of my father’s interest in Taoism, Zen Buddhism, and the philosophy of Alan Watts.
I don’t remember it specifically, but I think that that church is where I may have first heard this story. What’s interesting to me is that the story of a great flood is one that many people have been telling for a very long time. In this case, we see also how the correlation of religious narratives may give us some clues to the real history of our kind, or at least the way that history is interwoven with myth, which may in turn shed new light on the interpretation of myth. So many cultures have had flood narratives that it seems likely that there was indeed a great flood at some point in the history of our kind, and if that is true, then these myths may be re-interpreted as the expressions of gestalt mystical experiences of a culture in the face of worldwide natural disaster.
But in many traditions, and in the Abrahamic tradition in particular, there is an aspect to the story that is particularly troubling: God became displeased with us. So They murdered almost the entire world.
To the Text:
When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair; and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose. Then the Lord said, “My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days — and also afterward — when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.
Genesis 6:1-4, NRSV
The interlinear Bible that I’ve been using (biblestudytools.com) does not have an entry for the word נפילים, transliterated as Nephilim. One thing that must be remembered in any reading of the Bible is that there are contexts of significant meaning to which we are no longer privileged. We have an ontological statement concerning Nephilim but only a terse explanation as to what the Nephilim were. It has taken great effort for this Text to have been passed down to us over thousands of years, something easily forgotten in this age. Every word written was important, every possible understanding and misunderstanding mattered. But so too was economy important; ink and parchment must be rationed, not to mention the incredible time it must have taken to copy books entirely by hand. The stories of Genesis were part of an oral tradition in which other stories must have existed; the notion of Nephilim must have seemed sufficiently common to not need much explanation. The authors also seemed to have used this opportunity to incorporate other stories into this narrative: “These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.”
But this is quite a different picture of God than the one we are given today. God here seems more like the pagan gods of this ancient world, immanent to the world and prolifically fecund within it. What became of the sons of God, who, it seems were (perhaps lesser) gods in their own right? And to what end, I wonder, did the authors and reciters and scribes of the Bible include these other contemporaneous narratives? Did the Hebrews mean the “heroes that were of old” from their own stories alone, or from all the other narratives of all the other cultures that the Hebrews had encountered? Did they already, at this state, intend their story to be all-encompassing, to re-explain all the hero stories and flood stories that they knew?
And what of that cryptic statement made by God: “My spirit1 shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years.” My copy of the Text makes a footnote at the word “abide” stating: “Meaning of [the] Heb[rew] uncertain.” In the King James Version it is “strive with.” The Hebrew is דין, diyn, which is translated elsewhere in the Bible almost universally as “to judge.” And “flesh” is שׁגג, shagag, elsewhere translated as “to go astray.” Although I have some linguistic training, I’m still a bare novice with Biblical Hebrew. Perhaps the translators had good reason for translating these words such as they did. But consider even the possibility of this line being translated more in accordance with how these words are translated elsewhere in the Bible: “My spirit shall not judge mortals forever, for they go astray.” It seems to say, “It seems that it is the very nature of humankind to err. Having created them, I can’t hold that against them forever.” Why then shorten their years (a genealogy given in the previous chapter has individuals living in to the 900’s), and why to one-hundred twenty? Odd that that number is so close to what seems to be the maximum possible lifespan that we’ve been able to achieve. But more to the point, such a translation would contradict the doctrine of original sin. It also seems to strongly conflict with what happens next:
The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, “I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created — people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.”
Genesis 6:5-8, NRSV
This cannot be reconciled with an omniscient deity, or one who does not learn and change, as we do.
Again, I had to turn to my partner to sort through what this might mean. They reminded me that their mother had been a devout Christian, even through almost a decade of cancer, and she had loved the story of the Flood and of Noah’s Ark most out of all the stories of the Bible. One year they made a Christmas tree, with Noah as the star, and the tree decorated with as many living things as could be conceived and could conveniently fit on its boughs.
One thing that my partner told me that they had been told by their mother was that Noah had been cast out as mad by a society that didn’t believe that he had received instructions from God to build the ark and save humankind from the divine flood to come. They thought he was crazy and ridiculed him, but he, in faith, had persisted, and was ultimately vindicated. But I found that that narrative is not to be found in the Text. God commands and Noah executes His instructions; not a word is said of what Noah’s society thought of him.
Everyone interprets the Text and adds to it in their own way, from what they have heard from others that comports with their understanding, and simply by the funding of their own experience. I remembered this woman’s story: dying of cancer, she believed for nine years that God would save her, that she would be like Job, suffering for years but finally being rewarded for her faith. That was her mystical experience of faith in the face of death.
I think it’s prudent here to reproduce a longer section from Genesis, a section occurring after the initial flooding, which I think is quite poignant:
But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and all the domestic animals that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the water subsided; the fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed, the rain from the heavens was restrained, and the waters gradually receded from the earth. At the end of one hundred fifty days the waters had abated; and in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. The waters continued to abate until the tenth month; in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains appeared.
