NOTES for Gen 6:1-7:10

The parable of Noah, which many Bible readers perceive as the story of the flood, is mysterious in many ways, although its most interesting riddles are not obvious. Still, there is one riddle that has drawn the attention of commentators for more than one century: who are the "sons of God" mentioned in the parable, who "came in" to the "daughters of men"? Different interpreters sometimes build very ingenious theological schemes here, but the answer may turn out to be much simpler than it appears.

It has to do with historical realities connected with the cult of the Great Goddess, whose roots really do reach far back into prehistory. An essential part of this most ancient cult was ritual prostitution, and the priestesses of the goddess usually practiced it in a state of erotic and orgiastic ecstasy. In that state they really thought that they were uniting not with people but with spirits who took on human form.

For the readers of the age when the Prologue of Genesis was written, this was perfectly clear: the cult of the Great Goddess remained in the Near East right up to the final Christianization of the region. That is precisely why the prophets called paganism fornication: their definition was both literal and symbolic, since in the case of the cult of the Great Goddess, spiritual fornication was accompanied by physical fornication. It is no surprise that this cult became the symbol of the worst elements in pagan religiosity, and the sacred writer uses it to describe the spiritual situation in which humanity found itself before the flood.

Against this background, Noah is portrayed as the only righteous man in his generation, one who, as it says of him, "walked before God." What his "walking" means and what it was like can only be guessed; the parable gives no details. What matters, however, is that this very "walking" of Noah before God allowed the world not to perish completely.

The story of the flood itself is presented by the author of the Prologue somewhat schematically, and even symbolically. The details mattered so little to him that, as biblical scholars have long noted, he used two different accounts of the flood and joined them into one, in such a way that in some places the "seams" separating one version of the story from the other are still visible. These "seams" do not trouble the sacred writer: he is writing the parable of Noah, not a report about the flood.

The parable makes it clear that human beings have had a choice in every age. Today historians of religion have already moved away from the primitive linear schemes of humanity's religious development that were once popular. It is now clear that monotheism, once considered a historically very late phenomenon, actually has roots that reach as far back into history as many pagan cults. This means that even in prehistoric times a person could choose whether to worship the One or prefer someone else.

In that case Noah becomes a collective image. He becomes a symbol of all righteous people who have walked before God from the most ancient times down to our own day, righteous people who did not know, and perhaps still do not know, the tradition that goes back to Abraham. God never abandons anyone who seeks Him, regardless of where and when that person happened to live.

The story of the corruption of the human race before the flood raises an extraordinary number of questions; few passages of Holy Scripture can compare with it in this respect. Yet here is what is surprising: at first glance these questions seem obvious, but on closer examination they turn out to be largely idle. Indeed, we are very interested in who the sons of God were who went in to the daughters of men; we almost cannot live without finding out who the giants were, the men of renown from of old. Yet what would change for us depending on one answer or another?

Here, as in many other places, the biblical narrative uses marriage as a symbol of a person's relationship with God, and this is a highly meaningful symbol. Religious worship turns out to be akin to the essential union of different beings that marriage is. It is characteristic that the human person appears here as the feminine principle, needing protection and needing the object of worship to take responsibility for him. Therefore the matter concerns events of religious history. In a figurative sense, the Bible most often calls "sons" those who share in the nature of someone or something. This is the meaning of many biblical expressions, from "Son of Man" to "sons of disobedience." The sons of God mentioned at the beginning of Genesis 6 are beings who share in an immaterial, spiritual nature; simply put, bodiless spirits. Thus before us is a story about the emergence of paganism, about how the human person, "becoming futile in his thinking," as the apostle Paul puts it, began to worship created spirits instead of worshiping the one God. From this the giants appeared on the earth: people who, thanks to union with these spirits, possessed abilities unusual for human beings and not intended by the Creator. That, essentially, is all. But this is by no means the only thing that matters in the narrator's story.

