Noah: Genesis 6:9-11:32
The Flood 6:9-8:19
Would Jews in exile in Babylon have identified themselves with those who perished in the flood or would they have identifies themselves with Noah who survived?.
In the flood story God decides to uncreate the world and start over because the people have forgotten the expectations for them from the garden. In the prophetic accounts of exile, God allowed Babylon to conquer Jerusalem because Jerusalem’s leaders violated the covenant by not caring for the orphans and widows but instead relied on attempted military alliances to fight the Babylonians. The choice by Noah, to rely on God for salvation, no mater how preposterous and irrational it may have seemed to do so, is the path that the ruling classes exiled to Babylon did not take and so they were swallowed up by the Babylonian flood, and the Temple was destroyed.
While the prophetic account makes clear that many good people suffered and died despite their righteousness due to the greed for power of their rulers (the suffering servant of Isaiah) it is very disturbing that the Flood story does not appear to include this truth. In the flood story, we are told that the righteous survive and the wicked suffer. Since so many of the characters in Genesis act sometimes righteously and sometimes wickedly it seems clear that the Torah generally has a far more sophisticated view of human nature than that given in the beginning of the flood story. In fact, Rabbinic commentators have remarked that Noah does not act righteously in the story, given the standards of the text, since he does not negotiate with God to save the people as Abraham did to save Sodom and Gomorrah.
I believe that the flood story serves to expose as wrongheaded the view of human nature that there are good people and bad people.
The message of the story is that the flood solved nothing and If God can’t rid the world of evil by killing people, then surely it would be the greatest folly for people to presume that violence would work for them.
Aftermath and Covenant 8:20-9:17
Noah gets off the arc and the first thing he does is sacrifice animals to God despite the fact that God has not yet given authority for people to do this. God is portrayed as gaining an insight of human nature from this experience, and dispenses with the notion that some people are born good and remain so while others are born bad and remain so. God now realizes that people learn how to act from the social structures that they experience in their youth and that there is good and bad in everyone just as the air is sometimes hot and sometimes cold.
With this awareness, God blesses people to be fruitful and multiply and to fill the earth. God’s blessing is in the setting up of social structures to temper peoples’ tendencies towards perpetuating violence. Without this blessing, people would have killed each other off long before they would have the opportunity to fill the earth. Respect for life is encouraged through the restriction not to eat animals “with its life-blood in it” and human vengeance is restricted to the taking of one human life and only if that person is found guilty of murdering another (in contrast to the seven that would have been required for Cain’s murder or Lamech’s fear that seventy seven of his family will be required for whatever he had done.)
Rabbinic tradition considers these societal reforms to be the minimum necessary for the awareness to grow that people living and working together in harmony is the image of God. However people who really want to put this awareness into practice would feel compelled to order their community lives with social rules that are less violent than the minimum acceptable rules set out here. After all, God originally expected humans to be vegetarians and God did not require Cain’s life when he killed Abel. In the time of Noah before the flood, the people turned to violence because they have forgotten who they are and what is expected of them. We have the Torah to remind us (as God has the rainbow), so more is expected of us (and of God).
Curse of Cannan 9:18-28
This story has many allusions to the garden temptation story. First, Noah is described as a tiller of the soil, so we immediately envision him working in a garden like Adam and Eve. Next we are told that Noah is the inventor of wine (I wonder if this is the reason for his name. See 5:29) and drinks his fill of the fruit of the vine (presumably with his wife and possibly sons and their wives too. Perhaps Noah should be read as “the family of Noah.”). In keeping with the temptation stories, at this point we should expect someone to act in a domineering way as Adam did to Eve when he named her or when Cain killed Abel. What follows though is very sparse and many scholars believe that something was left out for reasons of modesty. Similarities with the story of Lot and his daughters, as well as Leviticus referring to having sex with a man’s wife as exposing that man’s nakedness, as well as the story of Jacob’s first wedding night, indicate that Ham (who might have been drunk) took advantage of his father’s (and mother’s) drunkenness to have intercourse with his mother, attempting thereby to assert his authority by displacing his father as the head of the family (all of humanity). Cannan was the result of the union.
And so Noah’s story is concluded with a sexual union that transgressed boundaries for the purpose of domination, just as the flood was initiated by God as a consequence of sexual unions that transgressed boundaries, showing again that the violence of the flood resulted in no positive consequences.
But why does Noah curse Cannan who, although the product of the temptation to domination, is not the responsible party? Perhaps this is another example of why it is so important for people to leave vengeance up to God, since people are notoriously bad at identifying the guilty.
Branching out of humanity 10:1-32
Humanity is described as branching out around the earth, each group with its own land and language. Nimrod, the founder of Babylon, is described as a mighty hunter, indicting domination and empire.
Babel 11:1-9
Now we are in Babylon and are told that everyone on earth speaks one language, in contrast to the previous section. It is part of the ideology of empire to think of everything under its control as the entire civilized world, with everyone outside it as savages. The story is another temptation story in which people transgress boundaries and try to be like God. Again people are expelled for their transgression. In the beginning of Isaiah, the prophet refers to the architectural excesses of the ruling class in Jerusalem as an example of its misplaced priorities. With the Babel story likely in mind, the prophets say that God allowed Babylon to invade because the rulers of Jerusalem were acting no different than Babylonians.
