Facts of the Matter
The Flood
THERE is a grandeur and majestic simplicity about the
scriptural account of "The Flood" which equally challenges and defies
comparison. Twice only throughout the Old Testament is the event again referred
to—each time in the grave, brief language befitting its solemnity. In Psalm 29:10 we read: "Jehovah sitteth upon the flood;
yea, Jehovah sitteth King for ever,"—a sort of Old Testament version of
"Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, and today, and for ever." Then, if
we may carry out the figure, there is an evangelical application of this Old
Testament history in Isaiah 54:9, 10: "For this is as the waters of Noah unto
Me: for as I have sworn that the waters of Noah should no more go over the
earth; so have I sworn that I would not be wroth with thee, nor rebuke thee.
For the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but My kindness shall
not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of My peace be removed, saith
Jehovah that hath mercy on thee."
The first point in the narrative of "The Flood"
which claims our attention is an emphatic mention, twice repeated, of Noah's
absolute obedience, "according unto all that Jehovah commanded him."
(Genesis 6:22; 7:5)
Next, we mark a "solemn pause of seven days" before the flood
actually commenced, when "all the fountains of the great deep were broken
up, and the windows of heaven were opened;" in other words, the floodgates
alike of earth and heaven thrown wide open. The event happened "in the
sixth hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day
of the month;" that is, if we calculate the season according to the
beginning of the Hebrew civil year, about the middle or end of our month of
November. Then Noah and his wife, his three sons—Shem, Ham, and
Japheth—and their wives, and all the animals, having come into the ark,
"Jehovah shut him in," and for forty days and forty nights "the
rain was upon the earth," while, at the same time, the fountains of the
great deep were broken up. The flood continued for one hundred and fifty days,
when it began to subside. The terrible catastrophe is thus described:
"And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased,
and bare up the ark, and it was lift up above the earth. And the waters
prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the
face of the waters. And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and
all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. Fifteen
cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered. And all
flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of
beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man:
all in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land,
died. And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the
ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the
heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive,
and they that were with him in the ark."
The remarks of a recent writer on this subject are every
way so appropriate that we here reproduce them: "The narrative is vivid
and forcible, though entirely wanting in that sort of description which in a
modern historian or poet would have occupied the largest space. We see nothing
of the death-struggle; we hear not the cry of despair; we are not called upon
to witness the frantic agony of husband and wife, and parent and child, as they
fled in terror before the rising waters. Nor is a word said of the sadness of
the one righteous man who, safe himself, looked upon the destruction which he
could not avert. But an impression is left upon the mind with peculiar vividness
from the very simplicity of the narrative, and it is that of utter desolation.
This is heightened by the repetition and contrast of two ideas. On the one
hand, we are reminded no less than six times in the narrative (Genesis 6,
7, 8)
who the tenants of the ark were, the favored and rescued few; and, on the other
hand, the total and absolute blotting out of everything else is not less
emphatically dwelt upon" (Genesis 6:13, 17; 7:4, 21-23).
We will not take from the solemnity of the impressive
stillness, amid which Scripture shows us the lonely ark floating on the
desolate waters that have buried earth and all that belonged to it, by
attempting to describe the scenes that must have ensued. Only the impression is
left on our minds that the words "Jehovah shut him in," may be
intended to show that Noah, even if he would, could not have given help to his
perishing contemporaries. At the end of the one hundred and fifty days it
is said, in the peculiarly touching language of Scripture, "God remembered
Noah, and every living thing, and all the cattle that was with him in the
ark." A drying wind was made to pass over the earth, the flood "was
restrained," "and the waters returned from the earth
continually." On the seventeenth day of the seventh month, that is,
exactly five months after Noah had entered it, the ark was found to be resting
"upon the mountains of Ararat,"—not necessarily upon either the
highest peak, which measures seventeen thousand two hundred and fifty feet, nor
yet, perhaps, upon the second highest, which rises to about twelve thousand
feet, but upon that mountain range. Still the waters decreased; and
seventy-three days later, or on the first day of the tenth month, the
mountain-tops all around became visible. Forty days more, and Noah
"sent forth a raven," which, finding shelter on the mountain-tops,
and food from the floating carcasses, did not return into the ark. At the end
of seven days more "he sent forth a dove from him to see if the waters
were abated from off the face of the ground," that is, from the low ground
in the valleys. "But the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and
she returned unto him into the ark." Yet another week, and he sent her
forth a second time, when she returned again in the evening, bearing in her
mouth an olive-leaf. It is a remarkable fact, as bearing indirect testimony to
this narrative, that the olive has been ascertained to bear leaves under water.
A third time Noah put forth the messenger of peace, at the end of another week,
and she "returned not again unto him any more." "No
picture in natural history," says the writer already quoted, "was
ever drawn with more exquisite beauty and fidelity than this. It is admirable
alike for its poetry and its truth." On the first day of the first month,
in the sixth hundredth and first year, "the waters were dried up from off
the earth; and Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and, behold,
the face of the ground was dry. And in the second month, on the twenty-seventh
day of the month, was the earth dried,"—just one year and ten days after
Noah had entered the ark.