Reading about what led to the flood, one cannot fail to notice the words that the narrator of Genesis puts into the Creator's mouth. "My Spirit shall not forever be disregarded by human beings," He says when paganism arises. This is a grand, astonishing promise in which the great mercy of God is revealed to us. For when the Lord says that the seduction of the human race into a great deception will be temporary, He thereby promises to conquer and end this madness. More than that, His will is that a union of love should bind the human person with the very source of the world's life, with the Holy Spirit. And the Almighty sets a limit to people's earthly life in order to give us the possibility of meeting Him face to face. What an unexpected thought. Scripture says that God did not create death; here it also says that He desires to return to eternity the person who has fallen away from it.

One also cannot fail to notice the words: "...the Lord regretted that He had made man..." Usually we think that God, like an unfortunate engineer, regretted what He had "made"; no, of course that is not the point. Even human betrayal is not able to surpass God's will to grant us life. The key words in this phrase come later, where the narrator says that the Lord "was grieved in His heart." In the prayer attributed to King Manasseh (2 Chron. 36:22a ff.), it says of God: "You are the Lord Most High, good, long-suffering, and greatly merciful, and You repent over human evils"; this quotation entered one of the prayers of the sacrament of repentance. This is what Scripture is saying: the Lord grieves over the evil that we commit. The grief and repentance "over human evils" of which the narrator speaks in chapter 6 are a prophecy of the prayer from the Cross, in which the Lord says: "Forgive them, Father, for they do not know what they are doing." This mystery of mercy is the main thing in today's passage. The human understanding of repentance, characteristic both of us and of the narrator, must not prevent us from touching it.

It is hardest for us to understand the words that the Lord can repent. It seems to us that this is purely human. But some interpreters urge us not to take this anthropomorphism too literally. Yet there is much in it that truly is real, and we feel this: the Lord is very tenderly and heartfully concerned with everything that happens on earth. And this is an unchanging side of love: anger. As a rule, we do not become angry with someone who is indifferent to us.

We must not picture God as a kind magician. The drama of the world is much more complex than the contents of most world epics and sagas, and simply fairy tales, where good magicians fight evil ones. For what could be more severe than sending His Son to the Cross? The word "good" has become worn down; perhaps it is better to say it this way. Yet God is the highest good.

Many commentators have asked the question: how could all those animals that God decided to save from the flood fit into the ark? The sacred writer, as can be seen, is not concerned with this question at all: he does not go into details, and even allows discrepancies. In one passage he mentions one pair of each kind of animal, while in the second, which is part of today's reading, he mentions seven pairs of clean (that is, kosher) animals and one pair of unclean (that is, non-kosher) animals. Such discrepancies are entirely acceptable if what is at issue is not history, but a parable. Yet every parable has its own meaning, and so must the mention of the difference between the number of clean and unclean animals.

Of course, the sacred writer's general logic rules out the possibility that Noah knew the laws that were given by God to Moses or to one of his successors. But Noah knows God, and the God in question is undoubtedly the very same God who much later revealed Himself to Abraham and Moses. This means that the Torah, the law of God, also remains one and the same. For the Torah is not simply legislation once given by God to His people; the Torah is an objective law describing the relationship between God and the human being and the spiritual patterns that govern that relationship. This means that the Torah has existed at least as long as the human being himself has existed.

Of course, Noah could not have known the Torah in the form in which it was given by God to Moses and his successors, but something could have been revealed to him by God that related to his concrete situation, which required concrete decisions. In the same way, perhaps, He revealed and still reveals something to other Gentiles who sought before and still seek today the righteous path. For, as Paul says, the Gentile has the Torah written in the heart. And there is no one but God to write it there.

If we believe, our faith becomes a kind of ark for us. "Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and the assurance of things unseen" (Heb 11:1) This remarkable thought opens the apostle's chapter in which he speaks about the faith of the patriarchs. And the first among them is Noah (Heb 11:7). It is faith, complete trust, that makes Noah leave behind all the affairs of ordinary life, affairs that are sometimes so urgent and important and so hard to break away from, and begin building the ark. What confidence in an as yet unseen flood it took to obey God's words!

