WEBVTT
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Take a look at the can at any baby nursery in America right now.
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Just just walk into one in your head.
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There is a good chance.
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I mean, a really good chance that somewhere on the wall, or on a onesie, or embroidered on a burp cloth, is a picture of Noah's Ark.
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The big smiling boat.
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Giraffes with their necks sticking out of the top.
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There are elephants, probably lions.
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I'm willing to bet there's a monkey.
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And there's always a rainbow, right?
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Always a rainbow.
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And the rainbow is very cute.
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It's smiling at you.
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I need you to sit with something for just a second.
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The story we're decorating baby merchandise with is a story in which God kills every human being on earth.
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Yeah.
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Every man, woman, and child, every infant, everyone drowns, except for eight people.
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We've taken a genocide narrative and we've put it on a onesie.
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Now, I'm not telling you this to make you feel bad about the nursery.
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I promise, this episode is not gonna be a downer.
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This might be one of the most interesting things you hear this week.
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Because here's what your Sunday school teacher didn't tell you about Noah's Ark.
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This story is not only much darker than the nursery version, this is also not the original story.
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Israel didn't come up with it, they inherited it.
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And what they did with it is one of the most beautiful pieces of theological work in the whole Bible.
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Let me show you.
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God is sad.
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God is sad because people are being bad.
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And so God tells Noah, who is good, to build a boat, and Noah does.
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He puts two animals of every kind on it, 40 days, 40 nights of rain.
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Everybody who's not on the boat dies, but we're not going to linger on that part, right?
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The boat lands on a mountain, Noah sends out a dove, the dove comes back with the olive branch, everybody's off the boat, rainbow in the sky, God won't do it again, roll credits.
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That's the version on the nursery wall.
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And some of that is actually in the text.
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Noah did build a boat.
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There were animals, it did rain, it landed on a mountain, there was a rainbow.
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But if you go back and you read the actual chapters, Genesis 6 through 9, you're gonna find that some things are there that the Sunday school lesson left out.
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You're gonna find out that God is not sad.
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Grieved, yes, but God has also decided, right?
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I will blot out the human beings from the earth.
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Blot out.
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That's the language.
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Not start out, not start over, not give them another chance, blot out.
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You're gonna find out that the flood isn't only 40 days of rain.
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That's just when the water starts.
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According to Genesis 6 and 7 and 8, the water covers the earth for 150 days.
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Noah and his family are on the boat, literally for over a year.
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You're gonna find out that when the boat lands, Noah gets off, and the very first thing he does is he builds an altar and offers a burnt sacrifice, and then he plants a vineyard, he gets drunk, and he passes out naked in his tent.
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And that is a story that your Sunday school teacher was understandably not eager to get into.
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You're gonna find out that the death toll is brutal, right?
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Genesis 723.
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He blotted out every living thing that was on the face of the ground.
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Humans, animals, creeping things, birds of the air, all blotted out.
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Everyone.
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That's the story that we decorate baby merchandise with.
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Now, here's where I think this gets really interesting.
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This story is not original to Israel.
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Okay?
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I'm gonna say that again, because it took me a while, and I had to sit with it the first time that I heard it too.
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The flood story is not original to Israel.
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There is an older flood story, a much older flood flood story.
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It was dug up from the ruins of an ancient Assyrian library in the 1870s.
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And when the scholars translated the tablets, they realized they were reading a version of the Noah story that had been written down centuries before Genesis.
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It's on the eleventh tablet of an ancient Mesopotamian epic about a king named Gilgamesh.
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The story on that tablet goes like this The gods decided to send a flood because human beings were noisy.
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Their racket was keeping the gods up when they went to sleep.
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That's the reason.
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Not violence or corruption, but noise.
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One of the gods secretly warmed a man named Utnapishtim, told him to build a boat, very specific dimensions.
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He built the boat, put his family on it, and the seeds of all living things.
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Then the flood came, lasted seven days and seven nights.
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The boat landed on a mountain called Nimush.
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Utnapishtim sent out a dove, it came back.
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He sent out a swallow, it came back.
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He sent out a raven, that one did not come back.
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Utna Pishtim then offered a sacrifice.
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And the text says, and I promise I'm not making this up, the text says the gods gathered like flies over the sweet savor.
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Is any of this sounding familiar?
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It should.
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It's this it's the same story.
