Noah and the long game

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God decided to destroy mankind except for Noah and his family. God has infinite power. God could have simply vaporized his creation (all people and animals except for Noah and family) and started over in an instant. God chose a long and drawn out method of proceeding. Decades of Noah building an ark, gathering animals from all over the earth, ensuring animals would procreate, sending rain for 40 days and drowning everything, finding landfall, dispersing the animals again etc. If you believe this story is a myth then it doesn’t matter how God accomplished this as it is just a story. But if you believe all this literally happened, why do you think God chose such a complex approach instead of just getting to the end goal? There seems no point in such a step-by-step manual approach.
 
One possible reason that I can see is as a warning to the others. Giving them a last chance to change their ways.
 
What others? People on other continents? The vast majority of people alive then had no knowledge of Yahweh.
 
KevinK said:
If you believe this story is a myth then it doesn’t matter how God accomplished this as it is just a story
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When you say “just a story”, have you considered that the story is trying to explain something about the truth of God rather than provide an account of an actual historical event? If correct, that would still answer your question. What i’m saying is, the logic matters whether or not it’s literally true. The writer wanted to convey something to the reader:
 
Elf01 said:
One possible reason that I can see is as a warning to the others. Giving them a last chance to change their ways.
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(“Others” = the other people living in the area that was destroyed)

In addition to the above, @KevinK, it could also be that God likes to use/work with people and nature to in carrying out His tasks. It would be fitting to believe that disaster was eminent, and God simply gave a warning to Noah, having decided not to step in to stop the disaster due to the evil of the people-at-large. Perhaps then, one might wonder why God didn’t just build the ark for Noah. And then it would be fitting to believe that Noah needed the exercise in patience and long-suffering and learning to trust God no matter how ridiculous a task may have seemed.

Is there any reason we should have expected God to do the work for Noah? Is there a reason that God should not have chosen a complex approach, or a reason He should not have let nature takes its course (yet still give Noah a head’s-up)? Just because you and I don’t see the point of a step-by-step approach, doesn’t mean there isn’t a point. Afterall, no one pretends to understand all there is to understand about an infinite God.
 
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A literal interpretation could have a small localized human population. The migration of the animals at least should have been seen as strange
 
Also the early rains (before there was enough to drown, but enough to flood) would in itself be a warning.
 
By using the term “area that was destroyed” you are asserting a localized flood? If that is the case why not just have Noah and family migrate away from the localized flood and why the need to gather worldwide animals unaffected by a local flood?
 
ChunkMonk said:
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KevinK:
The vast majority of people alive then had no knowledge of Yahweh.
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Why do you come to that conclusion?
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LOL! How do you not?!
Hint: China, India, Japan. Egypt, Australian aborigines, African tribes, American indigenous… oh, and European Celts/Norse/Greek/Roman…
 
Noah’s ark precedes the Greeks, the Romans, the Norse, and the Celts; and it could theoretically precede the migrations into China, India, Australia, and the Americas. Or even if it didn’t, there is still no indication that anyone pre-Flood was unaware of God’s existence, regardless of where they lived.
 
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ChunkMonk said:
Noah’s ark precedes the Greeks, the Romans, the Norse, and the Celts; and it could theoretically precede the migrations into China, India, Australia, and the Americas. Or even if it didn’t, there is still no indication that anyone pre-Flood was unaware of God’s existence, regardless of where they lived.
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Let’s just take one example… because floods happen everywhere…
You’d think that the Chinese would know about Yahweh and Noah, so why are those two remarkably absent from their flood myth?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_(China)
 
What’s the point here? That the Flood didn’t happen because the ancient Chineae myths don’t mention Noah, or that the Chinese who were drowned must not have known God because the later descendents of Noah who resettled China afterwards didn’t mention Noah?

If you’re trying to make the argument that the Flood didn’t happen, then we’d have to have a completely different discussion. At that point ‘whether the pre-Flood people knew about God’ is irrelevant because there was no pre-Flood or post-Flood people.
 
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First off, there are flood narratives all over the world, and they all seem to think that, at one point, every human in the world died except one man, one woman, one man and his wife, or one man and his immediate family. Given the amount of “bottleneck” events in the human genome, it’s very likely that some kind of traumatic flood did happen at some point. And it must have been a doozy for all humanity to still (sorta-kinda) remember it.

As to why it happened, the Bible is pretty clear on that. The Bible writer was obviously concerned to counter the neighboring Middle Eastern peoples’ creation and flood narratives, which said that the gods had just created humans as useful slaves; they got sick of them being yucky and mortal and wanted them dead, which was the reason for making a flood.

According to the Epic of Gilgamesh, all the gods were sworn to secrecy, but one of the gods, Ea, told Ut-Napishtim, the king of Shuppurak. (Well, technically he told the walls of the king’s house, thus not breaking his oath.)

It also said that Ut-Napishtim, the man who survived, was deliberately abandoned his people to die, after getting them to build his boat for him; he pretended that he was just going on religious retreat. The fury of the flood ended after twelve days, because the gods were afraid of the fury of the storm and flood they had raised. At that point, all human beings had not just died, but turned back into clay. Ut-Napishtim sacrificed to the gods, reminding them that without slaves, there was no meat or incense smell for them to eat. Enlil, the boss god, shows up and is enraged that any living thing escaped annihilation, but the other gods object. (And Ea claims that he sent a dream to Ut-Napishtim, and that that was totally not oathbreaking.)

At this point in the story, Enlil turns Ut-Napishtim and his wife into gods, so that there still won’t be any humans left on earth… and that’s as far as we know the story, because we know the story from its recap in the Epic of Gilgamesh, when Gilgamesh asks Ut-Napishtim how he can live forever too.
 
