Flood Limits and Motifs: Genesis 6:3 & the ANE - Episode 169

Carey Griffel: Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel, and today I hope we're gonna have a bit of a fun episode. We're gonna do a crossover between what I've been talking about lately about oral tradition and flood narratives and all of those things, and we're gonna dive right back into the biblical flood as well.

[00:00:35] I have not yet talked about Genesis six verse three, and we're gonna do that today . But I have a few things I'm gonna talk about to lead up to that. We're gonna have some fun time talking about flood parallels in the ancient Near East.

[00:00:52] So let's look at Genesis six verse three. In the ESV, Genesis six, verse three says, quote, "Then the Lord said, My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh. His days shall be 120 years." End quote.

[00:01:14] There's a lot of questions here. What Spirit are we talking about? Is this the Holy Spirit? What does it mean that God's spirit is abiding in man? Is this like the indwelling of the Holy Spirit that we get in the New Testament? And what is this, 120 years business?

[00:01:34] This verse sits right at the doorway into the flood story. And flood stories all over the ancient world often function like a hinge or a boundary point in time. They are not just describing destruction. They explain why the world is the way it is after the flood. And there's limitations. There's limitations on violence, human life, on how long God will tolerate a world bent on self-destruction.

[00:02:04] But in every different story for the flood, we get different meanings within these different stories. So we're gonna talk a little bit about that today and what it means to have these limiting factors before the flood and after the flood. And again, hopefully we'll get into those interpretive options for Genesis six verse three. What exactly is this limiting factor? Is it a limiting factor in time? Is it a limiting factor on human life, or what is it really?

[00:02:39] But before we get into that, let's talk about different common similarities and motifs, specifically within ancient Near Eastern flood myths. Now, I'm gonna go a little bit fast through these, or maybe we'll slow down for a few of them, because we've talked about the different floods in the ancient Near East before.

[00:03:00] A lot of us are familiar with a lot of the similarities and the differences and those matter. But today I wanna talk about a few of these motifs that show up in each one. we're just gonna be limiting it to the ancient Near Eastern flood stories, and there's a few of them, and they don't all have the same exact elements, but most of them have the basics.

[00:03:25] The first motif is very obvious. This is divine decision and judgment of some sort. There is something wrong with the world and there is going to be a reset that is going to happen within the flood. In many of the ancient Near Eastern stories, this is explained explicitly. In the story of Atrahasis, the gods decide on various successive measures against humans because humans have simply become unbearable to the gods. So this is noise and overpopulation, and this leads to things like plagues, famine, and eventually a flood.

[00:04:09] So in Atrahasis, there's a series of things that the gods are doing in order to try to limit humans and their unbearable interaction with the gods. In the epic of Gilgamesh, we have Utnapishtim who frames the flood as a secret of the gods, and there is a divine council decision that drives the deluge.

[00:04:33] And then we have the Eridu Genesis and the Sumerian King list. They don't really have exactly the same details, but they're pretty similar. Here we have the storm and the flood that sweep over the land for seven days and seven nights. So in each of these stories, as well as, of course, the biblical story, we have a shared divine judgment plot, but they don't have the same shared moral reasoning.

[00:05:03] The rationale in Genesis, which is violence and corruption, is not the same as the pagan gods are just fed up with humanity. But in each of these stories, there is a cosmic explanation for why the world is different after the flood than it was before the flood.

[00:05:22] So not only do we have this cosmic act, but it shows who is in charge. Is it a single God? Is it a pantheon of gods? Is it a council? Do we have the decision being made secretly so that men don't know what's going on and the secret is revealed to the one who's going to be saved through the flood? Or is it a public judgment or what do we have going on here?

[00:05:50] Let's dig a little bit into the different meanings that these different flood stories seem to have. In Atrahasi s, the problem is defined as humans being unbearable to the gods and the judgment is less moral verdict and more, we're just really annoyed with these guys, and we want them to stop annoying us. The gods need to get relief. So from the perspective of the gods, the judgment is very pragmatic, and it's not a moral reaction to violence and evil in humanity.