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And it's not just Gilgamesh.
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There are older Mesopotamian versions.
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There are fled stories in the Hindu tradition, Greek mythology, Chinese folklore, but the Mesopotamian versions are the direct answers of the biblical ones.
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The Israelite writers were sitting in Babylon during the exile, 6th century BCE, and they were reading Babylonian literature.
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They knew this story cold.
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They had grown up on it.
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It was in the water, so to speak, right?
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And when they sat down to write their own scriptures, they did not ignore the flood story.
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They took it.
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They took the whole thing.
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And then they changed it.
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What they changed is what made it theirs.
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I want to talk you through this carefully, okay?
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Because this is where the theological work happens.
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This is where I think you're gonna fall a little bit in love with these biblical writers.
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Change one, the reason.
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In the Gilgamesh version, the gods sent the flood because humans were noisy, because the gods couldn't sleep.
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There's no moral cause.
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Humanity had done nothing wrong.
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They're just apparently too loud.
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In the Israelite version, God sends the flood because the earth was filled with violence.
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Genesis 6.11.
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Humanity has become genuinely destructive.
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There's a moral reason.
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It's still horrifying, but at least it's not petty.
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The Israelite writers took an ancient story about divine irritation and rewrote it into a story about divine justice.
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Change two, the survivor.
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In the Gilgamesh version, Utna Pishtim is chosen because one of the gods happens to like him.
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There's no particular reason.
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He's just lucky.
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He's the guy who got told.
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But in the Israelite version, Noah is chosen because he, quote, walked with God.
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Genesis 6.9.
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There's an ethical dimension.
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Salvation in the Israelite version has this moral texture.
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Change three, the big one, the end.
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In the Gilgamesh version, once the flood is over, the gods argue about what happened.
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Some of them regret it, some of them want to send another one.
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Right?
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There is no promise, there's no covenant, nothing binding them.
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Utnapishtim is given immortality, personal gift.
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The world just goes on, hoping the gods stay in a in a good mood.
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In the Israelite version, God does something new.
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God makes a promise.
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Genesis 9 11 I will establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.
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Never again.
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That word does not exist in Gilgamesh.
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There's no divine self-limit in the Mesopotamian story.
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There's no I won't do this to you again.
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The gods are volatile.
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Humanity is vulnerable.
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But the Israelite writers said, our God binds God's self to a promise.
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Our God says never again.
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Our God agrees to a limit on divine wrath, a limit that God imposes on God's own self, unilaterally, before humanity had done anything to earn it.
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And then to seal it, God does one thing that isn't in the older story.
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God puts a bow in the sky.
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Here's the thing about the rainbow that nobody tells you.
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The Hebrew word for rainbow, Keshet, is the same word that Hebrew uses for a war bow, right?
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The kind you shoot arrows with.
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These are not related concepts.
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They are the exact same word.
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If you're a Hebrew speaker in the ancient world and I say Keshet to you, you don't picture a colorful arc in the sky, you picture a weapon.
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Cushet shows up all over the Hebrew Bible as an image of divine warfare.
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God with a drawn bow, God bending God's bow, God aiming arrows, the bow is the weapon of the warrior.
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The imagery is not decorative.
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It's how the ancient Near East pictured God's power.
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And so when Genesis 9 says that God is putting God's Cashette in the clouds, the original audience is not picturing something pretty.
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They are picturing a war bow.
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Here's what makes the image extraordinary.
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In the ancient world, laying aside a weapon was a public side, a public sign that the fighting was over.
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Genesis 9 13, I have put my bow in the clouds, it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth.
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God takes the war bow, sets it aside in the sky where everyone can see it, pointed away from the earth.
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That is the rainbow.
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It's not a decoration, friends.
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It's the warrior's public promise that the fighting is over.
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The Sunday School version made the rainbow into a smiley face, a little decoration that says, God loves you.
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The actual text makes rainbow into something stranger and more powerful.
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It's God setting down a weapon.
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Here's what I want you to see.
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The writers of Genesis inherited a horror story.
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They inherited a flood story from a culture that told it to explain why the gods were unreliable, that humanity was expendable.
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They didn't sanitize it, they kept the flood, they kept the drowning, they kept the total death toll.
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If anything, they intensified it.
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Their flood, the Israelite flood, is longer.
