A Summary of the Noah and the Ark Narrative

 Few narratives are more fondly recalled than that of Noah and the Ark, the Flood, and the covenant made between God and humanity that the Creator would never again destroy the world in this manner.  But as with any material, the more one studies the more there is to the material; such is the case with the Noah story.

 It is especially difficult for people to come to the narrative that takes place in the 6^th Chapter of Genesis without reading about the divine beings who mate with the daughters of men, or that Yahweh now limits the age of humanity to 120 years instead of the centuries that people had lived previously.  The Nephilim who appear on earth, rendered as "Giants" in some texts, which were the heroes of old, startles us.  E. A. Speiser notes that few narratives have caused the consternation as has this one, a fragment, that he calls "puzzling and controversial in the extreme."  The explanations vary from the older traditional one, that these "giants" were the sons of Adam and Eve's last son, Seth, and that the daughters of men were the descendants of Cain.  Thus, we have an evil pairing.  Others, with Speiser and Alter no different from most, point to the mythologies of this part of the world, from Hesiod to the Memphian dynasty in Egypt, in pointing out that the gods fought the Titans, and the gods were those such as Zeus, who defeated and destroyed his father Cronus, much like in Egypt the solar god Horus New York, this became confused with the Pharaoh, who was thought to be descended from the gods, and yet he married a woman from a family not royal or noble, which caused such a stir as to become mythologized into great evil.  He maintains that the Phoenicians, who in turn passed it along to the Babylonians, picked up the Egyptian myth.

 Speiser is more inclined to believe that the J writer knew of the story and used it as a way to illustrate the extreme evil and depravity of the people whom Yahweh destroyed, whether he believed it or not.  The metaphor illustration may have served better than any other "literal" explanation.  But in moving on from this brief story before Noah, we have been given a brief, if memorable, illustration as to how bad the people had become.  And, by the way, in Numbers 13:33 we are told that the Israelites saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak: so, does that means they survived the flood after all?

 As for the Flood story itself, Speiser and virtually all scholars agree that the narrative is an interspersed work of two writers, skillfully edited as fully as possible in order to render a greater "cause and effect" incident.  To separate the two is tedious, but interesting as well.  J begins, but P picks up at verse 8, continuing until verse 22.  With Chapter 7, J continues until verse 6; at verse 7 we have P again, but the 11^th verse begins again with J, there just long enough for the poetry: "All the fountains of the great deep bust forth / And the sluices in the sky broke open."  J concludes with the heavy rain falling upon the earth for forty days and nights.  The P narrative begins with verse 13, and so it goes, back and forth.  (And here I wish to remind the reader that poetry and myth were far more important than history for the ancient world, an idea that we have difficulty with today, but it remains essential in understanding any work of the ancient world, not just religious texts or texts recounting the "history" of a people.)

 In order to appreciate how scholarship has arrived at the distinctions and clear indications of different hands at work is far too large a subject to tackle here.  But the obviousness of the changes have to do with the openings that always mark the P writer, the toledot (Hebrew for This is the account) and the obvious contradictions of time and animals involved, not to mention the standard differences in naming God.  What is easiest for the purposes here is for me to reproduce what Bandstra does in his excellent text, Reading the Old Testament (a standard work in its second edition, and one that has gone through readings from such seminaries and theological programs as Baylor, Union, Vanderbilt, and a host of others):

 Yahwist version: 

 And YHWH saw that the evil of humanity of the earth was great; every willful plan of its mind was only evil every day.  YHWH regretted that he had made humanity on the earth, and he was pained to his heart.  YHWH said, "I will wipe out humanity which I had created from the face for the ground, from humanity to beast to reptile to bird of the sky.  For I regret that I had made them."  And Noah found favor in the eyes of YHWH.  (6:5-8) 

 Priestly version:

This is the account of Noah: Noah was righteous man, upright was he in his generation.  Noah walked with the gods.  Noah sired three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth.  And the earth was corrupt before Elohim, and the earth was full of violence.  And Elohim saw the earth: it was corrupt.  For all flesh corrupted his way on the earth.  And Elohim said to Noah, "The end of all flesh before me is coming.  For the earth is full of their violence.  I am destroying them with the earth"  (6:9-13).

 Bandstra goes on to say that the versions are not contradictory; they just use different vocabulary to get the point across.  For the Yahwist writer, humanity is at fault and is, along with all living things, the focus of Yahweh's wrath.  In the Priestly version, the earth and how flesh was corrupted becomes the focus. 

In his analysis, he says:  "The difference in outlook of the two sources is consistent with what we saw in the creation accounts.  The Priestly account in Genesis 1 is world-focused compared to the Yahwist account in Genesis 2 which is humanity-focused.  Also note that the Priestly version here is introduced by this version's characteristic toledot notice, "these are the generations of ". 

We may now appreciate the disparities of how many animals were on the Ark: Genesis 7:2-3 says that of the clean beasts, Noah is to take "by sevens," and the unclean beasts by "twos"; so too, the fowls of the air are to be taken by sevens.  The later verse 9 has it as "two of each" (which Speiser believes is a redactor, and not P--certainly, it can't be J, who gives us the first figures; remember: there's to be a sacrifice, and Noah could hardly spare one of his sets for reproduction; and of course there's disparity as to the length of the rain: J says 40 days, but  P says 150.