[00:06:25] In Gilgamesh, the problem is defined as a divine decision that is kept secret and it's within a divine council. And so we're not quite fully sure exactly how and why they're deciding what they're deciding, but clearly the gods are in charge and they are in authority, and they can just choose to wipe out humanity. The decision is not transparent and it's not morally argued towards humans.

[00:06:55] In the Eridu tradition, the surviving text is pretty short. It doesn't spend a whole lot of time explaining why. And so the meaning of the judgment is maybe a little bit more along the lines of, well, this is just what happened in that mythic past and we're not really moralizing the story so much here.

[00:07:16] But it's really important to understand the why of the flood in these stories, because that is where the theology lives in them.

[00:07:24] In Atrahasis, different gods actually want different outcomes, and so there is a definite sense of conflict within the pantheon. The decision is escalated through measures and one god can subvert another god. It is Ea who leaks the information, and thus there is survival of the human race because of that. The gods are powerful. They're not morally unified. They're just managing a problem within their system.

[00:07:55] In Gilgamesh, it's very secretive, very hierarchical, and the judgment reflects divine sovereignty. But it's not really chiefly interested in divine justice. It is more interested in the question of human mortality. That is kind of the focus in it.

[00:08:14] In the Eridu epic, the divine realm is encountered via light and worship. So after human survival, Utu appears, the boat is opened, sacrifice happens. And so judgment is kind of a backdrop here. But the narrative moves very quickly and it's very condensed and it restores divine human relations through ritual response very quickly through the story. This is really more focused on kingly authority because it does align with the story with the Sumerian King list. So the idea here is probably the legitimacy of the kings.

[00:08:56] Now, the divine decision in the flood stories can... not always, but it can provide a cosmic explanation for the suffering and the world that we live in today. I mean, it does set that up in every single one of the stories. It's just some stories are focused a little bit more in certain areas. And again, the Sumerian King List really doesn't give any explanation at all. But they do explain some things as to why we're dealing with the things that we do. And that is the case for the broader ancient Near Eastern stories as well as in Genesis.

[00:09:35] So here's a couple of questions for when we're approaching various types of flood stories. What do the gods think the problem is? Is it human wickedness? Is it human noise, or is it just something else entirely? Is the flood framed as moral justice or simply divine management? And then what does the story think needs to happen after the flood so that it doesn't happen again? Or does that remain a present danger?

[00:10:07] The next motif we're gonna talk about is the motif of the warned survivor. There is a chosen figure who gets advanced warning and instructions. In Atrahasis, Ea or Enki warns Atrahasis, and gives boat instructions. Although there are different versions and they do differ in details.

[00:10:30] In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Utnapishtim is warned by Ea, told to build a boat, and it's kind of like a privileged disclosure. Ea likes Utnapishtim, so he tells him how to survive the flood.

[00:10:46] In the Eridu epic, Ziasudra survives in a huge boat. Then he opens it to the sun god, Utu, after the storm period.

[00:10:57] The warning implies that the flood is not random, that it has a purpose. That it's an intentional act and not just chaos. And it allows a new world to begin with some continuity to the old world, with the humans, with the idea of worship, with the gods setting up particular kings.

[00:11:18] But each story will flavor that a little bit differently. In Atrahasis, there's a secrecy evading warning, and it turns that decree into something that is survivable. In Gilgamesh, again, there is a secret of the gods being leaked to the human. And what we have with the story with the Ziasudra is that there is an emphasis on survival and worship.

[00:11:42] And what's going on here with the leak of the information reveals some of the divine politics behind the worldview of the story. In Atrahasis and Gilgamesh, it sidesteps an oath of secrecy that the gods took. And so this signals a world where gods disagree. Decisions are made in coun something, then somebody else disagrees, they're gonna have to circumvent it secretly. But they can undermine each other's plans via certain cleverness and other things going on, right.

[00:12:18] And in each of the stories, the warned survivor becomes a boundary figure between worlds. In Gilgamesh, Utnapishtim is not only saved, but he becomes the exceptional human afterwards. He is granted a god-like status because he is the one human amongst any other human who is immortal, and he lives in a very distant place. They have to travel across the ocean to go see him and try to find the secret of immortality. And he ends up telling them, well, sorry, I am immortal because I survived the flood and I was granted the status, but nobody else is gonna ever be like me.

