Does 2 Peter 2:5 give support for a local flood?

Faith & Science Conversation
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We have on record the writings of Jews who lived just a few hundred years after Genesis 1-11 were written, and who commented on the text. So we know what they thought, and they were not far removed from the original narratives and their audience.

We have evidence that the Mesopotamians believed that the earth was a flat disc and that the firmament was a solid structure (or several solid structures), overhead. Could we draw the conclusion that the reference to a solid firmament in Genesis 1 would cause a Hebrew reader to say “Well obviously that’s not literal, so these few chapters can’t be historical either”?

Likewise, when the Sumerians referred to the wonderful land of Dilmun, in Edenic language, they were not saying “Well of course we’re talking about a completely mythical place, because Dilmun doesn’t exist”, they were talking about a historical place which had existed in the past, which was the whole point because the record was supposed to be making the argument that “The world is worse now than it used to be”. Genesis does the same thing with Eden.

In contrast we have clear evidence that the Sumerians did not take their extremely lengthy king reigns literally (kings living thousands of years), and we know also how the Sumerian King List was parodied by the Rulers of Lagash, which we also know they didn’t take literally. So we have good reason for believing that the chrono-genealogies in Genesis 4-5 were of the same genre and would likewise not have been taken literally by their Hebrew audience.

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I was not arguing that the original audience conceptualized the flood as both local and global flood at the same time. I was agreeing with Brad that what he called “narrative dissonance” was not as big of a deal for them as for us. “Narrative dissonance” is very understandable when you take into consideration orality and the fact that the author of Genesis did not sit down and compose Genesis from scratch, but rather recorded or adapted pre-existing oral traditions. And further, whatever original written sources existed, the text we have access to shows signs of redaction and compilation.

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But in order to do that you’ve already assumed a reading of the text; you’ve assumed there’s a narrative dissonance. I am pointing out that early expositors didn’t see a dissonance because they understood one part of the text was a contextual control for the rest; they understood the flood was local.

Of course the writer of Genesis 1-11 didn’t compose it from scratch. However, again you’ve already assumed an interpretation, and now you’re suggesting a rationale for the interpretation. I just think that’s backwards; we should work forward from the evidence towards our conclusions, not backwards from our conclusions towards any evidence we think we can use to support them.

Yes it does.

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IF the original audience and writer (Genesis) thought of a flat earth and a single land mass - is the notion of the entire land mass being flooded such a big deal? AND IF the writer of 2 Peter and the letter’s audience thought of the earth as flat and perhaps as a single continent IS the notion of the whole earth land mass being flooded such a big deal (I like everything Jonathan and Christy have been writing about - i love that story Christy tells us).

Because we know that our planet is round and that there are huge scientific issues with a world-wide flood we naturally focus on the notion of our entire round globe being flooded. However, for me, the story of God washing away the entire human race save the folk on the ark raises theological issues with the character of God that I find problematic. And I do think that the biblical author’s (both Testaments) truly think that everybody but the ark folk got washed away.

I tend to see the flood story as an ancient story taken up by the biblical writers to show that God’s judgement is a serious matter - but not strictly speaking historical as in wiping out the human race except for a tiny remnant.

Larry Schmidt

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Well it wouldn’t be, but they were aware they were living in a flood basin, and the text does carry clear indications of survivors. That’s precisely why we’re having this discussion, because in order to preserve the interpretation that it was a global flood, you have to find a way to get around the statement indicating deliberately that it was local.

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Thanks, looks like I’ll have t reread Genesis again.

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Larry,
I agree with you about God’s judgement, but would have to add that the most important thing is that God provides a means of salvation for humanity, with the ark carrying humanity through the watery chaos to a new creation, foreshadowing Christ.

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Yep. The story is still disturbing, same as Holy War, imprecatory psalms and so forth. Who ever said the Bible is easy?

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@Jonathan_Burke

Is it also your position that the Sumerians believed their version of the Flood was only local? Or did they think it was Global?

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The best way to determine the meaning of a word(cosmos) is the context. It seems to me that a local flood would be contrary to the point the author is trying to establish. That is God’s judgement on mankind.