The story of Noah is all about countering this. Humans were not created as slaves. The flood came as a punishment, not as a whim. God chose a good man and his family to survive, and He promised that humanity would never come to such a pass in the future. God also didn’t hate all living things; He planned for the animals and plants to survive. (And the wicked people just died; they didn’t turn back into clay mush.)

The Bible’s Flood narrative is also about God destroying the “nephelim” and their arts and sciences, most of which are no-nos to good Jewish people or are misused by pagans. This countered the Middle Eastern story that all arts and sciences had been taught to humans by the “seven sages” and a fish god, all of whom were some kind of divine beings or divine servants. The seven sages had kids with human women, and the kids supposedly had special powers. (Many of which were pretty nasty and vampiric.) Various Middle Eastern tribes claimed to be descended from these “seven sages,” and things like astrology and magic were supposed to come from them. They were popular deities with big festivals.

Obviously, from a Jewish point of view, this was a horrifying story about demons and their possessed dupes. So if everybody else in the world but Noah and his family was a demon-worshipping witchcraft-using creep, and some with delusions of godhood…

The world was supposed to be a Temple of God. Humans existed to be priests: to guard and care for the world, tame the animals and plants, and worship God. If almost all humans were polluting the world with demonic filth, misusing the plants and animals, and worshipping demons even though they were enemies of God, humans were barely human anymore. A little prehistoric smiting might be in order, just to clear the ground for the humans who were trying to be human, and for the animals and plants to be able to live better.

The story also said that anybody around at the time of writing, who was claiming to be a part-god who was descended from the “seven sages”, was gravely mistaken – because everybody living was descended from Noah, just like the Jewish people. Just like the story of Adam and Eve, it teaches the oneness of humanity. Nobody is intrinsically better or more godlike than anybody else.

Hope this helped a little.
 
The point is that pre-flood people - even allowing the unlikely scenario where such a worldwide flood did happen - would for the most part be unaware of Yahweh.
Yahweh appears in the Middle-East as the consort of Asherah. Knowledge of Yahweh spreads only north/westward, becoming the only god in the heavens in the process, ending in present-day Israel and then Christianity then takes over.
There is no archaeological record of anything similar to Yahweh anywhere besides the Middle-East. Nothing in Europe, nothing in India, nothing in China, nothing in Australia, nothing in America.

If you want to get real, though… There is also no evidence of a single worldwide flood event.
Humans have always tended to settle near water, for obvious reasons. And huge floods do happen a little all over the place, on occasion. So it makes perfect sense for localized floods to be viewed by the people who live there as worldwide events - their world often extends no further than 10 or 20 miles. Nomadic people may have a more extensive view of the world, but their range is still relatively limited.

I can understand Noah’s flood to be a retelling of the old Epic of Gilgamesh with different characters, or it’s a whole new tale based on a new flood event, but still with mythological elements thrown in, just like the flood myth from China I linked to earlier, because why not? It’s not like people understood climatology at the time.
 
The whole understanding of the Bible is that the Jewish people were the ones who remembered history correctly, because God helped them remember and filled them in on what they didn’t remember. Other people were ripping off their stories, not the other way around.

I wouldn’t discount this too quickly. The Shawnee people were the only ones who had stories of walking east into America over a land bridge, instead of the usual “island created on the back of a turtle,” “falling out of the sky,” and “coming up out of the ground” narratives of the various American tribes. Boy, were the Shawnee weird for thinking they weren’t originally from here! But they turned out to have remembered better than the rest.

As for worldwide floods – obviously, if you’re dealing with an omnipotent God, it’s difficult to say whether you’d see evidence. Was it even a physical flood, or was it just a lot of metaphysical smiting? Think about neutron bombs – a weapon with enough radioactivity to kill but of a kind that goes away quickly, and that leaves the buildings and fields standing and ready for use. Heck, you wouldn’t necessarily need to flood most of the world with water. You could do any amount of freaky stuff with other substances and just stick water on top, or you could use exact control of every molecule of water to keep stuff from being damaged that you want to keep.

If I can think of strange sci-fi scenarios, I’m pretty sure that God can think and carry out even weirder ones.

But if you have this sort of stuff happen early enough in human history, “the world” wouldn’t have to be a very large place. When the Bible says “the earth,” it usually is referring to “the Land” – the land of Israel, almost always. So there is a certain amount of ambiguity.

So like I say… given an omnipotent, omniscient God Who created the universe and sustains it, I’m not going to worry about one planet being flooded for 150 days. People have no problem, theoretically, conceiving of some kind of alien super-technology that destroys whole planets, and yet they boggle at a little flood.
 
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OP, you make the assumption that God operates in ways that would seem more logical to US.
He doesn’t have to do things the easier way, the shorter way, the most efficient way to accomplish His goal.
His goal is to instruct and lead the people. The end result is the COVENANT with the people of God.
It was done this way for His purpose. Which doesn’t necessarily have to “make sense” to people of the 21st century because the covenant is the important thing. Our job, post event, is to comprehend it in terms of salvation history. The detail that is important is there is that God will never abandon us or cause catastrophe to envelop us. Trust is built gradually, and for people of that time and place such things are very significant, as many totally feared God.
 
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Hehe… The SciFi planet destroying weapon requires something called “suspension of disbelief”.
Reality can have none of that.

I can perform suspension of disbelief and accept a god destroying all life on the surface of the world, with the exception of a chosen family… but it is far easier to believe that independent myths were created out of the oral retelling of the story of some localized flood.
And the myth of Noah was the local one that the Hebrews took for their own.
 
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