[00:13:01] So in Gilgamesh, the warning is a hinge point for the whole Epic's main theme, which is mortality and access to life. So the flood judgment isn't really about morality. It's about a description as to why humans die and how we are just gonna have to deal with that fact.

[00:13:20] In the story with a Ziasudra, it ends with him in a posture of worship. And so the function here is to create and reestablish divine human order through that ritualistic worship response.

[00:13:35] But in Atrahasis, the warning actually creates a problem between the gods that they have to resolve afterwards. And so in this story, the limiting factor isn't directly within the flood itself, but it happens as a result of humans surviving the flood.

[00:13:53] So in any case, the survivor isn't just a lucky guy. He's a hinge character that the new world and the new order and the new explanation for things is going to really seat their descriptions on. This is why things are the way they are. Each of these stories does legitimize post flood worship and kingship and order. There is something that is authorized. But of course in Genesis, the warning isn't a secretive leak from a divided pantheon. It is the outworking of a morally grounded divine decision and covenant trajectory.

[00:14:34] Third motif to talk about today is the boat or the ark as preservation technology. Now this really seems super obvious, doesn't it? You have a flood, people are gonna survive how? They're gonna survive in a boat. So shared motif of a boat is, as I've described previously, a really cheap detail. It's not gonna give us a whole lot of traction as to flood similarities, right?

[00:15:05] But there are a few interesting points to notice in the differences in the boat and ark motif in these different stories. In particular, are we given instructions on how to build the boat by the deity? Do we have birds to test the waters? And is the boat functioning as a sacred space, or is the boat just kind of a convenient passageway for the human and it really doesn't have anything to do with temples and sacred space? Again, the boat in the flood story proves almost nothing by itself. But the question is gonna be what the boat means inside the worldview.

[00:15:47] Is it a preservation container versus a ship? Because there's a difference here. If the ark is a preservation container rather than a ship, the difference here is that it doesn't really necessarily need to be described in a seaworthy fashion. They don't have to be picturing it as a ship, but rather it could just be a sealed survival capsule of some sort and its point is to keep life alive and not really to travel skillfully through the water.

[00:16:21] In Genesis, the term here is used only for Noah's Ark and Moses' basket, and both are essentially floating life containers more than they are ships. And I would argue that the ark in Genesis is meant to be seen as sacred space, but we'll talk about that in another episode.

[00:16:41] In the story with Ziasudra, it is repeatedly the huge boat and it is rocked by a storm. He drills an opening and light enters. So again, we've got a container that the human is surviving in, but it doesn't really seem to be a sacred space because he has to have the deity enter it through the light that he drills particularly at the end.

[00:17:07] The boat in Gilgamesh is arguably more ship like in presentation, but still functions primarily as the means of life preservation rather than some sort of heroic seamanship. When we go to study other flood myths, we'll see different descriptions of the boat and so that will be interesting for later.

[00:17:29] I would suggest that Genesis really pushes the idea of the life container really hard with its emphasis on compartments and sealing. And I guess I would say that I kind of think the text is nudging us to picture a life box instead of a ship. Like if it's describing a seaworthy ship vessel, we got some problems in the description, but again, we'll talk about that in another episode.

[00:17:57] But how much is the boat a pocket of order, like a mini world where life is protected and seen as sacred. In Genesis, we have explicit compartments and ordered loading of living creatures. In Atrahasis and Gilgamesh, we have the preservation of life in general, but the boat is less explicitly ordered creation and kinda feels more like an escape hatch from a divine decision. Right? Because if we have the secretive thing going on, then it's less like a temple that is open to worship and more like a, we're gonna hide you away from prying eyes so that you survive this flood. So that the other gods don't still kill you through the flood.

[00:18:48] I think in Genesis, obviously we have theological meaning here. God preserves creation and moves toward covenant stability, whereas in Gilgamesh and Atrahasis, it's a little bit more pragmatic. The boat keeps something from being wiped out totally, and that includes being wiped out within divine politics. So it's a little bit more hidden and secretive.

