The Lost World of the Flood

Mythology, Theology, and the Deluge Debate

John H. Walton, Tremper Longman III

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780830887828
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Critique et interprétation bibliques

"The flood continued forty days on the earth; and the waters increased, and bore up the ark, and it rose high above the earth... and the ark floated on the face of the waters" (Gen 6: 17-18 NRSV).In modern times the Genesis flood account has been probed and analyzed for answers to scientific, apologetic, and historical questions. It is a text that has called forth "flood geology, " fueled searches for remnants of the ark on Mount Ararat, and inspired a full-size replica of Noah's ark in a theme park. Some claim that the very veracity of Scripture hinges on a particular reading of the flood narrative. But do we understand what we are reading?Longman and Walton urge us to ask what the biblical author might have been saying to his ancient audience. Our quest to rediscover the biblical flood requires that we set aside our own cultural and interpretive assumptions and visit the distant world of the ancient Near East. Responsible interpretation calls for the patient examination of the text within its ancient context of language, literature, and thought. And as we return from that lost world to our own, we will need to ask whether geological science supports the notion of flood geology.To read Longman and Walton is to put our feet on firmer interpretive ground. Without attempting to answer all of our questions, they lift the fog of modernity and allow the sunlight to reveal the true contours of the text. As with other books in the Lost World series, The Lost World of the Flood is an informative and enlightening journey toward a more responsible reading of a timeless biblical narrative.The books in the Lost World Series follow the pattern set by Bible scholar John H. Walton, bringing a fresh, close reading of the Hebrew text and knowledge of ancient Near Eastern literature to an accessible discussion of the biblical topic at hand using a series of logic-based propositions.

PART 1

METHOD:
PERSPECTIVES ON
INTERPRETATION

Proposition 1

Genesis Is an Ancient Document

We all desire to be faithful interpreters of God’s Word to assure that we receive the full benefit of God’s revelation to us. We consider the Bible to have authority, and we want to submit ourselves and our lives to that authority. Biblical authority is tied inseparably to the author’s intention. God vested his authority in a human author, so we must consider what the human author intended to communicate if we want to understand what God’s message is. Two voices speak: the human author is our doorway into the room of God’s meaning and message. Thus, when we read Genesis we are reading an ancient document and should begin by using only the assumptions that would be appropriate for the ancient world. We must understand how the ancients thought and what ideas underlay their communication.

Even though we may rarely identify a passage of the Bible that could be arguably indebted to specific awareness of a known text from the ancient Near East, for the most part we are interested in understanding how Israel in the Old Testament was embedded in the ancient world. Whether the revelation of God in the Old Testament reflects the kind of thinking that was common throughout the ancient world or it exhorts the Israelites to abandon the standard thinking in the ancient world, the conversation that takes place in the Bible is assuredly situated in the ancient world. So the more we can learn about the ancient world, the more faithful our interpretation will be.

In one sense, every successful act of communication is accomplished by various degrees of accommodation on the part of the communicator, but only for the sake of the audience they have in mind. Accommodation must bridge the gap when communicator and audience do not share the same language, the same command of language, the same culture, or the same experiences, but we do not expect a communicator to accommodate an audience they do not know or anticipate. High context communication takes place between insiders in situations in which the communicator and audience share much in common. In such situations, less accommodation is necessary for effective communication to take place, and therefore much might be left unsaid that an outsider might need in order to fully understand the communication.

This is illustrated in the traffic reports that we hear in Chicago, where the references to times of travel and location of problems assume the listener has an intimate understanding of the highways. Traffic reports that offer times of travel from various identified points and stretches where one might encounter congestion are very meaningful to me (John) as a regular commuter. I know exactly what to expect by a report that it will take thirty-eight minutes to drive from “the Cave” to “the Junction” and that it is congested from “the Slip to the Nagle curve.” When out-of-town guests visit, however, this information confuses them. They do not know what the Slip or the Cave are (nor could they find them on a map); they don’t know how far these places are from one another, and they don’t know that on a good day one can go from the Cave to the Junction in about eight minutes.

By contrast, in low context communication, high levels of accommodation are necessary as an insider attempts communication with an outsider. A low context traffic report would have to explain to out-of-town listeners or inexperienced commuters just where the different locations are and what normal times look like from one location to another. These would be much longer reports. If the traffic reporter made the report understandable to the out-of-town visitor, it would be too tiring to be of any use to the regular commuter.

We propose that in the Bible, a human communicator is engaged in expressing an accommodating message to a high context (i.e., ancient Israelite) audience. So, for example, a prophet and his audience share a history, a culture, a language, and the experiences of their contemporaneous lives. God has employed this communication as his revelation of his plan and purposes. When we read the Bible, we enter the context of that communication as low context outsiders who need to use all of our inferential tools to discern the nature of the communication that takes place in that ancient setting, as well as discern from that the revelation God has offered through that communication. We have to use research to fill in all the information that would not have to be said by the prophet in his high context communication to his audience. This is how we, as modern readers, must interact with an ancient text.

Those who take the Bible seriously believe God has inspired the locutions (words, whether spoken or written) the communicator has used to accomplish joint (divine and human authors) illocutions (which lead to an understanding of intentions, claims, affirmations, and, ultimately, meaning), but that the foundational locutions are tied to the communicator’s world.1 Whatever the human communicator’s illocution is, God has added a second illocution (revelation) to that. Inspiration is tied to locutions (they have their source in God); illocutions define the necessary path to meaning that can be defined as characterized by authority.

