The picture of God in the story of Noah and the Great Flood (Gen. 6–9) offends many people. They object to the idea that a good God would intentionally destroy all living beings without distinguishing between the righteous and the wicked. For the sake of the discussion, they concede that human life was corrupt and violent. Even so, they contend, drowning the entire earth, including many innocent men, women, and children, to say nothing of all the animals, is a classic example of an indiscriminate and disproportionate response. This is the kind of thing that can get one convicted today for committing a crime against humanity.

One frequent response is that all the righteous people on the earth were safely within Noah’s ark throughout the entire deluge. Everyone else had been invited to join Noah and his family but had declined to do so, often disrespectfully. The human beings who perished outside the ark therefore had no one to blame but themselves. All the other animals that died had representatives in the ark that would quickly replenish the earth following the flood.

Beginning with three general comments, more can and should be said for those who find this response only partially helpful. First of all, our own pictures of God should be drawn from all the evidence we can handle, biblical and nonbiblical, with primary emphasis upon Scripture. Second, we should base our pictures of God on the whole of Scripture, not any one portion of it. Third, Scripture teaches that Jesus Christ is the clearest embodiment of what God is really like. Therefore, if we experience tension between the way Jesus depicted God and the way others in Scripture portrayed God, the benefit of the doubt goes to Jesus.

Another consideration is that some depictions of God in Scripture may seem troublesome from our points of view even though they may have been positive alternatives in their times and places. "Compared to what?" is always an appropriate question to ask when people assert that some picture of God is ethically inappropriate. If we don’t ask this question, we run the risk of placing unrealistic expectations upon all the generations of human beings who preceded us.

We know, for instance, that many cultures around the world treasure stories about a flood long ago that changed everything. We also know that the Gilgamesh Epic from ancient Iraq is one of the oldest written documents still in existence and that it includes a story that is similar in some ways to the one about Noah and different in others.

Discussions continue about the possible relationships between these two ancient flood stories from approximately the same region of the world. Is the story in the Gilgamesh Epic a modification of the one in Scripture? Or is the one in Scripture a modification of the one in the Gilgamesh Epic? Do they both derive from some third source? Or are they wholly unrelated? Conversations about these alternatives continue with no end in sight! It is possible to follow these exchanges and to read the Gilgamesh Epic on the Internet by using almost any of the search engines.

Regardless of how these two stories may or may not be related, it is useful to compare their alternative pictures of God because they both come from the same general part of the ancient world. It is more instructive to do this than to compare the picture of God in the story of Noah with that in the eighteenth century hymn "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling," for instance. Again, when evaluating alternative pictures of God, "Compared to what?" is always an important question.

My own view is that the picture of God in the story of Noah is ethically superior to the portrait of the gods in the Gilgamesh Epic in at least three ways. An obvious contrast is that the story of Noah depicts one true God whereas in the story of Utnapishtim, the figure who parallels Noah in the Gilgamesh Epic, we read about several gods. This is the difference between monotheism and polytheism, between the sense that we live in a cosmos that is made one by a singular creator and the contrary impression that we live in a chaos that is irreducibly at odds with itself.

Another contrast is that Noah’s God warns the inhabitants of the earth of the coming flood and provides a way for them to escape whereas in the Gilgamesh Epic only the god Ea acted similarly. Some of the other gods were so set on the complete destruction of all human life that they quarreled once they discovered that Utnapishtim and his family had survived by building a boat. Noah’s God is more attractive from a moral point of view.

A third contrast is that Noah’s God is sensitive to and affected by what happens in human experience, so much so that human corruption and violence caused God to be "sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart" (Gen. 6:6 NRSV). Most of the gods in the Gilgamesh Epic seem too preoccupied with their own ambitions and apprehensions to care.

We have, then, in the story of Noah and the Great Flood an expression of "responsive ethical monotheism." This view of God characterized the Hebrew heritage with varying degrees of clarity and power over the centuries until its full embodiment in Jesus Christ. It is not a feature of the Gilgamesh Epic. Neither is it available in most of the other flood stories of the ancient world. They should be our first points of comparison when we are seeking to understand and evaluate Noah’s God, not more recent discussions of how God relates to the universe.

Being faithful to Scripture is not merely to repeat in our time what its spokespersons said in theirs. It is to understand the positive contributions they made in their circumstances and then to make further and similarly appropriate ones in our own. Context counts!

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