[00:19:13] Like I would say that in Genesis, the ark is not just a lifeboat, it is the lifeboat. It is a little Eden- ark of survival in the middle of the de creation narrative.

[00:19:27] And so the boat functioning as either an obedience test with the instructions or a covenant pathway is pretty strong in Genesis. The boat functions as a moral instrument because it's built by obedience and it becomes the path through judgment toward a new beginning. And that matters because of the way we can track this theme through Scripture into things like baptism.

[00:19:57] So it's kind of a big deal. If the ark is connected to sacred space and salvation, that matters, right? Like Noah builds it according to divine command. And so the ark embodies faithful obedience and becomes a vehicle of covenant fidelity. Again, in Gilgamesh, the boat is centered more on secret divine council survival.

[00:20:23] If it is functioning as sacred space, then it is that liminal space. And in every story we kind of have that because inside is life and outside is death, and the boat is separating those two realms. But again, there's differences because with Ziasudra, he has to make the divine light enter by drilling a hole. It's very explicit. In Genesis, there is divine governance over the whole thing. And in Gilgamesh, well, it kind of emphasizes that access is rare and exceptional. Like Utnapishtim does get that access. And he does get immortality, but he is living beyond ordinary humanity. This is not a normal thing.

[00:21:11] And so in each of these stories, the boat is a threshold, but it means something different. And it means something different according to how God or the gods is interacting with humanity. How do they see humanity?

[00:21:26] A point that is unique to Atrahasis is that the boat is part of a larger human management problem, where the gods are trying different solutions. And then after they try the solutions, then the policies follow after that, whether it worked or it didn't. So in Atrahasis, the flood functions within a sequence of divine measures that respond to a human problem, and it's after the flood that the policies of limitations appear. That's very different from these other stories.

[00:22:01] And this might also indicate a very crucial difference in the views of justice and judgment. In Genesis, justice and judgment have two parts to them. We have mercy as well as retribution. That's not quite the orientation we have in these other flood stories, though, because they don't have a covenant pathway. They are more "escape clause." And they're not really all that concerned with divine justice to begin with. It's a little bit more random and haphazard, isn't it?

[00:22:38] So who knew that as something as simple as the boat in a flood story could have so much wrapped up inside of it? We have the same technology, but different theology.

[00:22:52] Okay, so let's move on to motif number four. This is the preservation of seed and animals and repopulation. Now, the whole point of a flood tradition is that there is some level of continuity from before and after. It's not just survival but it's restarting and reorganizing the entire world.

[00:23:13] In Atrahasis, this is often summarized as loading the animals and preserving life, though again, the details can vary by the different version we're looking at. In the epic of Gilgamesh Utnapishtim preserves life and later makes a sacrifice. And the gods are going to respond very strongly to the offering. They gather around it like flies.

[00:23:38] In the the gods give Ziusudra breath eternal for preserving the animals and the seed of mankind. But the whole idea of preserving seed will answer the big narrative problem of if the world is reset, then how is life going to continue? The flood is never just total annihilation, but it preserves a future with a remnant.

[00:24:04] A lot of this is very similar in these different stories, but in Genesis, it ties the seed and the family line to that covenant trajectory. So it's history continuing through a particular line, not just whatever human keeps existing.

[00:24:21] In the ancient Near Eastern texts, broadly, many Mesopotamian origin narratives assume humans exist to support the gods. They give them food, they provide them homes, like temples. They work for them. And so preserving the seed is going to preserve the world's functioning as well as the cosmic functioning.

[00:24:42] In Atrahasis specifically, humans continue, but gods adjust the system to prevent overload, and they do that after the fact, not before. But of course in Genesis, the purpose of humanity is not to feed the gods, but we are image bearers with a vocation. So seed preservation is the preservation of that calling and that vocation. It's not just a workforce for the gods, but we are meant to work as vice regents of God in ordering his creation.

[00:25:15] So this is a different thing. Are we looking at earthly creation, or are we looking at the divine economy and preservation of the divine? Those are two very different trajectories. And they're different because it shows a different emphasis on the meaning of being human.

[00:25:35] In the pagan narratives, the gods are going to save somebody special or they're gonna save the king. And it's not really that they have exactly humanity in general that they're concerned about. It is their authority figure that they're more concerned about.