At the end of forty days Noah opened the window of the ark that he had made and sent out the raven; and it went to and fro until the waters were dried up from the earth. The he sent out the dove from him, to see if the waters had subsided from the face of the ground; but the dove found no place to set its foot, and it returned to him to the ark, for the waters were still on the face of the whole earth. So he put out his hand and took it and brought it into the ark with him. He waited another seven days, and again he sent out the dove from the ark; and the dove came back to him in the evening, and there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf; so Noah knew that the waters had subsided from the earth. Then he waited another seven days, and sent out the dove; and it did not return to him any more.
Genesis 8:1-12
These chapters are replete with numbers. The age of Noah at various stages in the narrative, the number of days that the floodwaters were upon the earth, the number of days between when God warned Noah of the flood and when it started to rain. I suspected that the Kabbalistic author De Souzenelle, who relies a great deal on the symbolically rich but metaphysically dubious practice of gematria (using numerological interpretations of the Hebrew language to uncover hidden meanings), might have something to say about this. Her constant numerology seems only to either confirm what was already self evident in the language, or to act as the sole and wholly inadequate support for incredible and often completely ridiculous claims. But sometimes the Bible does turn to numbers in a suspicious way, stating the lengths of durations in a way that seems to mean something more than what is being plainly said, and I wonder what others have made of this.
Again there is the economy of writing in the ancient world to consider. For example, Genesis 7:5, “Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters came on this earth.” Now, being six hundred years old is indeed remarkable, but keep in mind that many individuals in the Bible were noted as having exceptionally long lives. What is different here is that the numbers are expressing not only the length of Noah’s life but milestones within it, and they’re very specific and very round numbers. Perhaps I don’t understand gematria well enough, but it seems odd that De Souzenelle would seemingly ignore this and focus instead on the numerology of the names involved, like “Noah.”
If I were to pursue the gematria interpretation myself, I would look first to that number, the age of Noah when the floods came: 600 years, which gematria correlates with “final mem” (the form of the letter mem as written at the end of a word). De Souzenelle correlates this with “Union. Fertilization. Symbol of Man (created on the sixth day).” Only the last of these makes any sense to me; maybe she has reasons for the correlations of those first two, and maybe they’re good reasons, but I don’t know them either way. But I can see the symmetry there between the six days before creating humankind and the six hundred years before destroying humankind. And then the 40 days and 40 nights that the flood reigned on the earth: those are related in De Souzenelle to mem (non-final form), which is said to symbolize “matter, resistance, death, womb, temptation, trial.” And indeed the flood seems to have been some of these things, so I have to wonder if gematria comes from Biblical narratives or the other way around. In any case, I find it attractive, the way they fit together.
In any case, we are to believe that Noah took as many as seven pairs from every species of living thing on the earth, which amounts to billions of pairs. Then we must believe what comes next: having saved so many lives, Noah takes some hundreds of millions of them, which had been with him through a seeming apocalypse, and immolates them in a sacrificial offering to God. No one seems to remember that part. They do remember that God, in response, promises to never again murder the world:
And when the Lord smelled the pleasing odor [of the immolated sacrifice], the Lord said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done. As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.
Genesis 8:21-22, NRSV
The thing is, my partner said to me, everyone just focuses on the end of the story. God, having murdered much of the world, accepts a sacrifice and promises not to do it again. What They saw in Noah that caused Them to save a part of the world was simply obedience: Noah was not even good, he was only blameless. And when God told Noah to build an ark against the murder of the world, Noah spoke no words of protest but said only that he would do as his Lord commanded.
But in the end, one cannot avoid that God has made a mistake and is remorseful, as we might be. If we are created in the image of God, then as above, so below. God had seen Themselves in the wickedness of humankind, and that was unbearable to Them. And so They chose to murder the world rather than face who They truly are. But They realized that They could not sacrifice that of Themselves which was unpleasant to Them without effecting an unforgivable atrocity, and realized also that there was something of Themselves worth saving.
This is the very process of the Dialectic. In seeing the world in its wickedness, God saw Themselves and chose to destroy this reflection, and in choosing to destroy it, God manifested Their own wickedness. With the aim of abolishing Their own wickedness, God committed a wickedness that was far greater. In seeing this, there was a progression of the divine Self.
The precedent set by taking this story at face value is problematic: natural disasters are caused by God for our wickedness. I think that everyone naturally seeks explanations through what they have encountered in mystical experience; the problem comes when seekers look to an external source to describe what is inescapably private to them. This is an opportunity ripe for exploitation: do as God says — as we say that He says — or else He’ll kill everyone.
But those with any intellectual honesty cannot possibly accept this as a literal historical account, though I will not go so far as to say that this story isn’t, in a more general sense, true. In learning of this story, I thought of faith: to believe, as my partner’s mother did, that the story of Noah and the Flood was a literal, historical narrative when every fact of the world contradicts such a thing. I was tempted to delay the publishing of this essay until I had read Kierkegaard, because I have heard of his works that he had a unique description of faith: Abraham, bringing his son up the mountain to be sacrificed, knew in faith that God’s will would be fulfilled, and Abraham, bringing his son up the mountain to be sacrificed, knew in faith that his son would be saved. But there will always be something else for me to know, something else for me to learn. If I only write when I have learned all that is necessary to know, I will never write again. Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling is on the way, which I will read together with Bataille, and then I will write of Abraham and of faith and sacrifice.