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I believe the Sumerians knew their flood was local. After all, they lived through it. And their flood was not way back in the primeval history out of reach of contemporary records. On the contrary, their civilization had existed for around 1,500 years before the flood, and they had records back to around 400 years before the flood.

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@gbrooks9 @Jonathan_Burke I appreciate your replies. I don’t have time this week to offer a thoughtful response, as I’ll be in Houston at our national conference. As usual, I agree with everything @Christy said, which is better than anything I could have said on the subject.

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Say hi to any non-person human animals you run into for me, okay?

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I think it should be given a global view. By that I mean all humans will be judged. If geographically they are in 1 region, ok, then geographically it’s regional but all humans were still judged. if everyone like today are all over the globe then the everyone would be judged as well. The geographical meaning could change but in the sense of all humans (world) it never changed because God judged all humans. I think the Author is telling us in a global way that God judged all humans but never meant to give a geographical meaning. I don’t know of this helps but the Bible isnt really focused on geography or Biology most of the time. It’s focused on God, Jesus, people, and how God interacts with people. I agree that there is some stuff about the natural world like in Job 38. But I think the author meant to tell us all humans were judged not the whole world was flooded

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So… @Jonathan_Burke, what does the meta-message of a local flood even mean?

God found the “local population” so contemptible, he rescued Noah from its midst, like he rescued Lot from the midst of Sodom & Gom. . . .

But the rest of the world’s people he left unmolested?

Doesn’t this put Noah and his family “on par” with the surviving Nephilium? I’m starting to like this “local flood” interpretation … it allows for all sorts of new ideas!

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I think her point was that the narrative traditions, recorded by the Hebrew Bible’s final editors in the mid first millenium BCE, were themselves quite a bit older – so that in counter to your point, Jonathan, the Jewish philosophers and rabbis, who, as you noted, we see commenting on those passages beginning a few hundred years later, were quite a bit more removed than that from the actual traditions themselves. They were a thousand years (or even more) removed from them. And huge epistemological shifts had been underway in the Mediterranean in the meantime: the proto-critical/proto-modern ways of thinking of the Greek philosophers and mathematicians, for example, with whom some of the rabbis would probably have had some degree of familiarity (thanks to Hellenization). Thus concerns about details of chronology and factuality, pioneered by the Greeks in the first few hundred years BCE and brought into contact with the Jews by the time of the first commentaries, could explain their concern with such details – a concern which ANE Israelite societies (and their predecessors) who originated those narratives, and who were epistemologically closer to the primitive Papua New Guinean culture Christy mentioned, would not have had.

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I understand what she was saying, but what I am saying is that I don’t think this addresses the text in front of us. The Hebrew Bible does not simply pass on older traditions in a big jumble, regardless of what they say. It interprets those traditions and combines them with information from within the Hebrew community, in order to create a new historical narrative.

That new historical narrative was written during the exilic era. It is that new historical narrative which is then interpreted by Jews during the Second Temple Period; not removed over 1,000 years from the text. Parts of that new historical narrative have absolutely no counterpart in the original ANE source material, or are more realistic than the original sources.

  1. Noah sending out the raven and the dove. This is a detail in the Atrahasis Epic, but the Assyrian edit of the Atrahasis Epic which was added to Tablet XI of the Gilgamesh Epic in the seventh century gets this completely wrong, reversing the order of the birds (the landlocked Assyrian scribe simply did not understand what he was reading).

  2. The dimensions of the Ark. Two of the earlier sources have no dimensions at all, and the Assyrian version is a hopelessly unrealistic fully enclosed cube, with punting poles which can’t even be used (!).

  3. The Ark moving north, despite the natural tendency of the flood to empty south through the Persian Gulf.

  4. Detailed meteorological and date information, which is actually coherent with the local climatic conditions of the region.

  5. The explicit survival of the Nephilim.

With regard to the matter under discussion, the key information which resulted in some early Jewish and Christian commentators interpreting the text as a reference to a local flood was nothing to do with information from original ANE sources. It was due to the very explicit information which the exilic Hebrew scribe had included in the text, the survival of the Nephilim.