The Flood 6:9-8:19
Would Jews in exile in Babylon have identified themselves with those who perished in the flood or would they have identifies themselves with Noah who survived?.
In the flood story God decides to uncreate the world and start over because the people have forgotten the expectations for them from the garden. In the prophetic accounts of exile, God allowed Babylon to conquer Jerusalem because Jerusalem’s leaders violated the covenant by not caring for the orphans and widows but instead relied on attempted military alliances to fight the Babylonians. The choice by Noah, to rely on God for salvation, no mater how preposterous and irrational it may have seemed to do so, is the path that the ruling classes exiled to Babylon did not take and so they were swallowed up by the Babylonian flood, and the Temple was destroyed.
While the prophetic account makes clear that many good people suffered and died despite their righteousness due to the greed for power of their rulers (the suffering servant of Isaiah) it is very disturbing that the Flood story does not appear to include this truth. In the flood story, we are told that the righteous survive and the wicked suffer. Since so many of the characters in Genesis act sometimes righteously and sometimes wickedly it seems clear that the Torah generally has a far more sophisticated view of human nature than that given in the beginning of the flood story. In fact, Rabbinic commentators have remarked that Noah does not act righteously in the story, given the standards of the text, since he does not negotiate with God to save the people as Abraham did to save Sodom and Gomorrah.
I believe that the flood story serves to expose as wrongheaded the view of human nature that there are good people and bad people.
The message of the story is that the flood solved nothing and If God can’t rid the world of evil by killing people, then surely it would be the greatest folly for people to presume that violence would work for them.
Aftermath and Covenant 8:20-9:17
Noah gets off the arc and the first thing he does is sacrifice animals to God despite the fact that God has not yet given authority for people to do this. God is portrayed as gaining an insight of human nature from this experience, and dispenses with the notion that some people are born good and remain so while others are born bad and remain so. God now realizes that people learn how to act from the social structures that they experience in their youth and that there is good and bad in everyone just as the air is sometimes hot and sometimes cold.
With this awareness, God blesses people to be fruitful and multiply and to fill the earth. God’s blessing is in the setting up of social structures to temper peoples’ tendencies towards perpetuating violence. Without this blessing, people would have killed each other off long before they would have the opportunity to fill the earth. Respect for life is encouraged through the restriction not to eat animals “with its life-blood in it” and human vengeance is restricted to the taking of one human life and only if that person is found guilty of murdering another (in contrast to the seven that would have been required for Cain’s murder or Lamech’s fear that seventy seven of his family will be required for whatever he had done.)
Rabbinic tradition considers these societal reforms to be the minimum necessary for the awareness to grow that people living and working together in harmony is the image of God. However people who really want to put this awareness into practice would feel compelled to order their community lives with social rules that are less violent than the minimum acceptable rules set out here. After all, God originally expected humans to be vegetarians and God did not require Cain’s life when he killed Abel. In the time of Noah before the flood, the people turned to violence because they have forgotten who they are and what is expected of them. We have the Torah to remind us (as God has the rainbow), so more is expected of us (and of God).
Curse of Cannan 9:18-28
This story has many allusions to the garden temptation story. First, Noah is described as a tiller of the soil, so we immediately envision him working in a garden like Adam and Eve. Next we are told that Noah is the inventor of wine (I wonder if this is the reason for his name. See 5:29) and drinks his fill of the fruit of the vine (presumably with his wife and possibly sons and their wives too. Perhaps Noah should be read as “the family of Noah.”). In keeping with the temptation stories, at this point we should expect someone to act in a domineering way as Adam did to Eve when he named her or when Cain killed Abel. What follows though is very sparse and many scholars believe that something was left out for reasons of modesty. Similarities with the story of Lot and his daughters, as well as Leviticus referring to having sex with a man’s wife as exposing that man’s nakedness, as well as the story of Jacob’s first wedding night, indicate that Ham (who might have been drunk) took advantage of his father’s (and mother’s) drunkenness to have intercourse with his mother, attempting thereby to assert his authority by displacing his father as the head of the family (all of humanity). Cannan was the result of the union.
And so Noah’s story is concluded with a sexual union that transgressed boundaries for the purpose of domination, just as the flood was initiated by God as a consequence of sexual unions that transgressed boundaries, showing again that the violence of the flood resulted in no positive consequences.
But why does Noah curse Cannan who, although the product of the temptation to domination, is not the responsible party? Perhaps this is another example of why it is so important for people to leave vengeance up to God, since people are notoriously bad at identifying the guilty.
Branching out of humanity 10:1-32
Humanity is described as branching out around the earth, each group with its own land and language. Nimrod, the founder of Babylon, is described as a mighty hunter, indicting domination and empire.
Babel 11:1-9
Now we are in Babylon and are told that everyone on earth speaks one language, in contrast to the previous section. It is part of the ideology of empire to think of everything under its control as the entire civilized world, with everyone outside it as savages. The story is another temptation story in which people transgress boundaries and try to be like God. Again people are expelled for their transgression. In the beginning of Isaiah, the prophet refers to the architectural excesses of the ruling class in Jerusalem as an example of its misplaced priorities. With the Babel story likely in mind, the prophets say that God allowed Babylon to invade because the rulers of Jerusalem were acting no different than Babylonians.
posted by ross at 10:10 PM
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