[00:25:53] Now in relation to our Genesis six, verse three passage, this is part of the limiting factors here. In Atrahasis, humans are preserved. Post flood controls are going to limit reproduction and population.

[00:26:10] In Genesis, the conversation about limiting appears before the flood. And so the later post flood world emphasizes moral boundaries and accountability, not reproductive bureaucracy, where God is really interested in limiting human reproduction. In fact, he doesn't want to limit human reproduction.

[00:26:33] But there is that 120 years bit. Is he limiting people's ages? That is one of the options we have here, but I'll save that for a little bit. But anyway, in Atrahasis, we have the preservation of seed, but it is controlled and limited. And in Genesis, there is the preservation of seed, but it leads to covenant and moral order. It is not for the sake of limiting humanity itself.

[00:27:05] If the bit about the 120 years does anything to limit humanity, it is to limit the ages so that individuals can sin less because they have less time to sin, and that is one of the options we have.

[00:27:22] Here's a few questions that are kind of interesting here. What problem does the preservation of seed solve that mere survival isn't solving? Second question, does this story preserve humanity because humans are valuable or because humans are useful? Third question, after the flood is the new world stabilized by policy, by sacrifice, or by covenant?

[00:27:52] Okay, let's talk about the fifth motif I have in my list, which is the birds and the testing of the waters. Now, this is going to deserve its own whole episode, so don't worry. I will get into that later, but I did want to bring it up here because of these really interesting differences.

[00:28:12] Gilgamesh has that famous sequence of releasing the birds, which is commonly the dove, the swallow, and the raven. Again, there's different translations, there's different versions. Now, the bird motifs can travel in a cultural way, and we aren't going to infer dependence from a single share detail, and we do have to realize there's different versions. So we should be really quite careful in trying to hang too much on this here.

[00:28:43] But we do have a really strong parallel between Genesis and Gilgamesh here. We don't have any birds in the story of Atrahasis, and we don't have any originally in the story with Ziasudra, but we do have some in the later retellings of that story. And that might mean that it was there originally, but it might mean that they're doing some conflation as well. So we're just gonna go ahead and stick with Genesis and Gilgamesh for now here.

[00:29:13] And what do these different meanings of the birds track here in these different stories? The questions are gonna be what do the birds do in the plot? What is their function? And what can we infer on what the birds mean? What is their symbolic or theological weight? And how do those meanings shift from story to story?

[00:29:34] Okay, so here's one option. The birds are reconnaissance technology. They're a practical way to test whether there's land or food, or whether the boat can land somewhere.

[00:29:47] Again, in Gilgamesh, we can have the dove, then the swallow, and the raven. The dove and the swallow return because there's no perching place. The raven doesn't return and it's described as eating and circling. And that does signal that there's conditions that can sustain that bird. But a raven can also be feasting on corpses, right? So that could be a little bit of this meaning here.

[00:30:15] In Genesis, the dove is explicitly sent to see whether the waters had abated. That's described explicitly, and there is the sequence where there is progressive information. We have no rest. We have the olive leaf, and then the bird doesn't return.

[00:30:32] In later retellings of flood stories, birds are released three times, and the second return has muddy feet, which functions like a data point that land has emerged. So the emphasis there is on the emergence of land, but it's muddy land, so it's just barely emerged.

[00:30:52] Okay, so in Gilgamesh, the reconnaissance yields basically one decisive signal with the raven. And in Genesis, it becomes a staged narrative of restoration, especially with the dove. I'm just pointing out these differences here.

[00:31:10] Now, birds are also a standard mariner motif. It's a recognized ancient storytelling trope, which is why I say that even though a flood story could have birds in it, and that seems super unique, well, it doesn't really have to be that unique when we have a whole lot of stories that are set on water and they include birds.

[00:31:33] It's a conventional scene the audience is gonna recognize in a lot of ways. It's not just in the global flood stories where a ship or a boat is going to send a bird to locate land.

[00:31:46] Now what about this whole idea of birds and resting? The decisive question really isn't If there is land. The question is, is there a place of rest? And again, that could be theologically loaded. In Genesis, it explicitly says that the dove found no resting place. No perch. And the story turns on the transition from no rest to a sign of life to a new world that can sustain life. And that progression is part of the theological import of the story.

