So what is the flood account, then?

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/benjaminthescribe/2014/02/gospel-doctrine-lesson-6-moses-819-30-genesis-65-22-71-10/

 by Ben Spackman 

Part of his article

So what is the flood account, then? To begin to answer that question, we need to know that the Genesis flood account is one of several ancient Near Eastern flood accounts, and it resembles them greatly. (This is an introductory Institute handout about these other major stories.) In fact, those resemblances, combined with German Protestant assumptions and anti-Semitic bias at the time, led to early conclusions that the Genesis flood was a simplistic rip-off of these other Mesopotamian accounts. Scholarship become much more nuanced since then, but Peter Enns pointedly asks the still relevant question.

The problem raised by these Akkadian [flood and creation] texts is whether the biblical stories are historical: how can we say logically that the biblical stories are true and the Akkadian stories are false when they both look so very much alike? (Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament, 41.)

Here again, we have to recognize that simple dichotomies like “true” and “false” fail to account for the complexity of scripture and life.

My summary position is that the Genesis account is both an adaption of and a reaction against other ancient Near Eastern flood stories, much as creation in Genesis 1 is both an Israelite adaptation and polemic reaction against other ancient Near Eastern creation accounts.Very briefly, I think there may be a historical, limited-flood kernel behind the current text, but as it currently stands in the text, the flood tradition has been pressed into use and expanded (for polemical anti-Mesopotamican purposes?) into a universal cosmological flood. It is a reverse creation, undoing Genesis 1 by erasing order and structure, and returning the world to its pre-creation watery/chaotic state (as in Gen. 1:2, the tehom or watery Deep from which everything was created.) Then the waters recede, and Noah is the new Adam in the new creation.

This is tied very closely to the Priestly creation account (Gen 1-2:4a). Note I say universal, not global. Neither the Israelites nor their neighbors conceived of the world as a globe, but a flat, relatively small land surrounded by water on all sides, with water beneath, and waters above, held back only by the firmament, which was supported by the mountains at the ends of the earth, including the mountain range of Ararat (the land of Urartu.) This is the cosmology, or view of the universe assumed and made explicit in Genesis 1, which literalists must take pains to rationalize away. The flood account envisions the ark bumping up against the mountainous sides and nearly the ceiling (firmament) of creation, as the cosmic waters fill to the brim, and then recede.  Creation and its subsequent pollution (see the article by Frymer-Kremsky below for more on this term) are thus wiped away, resulting in a new creation with Noah as the new Adam. While it is a universal or cosmological flood, it is not necessarily a historical flood.

While the manual wisely avoids nearly every historical question to focus on application, it’s inevitable that someone somewhere is going to make fundamentalist claims on this topic.Let’s briefly address a few questions of the flood, frustrated once again at how little we can really do here. (I have a pipe dream of turning my not-yet-finished-but-somehow-wildly-successful-in-my-mind book into a trilogy, with the second volume on the flood in Genesis 6-9, and the third on Genesis 2-3.)

First off, we should note the views of someone like Elder John Widtsoe, who struggled with the idea of the flood. He tentatively proposed that it simply rained everywhere simultaneously, so the world was covered in a minuscule layer of water for a millisecond. In doing so, he offered several wise observations about reading scripture.

We set up assumptions, based upon our best knowledge, but can go no further…. Many Bible accounts that trouble the inexperienced reader become clear and acceptable if the essential meaning of the story is sought out. To read the Bible fairly, it must be read as President Brigham Young suggested: ‘Do you read the scriptures, my brethren and sisters, as though you were writing them a thousand, two thousand, or five thousand years ago? Do you read them as though you stood in the place of the men who wrote them?’ (Discourses of Brigham Young, p. 197-8). This is our guide. The scriptures must be read intelligently.- Evidences and Reconciliations, around p.126.

(I would point out that our best knowledge  of this topic has increased significantly since he wrote that.)

Second, in case you’ve never seen the scientific arguments (i.e. the problems raised by reading Genesis 6-9 strictly as a history), it is flatly impossible that there was a global flood that covered the highest mountains and left no trace at all, unless God is a trickster of some kind who insisted on removing all evidence. I believe in a deity who does have the power to unleash a worldwide flood (and it would take supernatural physics to produce that much water), but not a god who would then hide all evidence of such a massive worldwide geological miracle. It should have left all kinds of evidence all over the world, but there simply isn’t any.

In any case, it’s not necessary (as some LDS have done) to attribute all arguments against a historical worldwide flood to disbelief or “the world” (guilt by association?) since the Bible itself  is not consistent on the topic.  I think two things are clear.

•  The Biblical text in Genesis 6-9 depicts a universal flood.
  • (Whether this is because it was a universal flood or because it only appeareduniversal from the perspective of the ark’s occupants is a traditional side argument. While questions about “who is the author, and what perspective do they write from?” are great questions we should ask when studying scripture, they don’t help much here. The cosmology of the text, its connections to Genesis 1, and the details make it a universal flood. This does not necessarily make it a historical flood.
• The Biblical text elsewhere knows nothing about a universal flood and seems to assume it didn’t happen.
  • Genesis 4:20-22 tell us of “Jabal; he was the ancestor of those who live in tents and have livestock.His brother’s name was Jubal; he was the ancestor of all those who play the lyre and pipe.[And] Tubal-cain, who made all kinds of bronze and iron tools.”  (NRSV) The post-flood author seems to assume that the descendants of each of these three still exist in semi-distinct groups. Weren’t they all killed off in the flood?
  • Genesis 6:4 tells us of “giants” or nephilim, pronounced nuh-fill-eeym, accent on last syllable (no relation to Nephi. The root of nephilim is NPL, the root of Nephi is NPW or NPY); “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days [before the flood]– and also afterward“! (NRSV, emphasis added.) The Nephilim are around before and after the flood text. Numbers 13:33 tells us that the Anakites are their descendants. If we’re talking about a historical, universal flood, why weren’t they all killed off? How can they have descendants? One Jewish tradition maintains that one of them held on to the ark, and survived that way.

A final summary by John Walton from his Genesis commentary.

Any [interpretive] solution must take the text seriously, yet be willing to see the text in ways that the original author and audience may have seen it. It likewise needs to take logistical problems seriously. It is a weak interpretation that has to invent all sorts of miracles that the text says nothing about in order to compensate for the logistical problems.

My final advice is, stick with the manual, and the ideas it teaches, as summarized by the Jewish Study Bible, that “the ark symbolizes the tender mercies and protective grace with which God envelopes the righteous even in the harshest circumstances.”