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The death is more complete, the language is more absolute, but they did something the older story could not or would not do.
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They made God accountable.
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They wrote a God who acts for a reason.
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They wrote a God who is bound by a promise.
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They wrote a God who sets down a weapon and says, never again, and puts the sign of it in the sky where everybody everywhere gets to see it every time it rains.
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This is not a small piece of theology.
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This is one of the most sophisticated moves in the entire Bible.
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They looked at a story about divine violence and they said, Our God is different.
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Our God is not a mood, not a threat.
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Our God is not what those gods were.
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Our God is willing to be held to something.
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And this is the part that gets me.
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The covenant that God made, it's unilateral.
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Read Genesis 9 carefully.
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God doesn't say, if you shape up, I'm not going to destroy the earth again.
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God doesn't put conditions.
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God doesn't say, provided you're righteous.
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God says, I'm making this promise between me and every living creature for all generations.
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That's grace.
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Before anybody has done anything to earn it, right?
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The covenant isn't between God and Noah either.
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Read it again.
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It's between God and every living creature, every animal, every bird, every generation that will come.
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God is committing to a promise with beings who don't even exist yet, who could possibly never earn it, who would never know that they'd been included.
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The world isn't held together because you and I are good enough.
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The world is held together because God, at some point deep in the story we tell ourselves, chose to be the kind of God who sets the weapon down and doesn't pick it back up.
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We are always already loved.
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That's what the flood story is actually about.
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Not divine wrath, not a lesson about how bad humans are.
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It's about a God who chose to be bound by a promise before anybody asked, before anybody deserved it, before the ink was even dry on the story.
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So next time you see a rainbow, remember that.
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That's a war bow.
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Set down, retired, pointed away from you forever.
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Because that is who God is.
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And that's who God has always been.
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Take a look at the can at any baby nursery in America right now.
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Just just walk into one in your head.
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There is a good chance.
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I mean, a really good chance that somewhere on the wall, or on a onesie, or embroidered on a burp cloth, is a picture of Noah's Ark.
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The big smiling boat.
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Giraffes with their necks sticking out of the top.
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There are elephants, probably lions.
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I'm willing to bet there's a monkey.
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And there's always a rainbow, right?
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Always a rainbow.
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And the rainbow is very cute.
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It's smiling at you.
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I need you to sit with something for just a second.
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The story we're decorating baby merchandise with is a story in which God kills every human being on earth.
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Yeah.
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Every man, woman, and child, every infant, everyone drowns, except for eight people.
00:00:48.560 --> 00:00:52.159
We've taken a genocide narrative and we've put it on a onesie.
00:00:52.640 --> 00:00:56.159
Now, I'm not telling you this to make you feel bad about the nursery.
00:00:56.320 --> 00:00:58.640
I promise, this episode is not gonna be a downer.
00:00:58.960 --> 00:01:02.880
This might be one of the most interesting things you hear this week.
00:01:03.039 --> 00:01:07.680
Because here's what your Sunday school teacher didn't tell you about Noah's Ark.
00:01:07.760 --> 00:01:13.280
This story is not only much darker than the nursery version, this is also not the original story.
00:01:13.519 --> 00:01:16.400
Israel didn't come up with it, they inherited it.
00:01:16.560 --> 00:01:22.879
And what they did with it is one of the most beautiful pieces of theological work in the whole Bible.
00:01:23.200 --> 00:01:24.480
Let me show you.
00:01:57.359 --> 00:01:58.239
God is sad.
00:01:58.400 --> 00:02:00.640
God is sad because people are being bad.
00:02:00.799 --> 00:02:04.799
And so God tells Noah, who is good, to build a boat, and Noah does.
00:02:04.959 --> 00:02:09.280
He puts two animals of every kind on it, 40 days, 40 nights of rain.
00:02:09.439 --> 00:02:13.199
Everybody who's not on the boat dies, but we're not going to linger on that part, right?
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The boat lands on a mountain, Noah sends out a dove, the dove comes back with the olive branch, everybody's off the boat, rainbow in the sky, God won't do it again, roll credits.
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That's the version on the nursery wall.
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And some of that is actually in the text.
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Noah did build a boat.
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There were animals, it did rain, it landed on a mountain, there was a rainbow.
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But if you go back and you read the actual chapters, Genesis 6 through 9, you're gonna find that some things are there that the Sunday school lesson left out.
