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By Root 1458 0

probably dating back in oral tradition to the second millennium BCE, and recorded in clay in the mid-seventh century BCE). The Gilgamesh flood story pits one merciful deity against all the other more capricious ones, while the biblical story shows us one God whose character integrates concerns for justice and mercy. In the Gilgamesh flood story, genocide (we might even say geocide) is mandated in part because human beings are too noisy, keeping the gods from getting a good night’s sleep, while in the biblical story, it is humanity’s inhumanity and injustice that evoke catastrophic consequences.1 In the Gilgamesh story, the gods get frightened by the flood, as if they’ve unleashed something that even they can’t control. What’s more, they need Utnapishtim to make animal sacrifices when the flood is over because they are hungry—all their normal food sources were destroyed by the flood they caused. In the biblical story, God is neither frightened nor dependent on sacrificed meat to survive.

Now remember, in making this contrast, I’m not trying to defend the view of God in the Noah story as morally acceptable, ethically satisfying, and theologically mature. Nor am I trying to make Gilgamesh look bad to make the Bible look good. Instead, I’m simply recommending that we compare the Noah story to its predecessors as well as its successors. I’m recommending we notice the theological progress the story demonstrates instead of simply condemning it for not having progressed more. I’m acknowledging that, yes, the portrait of God found in the Noah story is far less satisfying in many ways than a portrait that emerges later in the biblical library. Yet we can celebrate it for being a step up from the portraits it was correcting and seeking to replace, keeping in mind that the Gilgamesh epic itself no doubt provided a more satisfying explanation for some facets of human experience than the earlier myths it sought to augment or replace.

In this way of reading the Bible as an ongoing conversation about the character of God, we not only look to the antecedents of the Noah story; we also consider its descendants. So now consider another story about water, drowning, death, and saving. Ponder the image of baby Moses floating on the crocodile-infested Nile River, protected by—what? An ark, an ark of reeds. Could this be, among other things, an ironic commentary on the Noah story, a part of the ongoing and maturing conversation about the character of God? Could this story suggest that God should no longer be identified with a mighty potentate who, in his insecurity, drowns helpless children, but rather with a tiny, fragile child who has been condemned to drowning? Obviously, this kind of reading has no place in a constitutional approach, but outside of that framework it seems to have real theological power.

This power will shine even more brightly when we come to the story of Jesus, who seems, in episode after episode, to turn old stories on their heads. I’ve described elsewhere, for example, his healing encounter with a Canaanite woman in Matthew 15, after which Jesus feeds four thousand Gentiles just as he had previously fed five thousand fellow Jews. The two stories seem perfectly poised to overturn the original encounter between Jews and Canaanites in Deuteronomy 7. Now under Jesus’s leadership in contrast to Joshua’s, instead of “no mercy,” we are to “show mercy.” Now following Jesus, instead of mercilessly destroying “the other,” we compassionately heal, feed, and serve the other. Now with Jesus, instead of rejecting the other as a “gentile dog,” we allow ourselves to listen and be “converted” by the other, seeing the other’s humanity and great faith.2

This approach helps us see the biblical library as the record of a series of trade-ups, people courageously letting go of their state-of-the-art understanding of God when an even better understanding begins to emerge. This evolutionary approach also helps us understand one reason for the absolute refusal among the Jewish people to tolerate idols: idols freeze one’s understanding of God