At the same time, if we believe, we ourselves become an ark for our faith, in which it sails along the river of generations. And we try to become like our Most Holy Lady, the Mother of God, who became an "ark gilded by the Spirit" (Akathist to the Most Holy Mother of God, Ikos 12) for Christ.

When people in their godlessness and inner emptiness generate chaos around themselves, such that the earth can no longer bear it and catastrophe comes, what remains for the one who is able to hear the Creator? The answer is paradoxical: in the midst of the chaos of the flood, to give oneself over to the will of the unknown. Noah must not look for shelter, but enter the heart of the elements in order to overcome it: to build a ship and hope in God. This is perhaps the first biblical example of faith, when a person does not rely on himself, does not build a house or city on solid ground, but constructs his home without any visible foundation so that at the necessary moment it can leave the earth and find itself in the hands of God. Faith, in essence, is the building of a house on a firm foundation (compare Matt 7:24), firmer than which there is nothing either on earth or in heaven.

So the Lord looked at all this ugliness and came to the conclusion that He had worked in vain. He had created the world and cared for it, while people took it for granted and forgot the Creator. What next? And next... Every evil, like a stone thrown upward, returns and falls on the one who threw it. Up to a certain point the Lord held out His hands and protected people from these stones, the consequences of their sins. But then came the moment when He decided to remove His hands. Dishonest, unfair? But why, exactly? After all, we are speaking of a situation in which people reject God by all their behavior. And the Lord chooses one person, more precisely, one family. Let us venture to suppose that the one chosen was not simply someone especially pleasing to God. Most likely, Noah was simply the only one capable of hearing His voice! So God speaks with the one person who hears Him. And if enough people had been ready to listen, most likely there would have been no flood at all. But in that situation the Lord did the only thing possible: He warned of the danger the only one who was listening, and by his faith the fragile little vessel on which Noah was saving his family and the animals protected them from the water. A fairy tale, a parable, an image? Is it so important what the scale of the flooding of Mesopotamia was in unknown ancient years before our era? Something else is more important: in this story, once again, we are given the opportunity to look at how the Lord acts. And the main conclusion that can be drawn is simple: the foundation of relationship with God is readiness to listen and trust.

The salvation of humanity from the flood is presented by the author of the parable quite symbolically: people and animals are saved in the ark, on a ship built by Noah according to God's instruction. Literalists and biblical critics have broken many spears trying to prove, some the absolute historical reliability of the story, others its equally complete and absolute unreliability and the impossibility of the events described by the sacred writer.

Meanwhile, the author had no intention of describing events literally. After all, he borrowed the story of the flood itself from a myth he did not invent, as if giving the reader to understand in advance that his story has a symbolic character and should be perceived as myth, not as a chronicle. Yet myth for a person of the time of the Babylonian exile is not what myth is for us. For us today, myth is something like a fairy tale or legend, and we perceive such things as a kind of literary work in which there may be as much fiction as in the fairy tales of Charles Perrault or the Brothers Grimm.

For the ancients, however, myth was a description of reality, but a symbolic description. A symbol is not the same thing as allegory or fiction; it is not arbitrary. Symbols form a kind of language whose elements allow no more arbitrariness in their interpretation than the words of any natural language. The flood and the ship in which people are saved together with animals are a mythologem well known to the ancients, whether Egyptians, Sumerians, or Greeks.

Considered as history, such a mythologem really does look absurd. But when it is read precisely as a mythologem, as a phrase written in symbolic language, we receive meanings that are no longer absurd at all, and precisely the meanings that the sacred writer wanted to convey to us. The matter concerns the unity and wholeness of the entire human race, God's plan in which will and permission stand alongside one another. The flood is more God's permission than God's will.

God does not want the death of people, but humanity cannot go on existing in the spiritual state in which it found itself before the flood. God preserves humanity in the person of the righteous man and of the world that fits with him into his ship, built according to God's instruction. Humanity is not simply saved; it is cleansed and reborn. Or at least it receives a new chance to begin its history with a clean page, and what that page becomes depends on people.