00:02:42.319 --> 00:02:44.240
You're gonna find out that God is not sad.
00:02:44.560 --> 00:02:47.759
Grieved, yes, but God has also decided, right?
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I will blot out the human beings from the earth.
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Blot out.
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That's the language.
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Not start out, not start over, not give them another chance, blot out.
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You're gonna find out that the flood isn't only 40 days of rain.
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That's just when the water starts.
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According to Genesis 6 and 7 and 8, the water covers the earth for 150 days.
00:03:08.240 --> 00:03:11.759
Noah and his family are on the boat, literally for over a year.
00:03:12.000 --> 00:03:22.639
You're gonna find out that when the boat lands, Noah gets off, and the very first thing he does is he builds an altar and offers a burnt sacrifice, and then he plants a vineyard, he gets drunk, and he passes out naked in his tent.
00:03:22.879 --> 00:03:27.919
And that is a story that your Sunday school teacher was understandably not eager to get into.
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You're gonna find out that the death toll is brutal, right?
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Genesis 723.
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He blotted out every living thing that was on the face of the ground.
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Humans, animals, creeping things, birds of the air, all blotted out.
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Everyone.
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That's the story that we decorate baby merchandise with.
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Now, here's where I think this gets really interesting.
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This story is not original to Israel.
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Okay?
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I'm gonna say that again, because it took me a while, and I had to sit with it the first time that I heard it too.
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The flood story is not original to Israel.
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There is an older flood story, a much older flood flood story.
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It was dug up from the ruins of an ancient Assyrian library in the 1870s.
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And when the scholars translated the tablets, they realized they were reading a version of the Noah story that had been written down centuries before Genesis.
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It's on the eleventh tablet of an ancient Mesopotamian epic about a king named Gilgamesh.
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The story on that tablet goes like this The gods decided to send a flood because human beings were noisy.
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Their racket was keeping the gods up when they went to sleep.
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That's the reason.
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Not violence or corruption, but noise.
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One of the gods secretly warmed a man named Utnapishtim, told him to build a boat, very specific dimensions.
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He built the boat, put his family on it, and the seeds of all living things.
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Then the flood came, lasted seven days and seven nights.
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The boat landed on a mountain called Nimush.
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Utnapishtim sent out a dove, it came back.
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He sent out a swallow, it came back.
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He sent out a raven, that one did not come back.
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Utna Pishtim then offered a sacrifice.
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And the text says, and I promise I'm not making this up, the text says the gods gathered like flies over the sweet savor.
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Is any of this sounding familiar?
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It should.
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It's this it's the same story.
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And it's not just Gilgamesh.
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There are older Mesopotamian versions.
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There are fled stories in the Hindu tradition, Greek mythology, Chinese folklore, but the Mesopotamian versions are the direct answers of the biblical ones.
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The Israelite writers were sitting in Babylon during the exile, 6th century BCE, and they were reading Babylonian literature.
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They knew this story cold.
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They had grown up on it.
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It was in the water, so to speak, right?
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And when they sat down to write their own scriptures, they did not ignore the flood story.
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They took it.
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They took the whole thing.
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And then they changed it.
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What they changed is what made it theirs.
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I want to talk you through this carefully, okay?
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Because this is where the theological work happens.
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This is where I think you're gonna fall a little bit in love with these biblical writers.
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Change one, the reason.
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In the Gilgamesh version, the gods sent the flood because humans were noisy, because the gods couldn't sleep.
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There's no moral cause.
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Humanity had done nothing wrong.
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They're just apparently too loud.
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In the Israelite version, God sends the flood because the earth was filled with violence.
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Genesis 6.11.
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Humanity has become genuinely destructive.
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There's a moral reason.
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It's still horrifying, but at least it's not petty.
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The Israelite writers took an ancient story about divine irritation and rewrote it into a story about divine justice.
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Change two, the survivor.
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In the Gilgamesh version, Utna Pishtim is chosen because one of the gods happens to like him.
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There's no particular reason.
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He's just lucky.
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He's the guy who got told.
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But in the Israelite version, Noah is chosen because he, quote, walked with God.
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Genesis 6.9.
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There's an ethical dimension.
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Salvation in the Israelite version has this moral texture.
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Change three, the big one, the end.
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In the Gilgamesh version, once the flood is over, the gods argue about what happened.
