Sunday Edition: Noah's Flood

Sunday Disclaimer

Our Sunday home learning is religion/morality oriented. As we are Mormon, the lessons will reflect a Mormon approach. Within Mormonism there is also room for theological variation, and what is taught here represents what we feel is true.

Lesson

The Bible tells the story of Noah's flood, where God decides to destroy the world by flooding it because of the wickedness of its inhabitants. There is a version of this story in many cultures across the world, leading some to speculate that the idea of a flood story might be in our brains naturally, while some people think that it might be based on some real flood that happened to our ancestors long ago. However, there's strong scientific evidence against some of the details of the story: there was no flood that covered everything in the world and destroyed all life just a few thousand years ago. Furthermore, the animal species we see today were not dramatically reduced to just two per species. We would have detected such a reduction genetically, they would probably have not been able to start a whole new group with just two because of problems that come with siblings marrying siblings and cousins marrying cousins, and all the species we have today would not have come close to fitting on the boat. God could have made all these things happen and intentionally changed the evidence in our genes and the geological layers, but then that would be a God that intentionally tries to trick us. He expects us to use our minds.

Like the creation story, the flood story has several different versions in the one story in the Bible, leading some researchers to believe that it was a combination of several stories combined together. However, some of the stories are different in regards to how long the flood lasted and how many animals were taken on board. This shows that the people putting it together didn't care about the differences since they allowed both versions to stand side by side.

Throughout the Bible there are things that happen that people see as symbols for something else. Many Christians have seen Noah's flood as being symbolic of a baptism of the entire earth. Later, when God introduces the gift of the Holy Ghost (which we receive after baptism) he refers to it as a "baptism by fire," many Christians believe that the second destruction of the earth will come by fire, in a way baptizing it by fire like it was previously baptized by water. Also, Christ's baptism was represented by a dove, as was the baptism of the earth.

In one of the Noah's flood stories, he sent out a dove to look for dry land, and it returned with an olive branch. The dove is symbolic of a lot of things like peace and holy Ghost, and its use here may be symbolic as well.

After Noah landed he had three sons, Ham, Shem, and Japheth; some early people thought that these three sons went on to populate the entire earth, and that different races came from these different sons; however, we know that race is much more complicated. For example, a lot of black people are more closely related to white people than they are to other black people.

Similarly, some people think that the Tower of Babel story, where God changes everyone's languages, is the reason why people speak different languages, but now we know that linguistic change happens across thousands and thousands of years, and didn't happen all at once.

Future

When the children are older I want to show them the Noah, the excellent Darren Aronofsky film.

Reading for Parents

Origins of the World's Mythologies by Witzel. Unlike some comparative mythology works, this one is solidly academic and tries to limit the speculation. It makes a compelling case that the similarities seen in the world's mythologies (most prominently exemplified by the ubiquitous flood story) are derived from a common proto-culture and religion we had as a species coming out of Africa.