At times our distance from the ancient communicator might mean that we misunderstand the communication because of elements foreign to us or because we do not share ways of thinking with the communicator. Comparative studies help us to understand more fully the form of the biblical authors’ employed genres and the nature of their rhetorical devices so we do not mistake these elements for something they never were. Such an exercise does not compromise the authority of Scripture but ascribes authority to that which the communicator was actually communicating. We also need comparative studies in order to recognize the aspects of the communicators’ cognitive environment that are foreign to us, and to read the text in light of their world and worldview. This is not imposing something foreign on the text; it is an attempt to recognize that which is inherent in the text by virtue of its situatedness—the author and audience are embedded in the ancient world. We are not imposing this on the text any more than we are imposing Hebrew on the text when we try to read it in its original language.

We will illustrate by using the metaphor of a cultural river. In our modern world the cultural river is easily identified. Among its currents are various fundamentals such as rights, freedom, capitalism, democracy, individualism, globalism, market economy, scientific naturalism, an expanding universe, empiricism, and natural laws, just to name a few. Some may wish to float in these currents, while others may struggle to swim upstream against them, but everyone in our modern world inevitably is located in its waters. Regardless of our diverse ways of thinking, we are all in the cultural river, and its currents are familiar to us.

In the ancient world a very different cultural river flowed through all of the diverse cultures: Egyptian, Phoenician, Assyrian—or Israelite. Despite variations between cultures and across the centuries, certain elements remained largely static. Continual course adjustments have little effect on the most persistent currents. People are people, but few of the currents common to the ancient cultures are found in our modern cultural river. In the ancient cultural river we would find currents such as community identity, the comprehensive and ubiquitous control of the gods, the role of kingship, divination, the centrality of the temple, the mediatory role of images, and the reality of the spirit world and magic.

The Israelites sometimes floated on the currents of that cultural river without resistance, and we should be neither surprised nor critical. At other times, however, the revelation of God encouraged them to struggle out of the current into the shallows, or even to swim furiously upstream. Whatever the extent of the Israelites’ interactions with the cultural river, it is important to remember that they were situated in the ancient cultural river, not immersed in the currents of our modern cultural river.

We seek to understand this embeddedness so we may be faithful interpreters of the biblical text. God communicated within the context of their cultural river. God’s message, God’s purposes, and God’s authority were all vested in Israelite communicators for Israelite audiences, and the message took shape according to the internal logic within their language and culture. We cannot be assured of authoritative communication through any other source. We must therefore find the message of God as communicated through those intermediaries in their ancient cultural river.

If we are to interpret Scripture to receive the full impact of God’s authoritative message, and build the foundation for sound theology, we have to begin by leaving our cultural river behind, with all our modern issues and perspectives, to understand the cultural river of the ancient intermediaries. The communicators that we encounter in the Old Testament are not aware of our cultural river—including all of its scientific aspects; they neither address our cultural river nor anticipate it. We cannot therefore assume that any of the constants or currents of our cultural river are addressed in Scripture.

Consequently, we are obliged to respect the text by recognizing the sort of text it is and the nature of the message it offers. In that regard, we have long recognized that the Bible is not a scientific textbook addressing issues from our modern vantage point. That is, God’s intention is not to teach about the scientific aspects of events or phenomena. He does reveal his work in the world, but he doesn’t reveal how the world works.

As an example of the foreign aspects of the cognitive environment, people in the ancient world had no category for what we call natural laws. When they thought of cause and effect, even though they could make all the observations we make (e.g., when you push something it moves; when you drop something it falls), they were more inclined to see the world’s operations in terms of divine agency. Everything worked the way it did because God set it up that way and God maintained the system. They would not have viewed the cosmos as a machine but as a kingdom, and God communicated to them about the world in those terms. His revelation was not focused on giving them a more sophisticated understanding of the mechanics of the natural world.

He likewise did not hide information of that sort in the text for later readers to discover. An assumption on our part that he did would have no reliable controls. For example, in the days when we believed in a steady-state universe, people could easily have gone to the Bible to find confirmation of that science. But today we no longer believe steady-state to be true. Today we might think we find confirmation of the big bang or the expanding universe, but someday we may no longer consider those to be true. Such approaches cannot be adopted within an authority framework.

In the same way, the authority of the text is not respected when statements in the Bible that are part of ancient science are used as if they are God’s descriptions of modern scientific understanding.2 When the text talks about thinking with our hearts or intestines, it is not proposing scientific ideas we must confirm if we wish to take biblical authority seriously. We need not try to propose ways that our blood-pumping organs or digestive systems are physiologically involved in cognitive processes. This is simply communication in the context of ancient science. In the same way, when the text talks about “waters above,” we do not have to construct a cosmic system that has waters above. Everyone in the ancient world believed in a cosmic ocean suspended above a solid sky. Therefore, when the biblical text talks about “waters above” it is not offering authoritative revelation of scientific facts. If we conclude that there are not, strictly speaking, waters above, we have not thereby identified an error in Scripture. Rather, we have recognized that God vests the authority of the text elsewhere. Authority is tied to the message the author intends to communicate as an agent of God’s revelation. This communication by God initiates that revelation by piggybacking on communication by a human addressing the world of ancient Israel. Even though the Bible is written for us, it is not written to us. The revelation it provides can equip us to know God, his plan, and his purposes, and therefore to participate with him in the world we face today. But it was not written with our world in mind. In its context, it is not communicated in our language; it is not addressed to our culture; it does not anticipate the questions about the world and its operations that stem from our modern situations and issues.

If we read modern ideas into the text, we skirt the authority of the text and in effect are compromising it. The result would be to arrogate authority to ourselves and our ideas. The text cannot mean what it never meant. What the text says may converge with modern science, but the text does not make authoritative claims pertaining to modern science (e.g., some statements may coincide with big bang cosmology, but the text does not authoritatively establish big bang cosmology). What the author...