Genesis 6-8 - The Flood

Are you ready for a little exegetical study today? Well, neither was I, until just out of curiosity I looked up a few words and was kind of blown away!

In prepping for today's entry, I noted that there were 2 bookends to this story:

"The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time" (Genesis 6:5).

"The Lord smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: 'Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood...'" (Genesis 8:21).

Now, as good Lutherans, we have this idea fully ingrained into our psyche and theology. We begin each service of our Divine Liturgy with confessing that we are "by nature, sinful and unclean." We are fully aware of the doctrine of original sin and the impact it has on us. (Though as quick side note: not all versions include the word 'every' before 'inclination', which I find interesting in itself because the theology that follows from excluding that one word could be quite different...)

But after my research, I have a deeper understanding despair of what original sin is.

I started off by wondering what exactly the word 'inclination' means. To begin with, when I used the interlinear Bible, the King James Version actually uses the word imagination. Already, my mind was starting to spin because to have an imagination is to participate in the sheer act of developing a coherent thought... it's the process. So what God is saying that even the process of forming our thoughts of the heart is evil. Would you not say that this is stronger than just an 'inclination', or a 'thought' being evil?

Digging further, the word comes from the Hebrew word yêtser, which means 'to form' and is used in one of Isaiah's illustrations that God is the potter and we are the clay. Adding this into our equation, we end up finding that not only is the process of our thinking evil from birth; but that we value these thoughts. We think they are valuable, like the potter does his clay. Stronger language yet, wouldn't you say?

And for one final layer, yêtser is derived from the other word yâtsar, which means basically the same thing; but notice five times (out of around 50) where it is used:

"Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being" (Genesis 2:7).

"Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky..." (Genesis 2:19).

"The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land" (Psalm 95:5).

"But now, thus says the LORD, your Creator, O Jacob, And He who formed you, O Israel, 'Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name; you are Mine!'" (Isaiah 43:1).

"Yet you, Lord, are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand" (Isaiah 64:8).

Wow. So in our bookends of the reading today, God lets us know what our way should be. We should want to follow our Creator and hold him and his ways dear to our heart. God wants us to choose his ways to bring us life.

Instead, we hold steadfast to our own ways, and even let them become near and dear to us, because we believe that they will bring us life. Unfortunately, as we saw yesterday, those ways only bring us death.

But thankfully, as God promised to never again destroy the earth (Genesis 8:21-22), so he has promised that through his son, we will always have life (oh, let's go John 3:16 here :)).

Other questions to think about (and that I didn't have time or space to write about):
- If they stayed in the boat for over a year; and we always assume the animals took the space; where did they put food to last them and the animals for that whole time? (Are there any artists' depictions of that?)

- Is there something significant to a dove being used by Noah (connection to baptism?); or do you think he used them for their superior homing abilities?

- For further research, what are the similarities between this flood account and many other accounts out there? (One notable one I found was in the fate of our protagonist, compared to the fate of those in other Middle Eastern accounts...)