But it didn’t matter what Noah or anyone else thought. It was God who said “I am going to bring a flood of waters on the earth, to destroy from under heaven all flesh in which is the breath of life; everything that is on the earth shall die.” [NRSV]
For the reasons I have given above the local flood theory just doesn’t work.
(And Noah looked out the window of the Ark and saw the hills and mountains surrounding the valley, and the tops of the trees above the flood water. Then Noah cursed God saying, “Why did I spend all those years building this massive Ark? Why have I been cooped up for 3 months with thousands of smelly animals? A couple of days walk would have got us all to high ground and safe from this local flood. And now you tell me we’ll be here for another 10 months!”)
I’m not sure how much sense the “There is a much more practical way that God could have accomplished this task” response is going to work when you consider Abraham and Isaac… Gideon… Joshua and the battle of Jericho… Balaam… Adam and Eve with a forbidden tree at their fingertips… Jonah… maybe even the entire Bible.
The lesson of the Flood is a beautiful symbol of the arrogance of man being leveled by Natural catastrophe. Because man has perhaps a unique capacity for abstraction we have the danger of becoming detached from our organic relationship to creation. This detachment is being played out with our current contempt for our environment. Trying to date the flood is a distraction from it’s true message and our present crisis.
