The issue raised in the OP is that God’s
judgement on his children by killing them did not resolve the matter of people
being people and wanting to express their individuality. On reflection the story of
the flood could show that the heart of humanity is actually not in favour of being governed
by a God.
The first thing to learn about the Bible is
that it is not true.
The flood account even reads like a myth. How illogical for eight people to gather samples of every species on the Earth and build a giant ship to float them. How unreasonable that God would use the rainbow as a symbol of his
promise never to flood the earth again and kill off most of its inhabitants-- how charitable of him! Especially is
this so when later religionists in the Bible promise another dose of global genocide
at Armageddon.
Folklore without the pretence of being sacred doesn’t have to make sense, what it
does do is harmonise or explain away the unexplainable.
I would however say that the flood never
existed. There is sufficient evidence from earth sciences that it never
happened, there is an unbroken record of depositional layers in
lakes, rivers, oceans and ice cores. Secondly the flood according to the Bible
occurred in historic time and there
is no written recording anywhere of this non-event.
It seems to me from evidence of folklore
including the Bible that it was associated with the great climate change
warming of the Late Upper Palaeolithic period at the end of the last Ice Age and an Ice Age is characterised as a dry desert. The consequence of the Arctic ice melt of the colder higher latitudes was the
unfamiliar experience of heavy rainfall there and everywhere else, including
areas where rain appeared never to have fallen before as mentioned in Genesis
2;5. As the ice retreated and the planet warmed up and the atmosphere became humid and the landscape became fertile like a Garden of Eden. Even the Sahara became green for many centuries.
Consequently farming was discovered as a new means
of food production, permitting a much greater population density. This brought
with it cities for the first time and political and religious leaders who used
the prevailing superstitions of gods and god-men to control the masses. The
nephilim were the same as the Greek and Roman demigod heroes, the mythical offspring
of Gods who loved humans whose stories were recounted in the reading of the night time constellations-- something which could be considered the first 'Bible'.
The hunter gatherers became fewer as farming grew and the new religious myth of
seed cultivation and harvest became the standard literary backcloth and remains much in evidence in the NT Greek.
The flood myth did not start with the Bible; they
abound in all cultures with many fantastical explanations of why it was dry and
then rainy. Myth only gives an engaging explanation, not truth as we know it. It was not a treatise on early climate change neither was Noah’s
flood a historical event. The Noah story is too preposterous for reality but it
capitalises on a historical fact of climate amelioration and uses it for moral
instruction and warning.
The
concept of scientific explanations based on verifiable evidence only go back
around four hundred years and the concept of writing truthfully for popular
consumption only goes back to the French Enlightenment at the end of the
eighteenth century.
(sorry I get carried away with lengthy explanations
but there is a lot of unpicking of myth necessary for ex JWs!)
