Is Genesis real history? (new Common Questions page)

[AntoineSuarez]

@Jay313

This is where I depart from Walton and Longman

@Jay313

the attempt to establish some kind of historical basis for it. To do that, many interpreters point to one of several Mesopotamian floods that fit the time frame for Noah’s Flood. I am simply saying that such a procedure does not establish the historicity of Gen. 6-9. If it did, the same reasoning could be applied to the Mesopotamian myths to establish their historicity, as well.

@pevaquark

I understand your theological argument here as I agree it seems hard to reconcile Peter’s warning if there really was not a worldwide global flood where everything was destroyed. To make matters even worse, certainly anyone today has a lot more evidence that there definitely was not in anyway whatsoever any global deluge. It was clear by the late 1800s that the global deluge (if there was one) did not cause any of the geological features we see today.

This highlights an interesting tension that we have today. So Peter was mistaken when he speaks of a global deluge and his argument made a lot of sense when everybody knew that there was the world destroying flood. I don’t think that today you can hold this Scripture in the same way. Unfortunately probably my statements here qualify me as a ‘scoffer’ according to most people. This is interesting though and I look forward to possible future discussions.

These claims by Jay and Matthew seem to entail the following important conclusion:

If one accepts the explanation of the Flood as “Hyperbole of a local real flood” (as advocated by Walton and Longman in this interview), then one acknowledges that “Peter was mistaken” and thereby gets rid of Jesus’ and Peter’s theological statements regarding the End Times and Final Judgment (Matthew 24, 25: 31-46; Luke 17: 20-37; 2 Peter 2:4-10; 2 Peter 3:3-13).

In my view this conclusion is coherent, all the more if one considers that to date there are no compelling reasons to pin a connection between any of the archaeologically evidenced local floods - at Ur, Kish, or Shuruppak - with neither the Flood of Mesopotamian literature nor Noah’s Flood. The reported archaeological data look somewhat paradoxical and raise questions: It is for instance unexplained how a massive Flood at Ur could have happened without letting any trace 11.81 miles away, in Eridu (see map).

However, before deciding to become "a faithful in the church of scoffers”, it may be worth investigating the explanation of the Flood as miracle more in depth.

The option “miracle” has some clear advantages:

1. Miracles mostly happen without leaving any trace observable for us today, as in case of Pentecost, Resurrection, and Ascension. I this sense the recent “Miracle of the Sun” in Fatima on October 13, 1917 (The Washington Post) is paramount and may provide a good key for interpreting Noah’s Flood.

2. Nonetheless miracles are real historic events we believe on the basis of trustworthy eyewitnesses.

In any case the option:

“historic narrative of a real miraculous event qualified by eyewitness accounts and divine revelation”

seems preferable to:

“hyperbole narrative of a presumed ordinary event without coherent geological evidence”.