[00:32:22] In the epic of Gilgamesh, it also has the no perching place language for the dove and the swallow. The raven's behavior, however, indicates the opposite. And there are conditions, but the raven isn't really seen to rest. He circles around.

[00:32:40] And so in Genesis, rest becomes part of the theological arc of the story. The movement from watery chaos toward habital order and rest in God. But in Gilgamesh, the whole idea seems to be that we really just need a place to land. Maybe that's reading too much into it, but when we have so much emphasis on rest in Genesis, I think it's pretty warranted, especially when the whole epic of Gilgamesh is a little bit more inclined to the narrative of immortality.

[00:33:15] Now, I would be remiss if I didn't mention birds as symbols of death and life here. The raven versus the dove. This is a little bit speculative, and scholars will disagree here, especially when we're trying to hit on early interpretation and early meaning. But in Genesis, we have the raven goes out, he moves back and forth. The dove gives the clearer life- is- returning signals. And so there is potential difference here in what the raven and the dove is indicating.

[00:33:50] In Gilgamesh, the raven is explicitly depicted as eating and not returning. So he's kind of seen as a scavenger that can survive but less emphasis on the life here.

[00:34:03] Now we could again have this idea of raven and unclean and the association with death here, with the association of dove and the Spirit and clean and all of that. Again, we need to be really careful with imposing later ideas on earlier ones. Is that actually an early interpretive move?

[00:34:26] But birds are also the creation reboot indicator, as we've talked about. And they are timing devices, as well, because we have repeated sendings, we have waiting intervals. In Gilgamesh, it's not really quite that way. We don't have the waiting rhythm and it's much more compressed.

[00:34:47] Okay, the sixth motif we're gonna talk about is the post flood sacrifice and the divine response after the flood. So the survivor survives. He offers sacrifice, and there is a reaction within the divine realm. In Gilgamesh, after Utnapishtim sacrifices, there is a famous line where the gods gather like flies around the offering. And Enlil is angry that someone survived and he has to be appeased. But even though he's angry, Utnapishtim and his wife are still granted an elevated status of immortality.

[00:35:27] I've mentioned how after Utu appears, Z and he offers innumerable sheep.

[00:35:35] And of course we have sacrifice after the flood in Genesis. and there's a pretty obvious theological difference here. Genesis, we have the sacrificial offering in covenantal and relational terms. And in Gilgamesh, it's like the gods need their food and they've been starved after the flood.

[00:35:55] Okay, there's more I could say about that, but let's go ahead to motif number seven. The flood as a boundary marker between before and after. This is kind of my key idea here, where the flood is marking a dividing line between mythical prehistory and later on is how we are today. The world before is not the world after.

[00:36:19] In the Sumerian King list, there is a flood mentioned, and it provides this historical and mythic hinge for how the world is ordered in kings, right? So it's a description of different epics. And there's a reason why different epics are, well, different. The pre-flood world belongs to a qualitatively different era. The post-flood world becomes the recognizable human order that we see today.

[00:36:48] And in the Sumerian kingship list, kingship is treated as a transferable, stable institution. Again, the flood and the gods are authorizing this. They're creating and maintaining the political order that people are currently seeing in their culture. The Sumerian King list expresses this via the lengths of different reigns. The pre-flood era has reigns in the tens of thousands of years, but after the flood, those reigns shrink. They're still large at first, but they trend toward a normal timeline. And that connects pretty well into the Genesis six, verse three, 120 years option there if we connect that to human lifespan.

[00:37:36] But in general, no matter what we see that as, the boundary of the flood is a cultural memory. And it answers a lot of the universal questions that people have. Why do we live the length of lives that we do? Why is the world dangerous? Why do we have the systems in place that we have? And in Genesis, why is the world violent? Why does death persist? And why does God govern through covenant and boundaries? And how does covenant flip those things like death and violence and suffering?

