The Fear and Dread of You: A Modern Flood Story

            Post-apocalyptic, dystopian novels are all the rage right now. One of the best-known ones is Margaret Atwood’s early book The Handmaid’s Tale. Hulu’s television series based on the novel won five Emmy’s this year, including Best Dramatic Series. But there is also Atwood’s more recent Maddaddam trilogy, Stephen King’s The Stand, Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games, and the Silo series of books by Hugh Howey. Even The Game of Thrones is in its own way dystopian and alt-apocalyptic. These books are all about the end of the world and how people do—or don’t—survive it.

What a Pleasant Story!

            The best-selling post-apocalyptic story of all time is found in the Bible. It is the story of Noah’s Ark. In the Flood story, nearly all the world’s population is killed in a global flood that makes Hurricane Harvey or Irma or Maria seem like spring showers by comparison. Only a dozen or so people, Noah’s family, survive Noah’s flood. The Flood Story is told with a minimum of detail, but it is easy to imagine what it suggests: doomed humans crying for mercy at the shut door of the Ark. Drowned bodies floating everywhere. As in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, not a bird or butterfly nor even a windswept leaf flitters across the sky. In the Bible’s post-apocalyptic Flood Story, everyone and everything dies, except for Noah and his family and a few animals.

            So, it’s interesting, don’t you think, that we rarely think of the Noah’s Flood story as a post-apocalyptic, dystopian story. In fact, we mostly remember it in the exact opposite way. The story of how animals, two by two, enter or exit the ark is found in every children’s Bible story book. And the pictures are pretty, aren’t they! So many happy bumble bees and monkeys, parrots and chameleons!

            There is no hint, in these pictures of the Flood Story, that it was a cataclysm. Given the actual story in the Bible, these pictures make about as much sense as putting party dresses and tuxes on Hurricane Irma survivors holed up in some stadium. In doing so, these pretty pictures also deny the hard practical and theological issues at the core of the Flood Story.

            At first glance, the hard issue at the core of the Flood Story might seem to be the question, “How can a loving God do such an evil thing?” Theologians call answers to this sort of question, “theodicy.” But actually, that is not the hard question the flood story tackles—at least for whoever wrote it.

            That’s because the Biblical Flood Story, and its earlier Babylonian and Akkadian versions, were written in an era, more than four thousand years ago, when people just presumed that the gods were responsible for everything that happened. Religious scholars call this stage of religious development the “Age of Enchantment.” The gods made babies and decided when old men and women would die; the gods sent plagues and droughts and rain and harvests. They might be persuaded but they were also unaccountable. In that prescientific tradition, the only way to tell the Noah’s Ark story was to make God the one who sent the flood. And while we might find that portrait of God objectionable today (I certainly do), the writers and audience of that time could not even have imagined a different scenario.

            What did surprise the first audience for this story, I think, was its emphasis on human morality and responsibility. In chapter six, before the flood, we are told that humans did evil things. They did so much evil that it stunk all the way to heaven. The earth was, quote, “filled with violence.” The world’s population was corrupted to the core and needed to be cleansed, says the writer of Genesis.

            This is a new thing in the Hebrew version of the Flood story. In the more ancient Babylonian and Akkadian versions of the same story, God destroys the world with a flood not because humans are doing evil, but because there are too many of them, and because their partying and noise making were keeping the gods awake.

            In Noah’s story, however, not only does God want more humans—we twice read that Noah’s family should be fruitful and multiply—but God wants humans to be good. This concern with morality, with human righteousness, is a near first in human literature. And in the Flood Story, it is the main, surprising point of the whole narrative. God sees that “the wickedness of humankind was great, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their heart was only evil.” So, for that reason, God decides to destroy the world. Except that, “Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord.” Noah was, quote, “a righteous man, blameless in his generation.” He did, quote, “all that God commanded him.” In Noah’s story, both the evil that most humans do, and the good that a few humans do, are the story’s central concerns. And so, along the way, we learn that doing good is what God wants from humans.

            Now, according to this myth, after the flood, and after Noah pleases God with aromatic burnt-offerings, God promises never to destroy the world’s population and flora and fauna with a flood again. God gives humans the rainbow, too, as a sign of his promise to make sure the earth is never destroyed again. But then, in chapter nine, there follow some very strange words. God says to Noah, “The fear and dread of you [humans] shall rest on every animal of the earth, and on every bird of the air, on everything that creeps on the ground, and on all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered . . .”

            As the story of the flood ends, with its focus on human responsibility to do good, God warns humans that because they are powerful, because they are moral agents who can bless or curse the world they live in, the dread of humans lies over creation. Or, to put it in plainer English, because humans are powerful, all of creation is going to be afraid of humanity. God promises that he will never destroy the earth again, but the story doesn’t say—just warns--what people might do. And creation’s plants and animals know it, and so they are afraid. The Flood Story ends with a reminder that it is up to humans to do good—or bad, for better or for worse, for all of the earth.

            Hurricanes like Harvey, Irma, and Maria are in the news. For weeks, now, headlines have been all about people on rooftops, people drowning, levees breaking, record rainfalls, islands evacuated, and more on the way. We’ve also heard President Trump say he would do a better job of rescuing people than any president ever before . . . though he said nothing about what humans have probably done to influence this run of bad weather in the first place. So floods are on our minds.

            And the central concern of the Biblical Flood Story—human agency and responsibility, human power to do good or ill to the earth—ought still be our central concern. Because, figuratively, anyway, the dread of humanity continues to rest on every animal of the earth, on every biome, on every forest and sea. And for good reason.

            We have given creation lots of reasons to dread us. We have ravaged this planet. From the collapse of the cod stock in Atlantic Canada to the poisoning of Pacific salmon stocks through the inadvertent release of farmed Atlantic Salmon on the West Coast last month; from global warming due to human greenhouse gasses that are likely a factor in the increasing number and severity of hurricanes, to the die off of tens of thousands of square miles of Western forests due to the fact that winters are no longer severe enough to kill borer beetles; from the lack of building regulations that make Houston a trap for flood damage to the excess of plastic garbage in the seas, killing all sorts of flying and swimming and creeping wildlife—no wonder the dread of us humans lies heavy on creation because we have shown, again and again, that, overall, taking care of creation is not a human priority.

            And matters will improve only if we understand one of the key themes at the heart of the story of the flood: the plight of this planet is our responsibility, and not God’s. We are this planet’s moral agents. We are the ones who can pass laws and change habits and create infrastructure, and only we can pay the price—in personal habits and taxes—to make things right, or not. We are the parents and aunts and uncles of the children and great grandchildren who will live with what we do fifty and a hundred years from now. Our lifestyles and choices about whether foreign aid should be measured in tanks and guns or schools and agricultural technology make all the difference in Sub-Saharan Africa, and make the difference for how many refugees from Africa will trek to Europe or here to escape hunger, poverty, and violence caused, in no small measure, by our economic choices, our global warming, our power politics and consumerism. 

            The Flood Story, in its historical context, wasn't concerned with theodicy. But the Flood Story,  in our era, does invite us to reflect on anthrodicy--on explanations or justifications or condemnations for the evil set loose in the world by we humans.

            I wish I could write, “don’t worry, God will never destroy the world again. All dystopian post-apocalyptic novels and movies are just fiction.” But I cannot, because the point of the Flood Story is that even if God isn’t going to destroy it all, it is actually now up to us to decide whether we will usher in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic future for our planet—or bless it and our descendants after us.