This isn’t about Jewish commentators failing to understand a relic of an ANE oral tradition from which they were separated by over 1,000 years, this is about Jewish commentators understanding a Hebrew and Greek text which came down to them from the exilic era, as saying plainly that the Nephilim survived the flood.

The exilic writer of the Genesis flood narrative clearly had far greater concern with historicity and facts than any of the ANE sources of which they were aware because they included precisely the kind of details which people include when they are concerned with historicity and facts, details which were either not included at all in the ANE sources, or which were represented hopelessly unrealistically.

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Yes.

The rest of the world was not responsible to judgment.

No, because being ignorant means you won’t be judged, but doesn’t mean you’re righteous.

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Well, I’m not quite seeing that. Those exilic redactors felt no need to reconcile the numerous chronological tensions between the two creation accounts; and in the flood narrative they interwove the doublets but otherwise left them intact. Were man and woman created together after the animals, or did the animals come in between them? How long was the flood, and how many pairs of animals were to be taken aboard the ark, and what is a “clean animal” anyway in this context long before the law was given? And so on. These discrepancies and contradictions were left intact by the redactors and it was only later generations that became concerned with resolving them; I suspect the early 1st and 2nd millenium BCE Israelites and proto-Israelites cared even less than the exilic scribes.

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[quote=“dscottjorgenson, post:40, topic:35399”]
Well, I’m not quite seeing that. Those exilic redactors felt no need to reconcile the numerous chronological tensions between the two creation accounts; and in the flood narrative they interwove the doublets but otherwise left them intact. Were man and woman created together after the animals, or did the animals come in between them? How long was the flood, and how many pairs of animals were to be taken aboard the ark, and what is a “clean animal” anyway in this context long before the law was given? And so on.[/quote]

You’re talking about a separate issue. I am talking about the exilic writers being “concerned with historicity and facts”, and I’ve given a list of examples. You’re talking about the extent to which they were prepared to tolerate literary tensions. These are not the same subject, and tolerance of literary tension is not a reliable indicator of whether or not a writer has any interest in historicity and facts. That is manifestly obvious from pre-exilic and exilic historical records such as Kings and Chronicles, as well as the entire Greek and Roman historical tradition. Look at Aeschylus, Herodotus, Polybius, and Pliny, for example, especially the accounts of Hannibal’s journey over the Alps in both Polybius and Pliny.

As for the tolerance of literary tensions such as contradictions, we have clear evidence that the exilic and post-exilic redactors actually did care about them, which is precisely why we find evidence of harmonization activity in the historical books especially. The very fact that the exilic writers tried to combine two different flood narratives, instead of leaving them separate (as they did with Genesis 1 and 2), is evidence that they were aiming for some kind of harmonization; they preferred one slightly inconsistent narrative with a consistent chronology, to two completely different narratives with potentially different chronologies.

I’m not confident drawing conclusions about what they thought without solid evidence. In fact I believe there’s evidence to the contrary. A typical view of the exilic redaction activity is that it took earlier traditions and combined them, thus creating contradictions which did not exist in the original sources. If they did not exist originally, this indicates that the earlier writers took care to avoid them. This issue has been raised by several scholars, such as Whybray and Wenham.

Taking the two typically understood flood accounts as an example, both of them stand alone without any of the internal tensions of the final redaction. This does not suggest that the earliest writers really didn’t care much about what they were writing and just threw stuff down without a lot of planning, forethought, or concern for consistency.

However none of this actually affects the point I’ve been making from the start; the reason why certain early Jewish and Christian commentators believed that the Genesis flood narrative was intending to describe a local flood, was not because of any leftover non-Hebrew ANE traditions in the text, and was not because of any inconsistencies introduced by the exilic writers. It was because the exilic writers themselves deliberately introduced the idea that the flood did not destroy all humans outside the Ark, by inserting an explicit reference to the survival of the Nephilim, when they had no literary reason to do so.