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Some of them regret it, some of them want to send another one.
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Right?
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There is no promise, there's no covenant, nothing binding them.
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Utnapishtim is given immortality, personal gift.
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The world just goes on, hoping the gods stay in a in a good mood.
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In the Israelite version, God does something new.
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God makes a promise.
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Genesis 9 11 I will establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.
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Never again.
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That word does not exist in Gilgamesh.
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There's no divine self-limit in the Mesopotamian story.
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There's no I won't do this to you again.
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The gods are volatile.
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Humanity is vulnerable.
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But the Israelite writers said, our God binds God's self to a promise.
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Our God says never again.
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Our God agrees to a limit on divine wrath, a limit that God imposes on God's own self, unilaterally, before humanity had done anything to earn it.
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And then to seal it, God does one thing that isn't in the older story.
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God puts a bow in the sky.
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Here's the thing about the rainbow that nobody tells you.
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The Hebrew word for rainbow, Keshet, is the same word that Hebrew uses for a war bow, right?
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The kind you shoot arrows with.
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These are not related concepts.
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They are the exact same word.
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If you're a Hebrew speaker in the ancient world and I say Keshet to you, you don't picture a colorful arc in the sky, you picture a weapon.
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Cushet shows up all over the Hebrew Bible as an image of divine warfare.
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God with a drawn bow, God bending God's bow, God aiming arrows, the bow is the weapon of the warrior.
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The imagery is not decorative.
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It's how the ancient Near East pictured God's power.
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And so when Genesis 9 says that God is putting God's Cashette in the clouds, the original audience is not picturing something pretty.
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They are picturing a war bow.
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Here's what makes the image extraordinary.
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In the ancient world, laying aside a weapon was a public side, a public sign that the fighting was over.
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Genesis 9 13, I have put my bow in the clouds, it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth.
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God takes the war bow, sets it aside in the sky where everyone can see it, pointed away from the earth.
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That is the rainbow.
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It's not a decoration, friends.
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It's the warrior's public promise that the fighting is over.
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The Sunday School version made the rainbow into a smiley face, a little decoration that says, God loves you.
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The actual text makes rainbow into something stranger and more powerful.
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It's God setting down a weapon.
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Here's what I want you to see.
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The writers of Genesis inherited a horror story.
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They inherited a flood story from a culture that told it to explain why the gods were unreliable, that humanity was expendable.
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They didn't sanitize it, they kept the flood, they kept the drowning, they kept the total death toll.
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If anything, they intensified it.
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Their flood, the Israelite flood, is longer.
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The death is more complete, the language is more absolute, but they did something the older story could not or would not do.
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They made God accountable.
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They wrote a God who acts for a reason.
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They wrote a God who is bound by a promise.
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They wrote a God who sets down a weapon and says, never again, and puts the sign of it in the sky where everybody everywhere gets to see it every time it rains.
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This is not a small piece of theology.
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This is one of the most sophisticated moves in the entire Bible.
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They looked at a story about divine violence and they said, Our God is different.
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Our God is not a mood, not a threat.
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Our God is not what those gods were.
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Our God is willing to be held to something.
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And this is the part that gets me.
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The covenant that God made, it's unilateral.
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Read Genesis 9 carefully.
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God doesn't say, if you shape up, I'm not going to destroy the earth again.
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God doesn't put conditions.
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God doesn't say, provided you're righteous.
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God says, I'm making this promise between me and every living creature for all generations.
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That's grace.
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Before anybody has done anything to earn it, right?
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The covenant isn't between God and Noah either.
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Read it again.
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It's between God and every living creature, every animal, every bird, every generation that will come.
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God is committing to a promise with beings who don't even exist yet, who could possibly never earn it, who would never know that they'd been included.
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The world isn't held together because you and I are good enough.
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The world is held together because God, at some point deep in the story we tell ourselves, chose to be the kind of God who sets the weapon down and doesn't pick it back up.
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We are always already loved.
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That's what the flood story is actually about.
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Not divine wrath, not a lesson about how bad humans are.
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It's about a God who chose to be bound by a promise before anybody asked, before anybody deserved it, before the ink was even dry on the story.
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So next time you see a rainbow, remember that.
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That's a war bow.
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Set down, retired, pointed away from you forever.
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Because that is who God is.
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And that's who God has always been.