Thus far the scriptural narrative. It has so often been
explained that the object of the Bible is to give us the history of the kingdom
of God, not to treat of curious or even scientific questions, that we can
dismiss a matter too often discussed of late in an entirely unbecoming spirit,
in these words of a recent writer: "It is a question among theologians and
men of science whether the flood was absolutely universal, or whether it was
universal only in the sense of extending over all the part of the world then
inhabited. We do not here enter into this controversy; but we may notice the
remarkable fact that the district lying to the east of Ararat, where the ark
rested, bears traces of having at one time been under water. It is a peculiarly
depressed region, lying lower than the districts around, and thus affording
peculiar facilities for such a submersion."
But there is another matter connected with the flood so
marked and striking as to claim our special attention. It is that the
remembrance of the flood has been preserved in the traditions of so many
nations, so widely separated and so independent of each other, that it is
impossible to doubt that they have all been derived from one and the same
original source. As might be expected, they contain many legendary details, and
they generally fix the locality of the flood in their own lands; but these very
particulars mark them as corruptions of the real history recorded in the Bible,
and carried by the different nations into the various countries where they
settled. Mr. Perowne has grouped these traditions into those of Western Asia,
including the Chaldean, the Phenician, that of the so-called "Sibylline
Oracles," the Phrygian, the Syrian, and the Armenian stories; then those
of Eastern Asia, including the Persian, Indian, and Chinese; and, thirdly,
those of the American nations—the Cherokee, and the various tribes of Mexican
Indians, with which—strange though it may seem—he groups those of the Fiji
Islands. To these he adds, as a fourth cycle, the similar traditions of the
Greek nations. But the most interesting of all these traditions is the Chaldean
or Babylonian, which deserves more than merely passing notice.
Though it needs not such indirect confirmations to
convince us of the truth of the narratives in the Bible, it is very remarkable
how all historical investigations, when really completed and rightly applied,
confirm the exactness of what is recorded in the Holy Scriptures. But their
chief value to us must always be this, that they tell us of that Ark which
alone rides on the waters of the deluge, and preserves for ever safe them who
are "shut in" there by the hand of Jehovah.
CHALDEAN NARRATIVE OF THE DELUGE
In general we may say that we have two Chaldean accounts
of the flood. The one comes to us through Greek sources, from Berosus, a
Chaldean priest in the third century before Christ, who translated into Greek
the records of Babylon. This, as the less clear, we need not here notice more
particularly. But a great interest attaches to the far earlier cuneiform
inscriptions, first discovered and deciphered in 1872 by Mr. G. Smith, of the
British Museum, and since further investigated by the same scholar. These
inscriptions cover twelve tablets, of which as yet only part has been made
available. They may broadly be described as embodying the Babylonian account of
the flood, which, as the event took place in that locality, has a special
value. The narrative is supposed to date from two thousand to two thousand five
hundred years before Christ. The history of the flood is related by a hero,
preserved through it, to a monarch whom Mr. Smith calls Izdubar, but whom he
supposes to have been the Nimrod of Scripture. There are, as one might have
expected, frequent differences between the Babylonian and the Biblical account
of the flood. On the other hand, there are striking points of agreement between
them, which all the more confirm the scriptural account, as showing that the
event had become a distinct part of the history of the district in which it had
taken place. There are frequent references to Erech, the city mentioned in Genesis 10:10; allusions to a race of giants, who are
described in fabulous terms; a mention of Lamech, the father of Noah, though
under a different name, and of the patriarch himself as a sage, reverent and
devout, who, when the Deity resolved to destroy by a flood the world for its
sin, built the ark. Sometimes the language comes so close to that of the Bible
that one almost seems to read disjointed or distorted quotations from
Scripture. We mention, as instances, the scorn which the building of the ark is
said to have called forth on the part of contemporaries; the pitching of the
ark without and within with pitch; the shutting of the door behind the saved
ones, the opening of the window, when the waters had abated; the going and
returning of the dove since "a resting-place it did not find," the
sending of the raven, which, feeding on corpses in the water, "did not
return;" and, finally, the building of an altar by Noah. We sum up the
results of this discovery in the words of Mr. Smith:
"Not to pursue this parallel further, it will be
perceived that when the Chaldean account is compared with the Biblical
narrative, in their main features the two stories fairly agree; as to the
wickedness of the antediluvian world, the Divine anger and command to build the
ark, its stocking with birds and beasts, the coming of the deluge, the rain and
storm, the ark resting on a mountain, trial being made by birds sent out to see
if the waters had subsided, and the building of an altar after the flood. All
these main facts occur in the same order in both narratives, but when we come
to examine the details of these stages in the two accounts, there appear
numerous points of difference; as to the number of people who were saved, the
duration of the deluge, the place where the ark rested, the order of sending
out the birds, and other similar matters."
We conclude with another quotation from the same work,
which will show how much of the primitive knowledge of Divine things, though
mixed with terrible corruptions, was preserved among men at this early
period:
"It appears that at that remote age the Babylonians
had a tradition of a flood which was a Divine punishment for the wickedness of
the world; and of a holy man, who built an ark, and escaped the destruction;
who was afterwards translated and dwelt with the gods. They believed in hell, a
place of torment under the earth, and heaven, a place of glory in the sky; and
their description of the two has, in several points, a striking likeness to
those in the Bible. They believed in a spirit or soul distinct from the body,
which was not destroyed on the death of the mortal frame; and they represent this
ghost as rising from the earth at the bidding of one of the gods, and winging
its way to heaven."
Posts
