The Flood, Part 2

Genesis 7 and 8

The Flood story, like the Creation Story, provides wonderful evidence that Genesis has multiple narratives, and multiple authors. The Flood story has been stitched together in a way that contains many inconsistencies, which becomes apparent when Genesis 7 is read directly after Genesis 6.

I won’t go into the Documentary Hypothesis again, or which author supposedly wrote which part. You can find that information elsewhere. But objectively, Genesis 7 contains numerous contradictions. They are there, easy to see. It is the reasons given for these contradictions that are subjective and tied to one’s belief.

·      Contradiction 1: In Genesis 6:19-20, Noah is instructed to bring into the ark “two of all living creatures…two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of every kind of creature”. In Genesis 7:2-3, God commands Noah to “take with you seven of every kind of clean animal…two of every kind of unclean animal…and also seven of every kind of bird”. But, in Genesis 7:8, we’re right back to two of every kind again.

·      Contradiction 2: In Genesis 7:10, Noah entered the ark seven days before the rains began. But in the very next paragraph, Genesis 7:13, it states that Noah entered the ark on the very day that rain began to fall for forty days.

For those who believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible, the first contradiction is explained by the reasoning that the extra animals were brought on board the Ark as food for everyone else, not to be “kept alive”. Fair enough. I buy that more than the anti-evolution arguments given to explain the creation narratives. In regards to the second contradiction, that is explained in that Noah entered seven days prior to the start of the flood, but the last of the animals didn’t enter until seven days later, the same day the rains started. That’s a bit of a stretch, and doesn’t hold up when reading essentially any translation of the passage.

Poor Noah. I think the blogger from A Skeptics Journey Through the Bible describes it best:

“Poor Noah has one week to gather up animals from all over the globe and to bring them back to the Ark. The author of Genesis conveniently leaves out the story of how a 600-year-old man from the Middle East was able to travel on foot across continents and oceans, rainforests, arctic permafrost, and deserts, gather up all of the wild animals in their natural habitats and bring them back to the ark.”

The Flood supposedly lasted for 40 days, the waters continued to cover the earth for 150 days, and then began to slowly recede until the seventh month of the 17^th day, when Noah’s Ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat (considered to be Mount Judi and surrounding region in the southern Anaotolia region of Turkey). While there is some evidence of mass flooding that possibly occurred in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago, there is zero scientific evidence for a flood that has covered the entire earth at the same time.