@DougK this is such a thoughtful set of questions. I think you are right that the Flood brings science/faith issues to the forefront in a clearer way than even Adam, Eden, or the Fall. Particularly, it illuminates a lot of our presuppositions about the nature and authority of Scripture.
A couple of months ago I was thinking about the exact phrase you mention—“tol eretz”—and it occurred to me that translating it as a portion of the Earth instead of the whole earth is a strange statement about the way in which that part of the Bible was inspired and written. I think we can agree that the author of Genesis did not (out of his own capacities) know about the modern globe. So what we’re saying is that God inspired him to use a phrase that softened the sense of “whole earth”, even though that’s what he himself was trying to convey (just so future generations could fuse together scripture and modern science?). Or perhaps he decided (on the Spirit’s urgings) to use the phrase just in case there was more of the globe than he thought, and the global flood he was recording was not, in fact, global? The more you think about it, the more acrobatic that interpretation gets. The far simpler option is to say that this story was meant to reference a global flood.
I also wonder whether our efforts to “find” the flood of Noah are equally acrobatic. What if someone said that the “Flood” was really referring to the asteroid strike that wiped out the dinosaurs? I mean, there’s no ark or Noah, but it was a global catastrophe that killed off an awful lot of creatures, right? Or if we found evidence of a local flood in South America where a man and his wife survived on a raft with their household animals, is that the flood of Noah? Or—to even push the analogy further—if we found evidence of a global flood about 4,500 years ago from which only a boat full of people and animals survived, would that be the flood of Noah? But what if the water in that case hadn’t risen to the top of the highest mountains, as Genesis indicates, or the “fountains of the deep” hadn’t ejected billions of gallons of water from a vast underground ocean (also, as Genesis indicates)? Is it still the flood of Noah? And what if the animals and people in this boat didn’t represent every species on earth? Still the biblical flood?
These are the perils of trying to find the scientific story “behind” the biblical story. It seems like the acrobatics are driven by an approach to Scripture wherein we read the text with a list of non-negotiable demands that the Bible must fulfill. That approach, when applied to Genesis, isn’t really reading the story with open ears (as much as it intends to). It’s trying to figure out what version of the story can best be promoted to TIMELESS TRUTH and promoted to other Christians as the one true infallible account of the Earth against which science is powerless.
As you might have guessed, I’m increasingly convinced this approach to Scripture creates more problems than it solves. My own approach, alternatively, is the following:
- I read the biblical text listening for what the author was trying to communicate in the original context
- I then ask, “how does this text help me understand the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ?” (As a Christian, I read all of Scripture with Christ as the center of gravity).
- I then ask, “How has this text been applied to different contexts throughout church history? And how might I apply it to my context?”
Within this approach, I’m completely comfortable with the idea that the Genesis Flood is a poetic re-telling of ancient flood legends, told through the lens of what ancient Hebrews knew about God Almighty and the world around them. To put it bluntly, Genesis records a flood that didn’t happen. And I’m OK with that. For me, if a biblical text helps the community of faith understand Christ and his work and live as his Body, then it’s authoritative. And vice versa. A text doesn’t need to prove itself to be TIMELESS TRUTH (according to our modern definitions) before it can accomplish this.
Just my two cents.