[00:38:10] The boundary line of the flood organizes history without being like a history textbook in modern terms. This is a really clear way we can see how ancient historiography will mix different things together that we never would in our own historical recording. But if you see the tendencies and you see these differences and you see the purpose of what the writing is for, then things start to make a little bit more sense in how the ancient world really understood and recorded history in a different way than we do today.

[00:38:47] And really we see the same thing going on in the book of Genesis. We have the boundary limit language at the threshold of the flood before it happens. Whatever Genesis six verse three means, there is clearly limitation here. We also see differences in genealogies. There is a before and after difference even though there's no dramatic difference in switchover to exactly 120 years after the flood.

[00:39:16] Well, I'll just give you a few questions here that we can ask when we're reading the different flood narratives. What changes after the flood in the story, the lifespan, kingship, covenant? What is limited?

[00:39:30] That, of course, will track with the first motif we talked about in judgment and the purpose of the flood to begin with. Second question, what problem does the before and after boundary solve the for the story? Third question, does the post flood world feel like it's being administered like it's authorizing kingship or it's leading to a covenant relationship with God?

[00:39:57] And what does that tell you about the people's view of the divine and humans as well? How are they understanding the value and purpose of humans and how the gods relate to the humans?

[00:40:11] Let's drill a bit down into the story of AtAtrahasis with the limits after the flood, because I've already said that Atrahasis is interesting and unique because it's not giving a limitation before or during the flood. It gives one afterwards. So it's producing a mechanism to prevent a repeat of the flood. And all of these stories do that to some degree. But in Atrahasis, after the flood, the gods are going to establish population control measures. And it's like, well, couldn't they have done that before the plagues and the famine and the flood? Well, they didn't because they were like, well, these things are obviously not working, so we have to try something else.

[00:40:54] So they have women who bear and women who do not bear. So this is the introduction of infertility. We have the introduction of demons who snatch babies. And we have categories of women, often priestess classes, who are taboo and they're set apart so that they are not to have children.

[00:41:17] So that's really interesting how we have these limitations after the flood instead of before the flood. And there's very particular things here. Remember that in Atrahasis, the problem was that humanity was unmanageable and the gods were just not having it. It's common in Atrahasis to describe humans as immortal before the flood. And so the flood clears the drawing board, and then humans are no longer mortal after the flood.

[00:41:47] So that does match a little bit with the emphasis of Gilgamesh, but in a very opposite and interesting way. Population control is very important in this story. The gods are going to govern the humans through reproductive throttling and infant mortality. And so again, we have limitation on seed and limitation on fertility. It's almost like a curse, although it's not described that way.

[00:42:15] Atrahasis is depicting a post flood world where the divine realm is deliberately reducing the rate of human expansion. Again, that's not how we're seeing the story in Genesis, right? Very different. Even though the gods need the humans in order to survive and as a force of labor, they really can't have too many of them, or they're gonna pose a problem.

[00:42:39] The restraint and the limitations, it's not for humanity's sake. It is for the sake of the gods. This post flood policy reveals some tension where some of the gods are gonna regret the flood's totality. Some are angry that anyone at all survived. The pantheon is gonna negotiate a workable future forward, and the limitations are the negotiated settlement within the divine council.

[00:43:05] And that goes along with the whole idea that the warning was actually leaked secretly. And there's a divided pantheon, and the pantheon then has to come together and find a solution that will work so that they will stop arguing amongst themselves and destroying each other's solutions. It's like a compromise amongst the conflicted gods. So the humans are a resource, but there are problems. So we have to kind of get together and figure this out.

[00:43:38] Is Genesis paralleling any of this fertility limitation? I mean, it's possible to some degree because if the 120 years is ascribed to human lifespan, then people who don't live as long are going to have fewer children.

[00:43:55] But it's not described that way, and there is never any emphasis in limiting human reproduction in Genesis. So that is kind of a point against the idea of the limiting lifespan, at least as far as how it parallels other flood stories. Because if the limitations are about human reproduction, well that is clearly not what we have in Genesis.

[00:44:23] Okay. So let's go ahead and actually get into the different options for interpretation that we have for Genesis six verse three. We have the lead up to the flood. This is in the middle of Genesis six one through four. We've talked about that at length. And it's really kind of a strange place to put this, and a lot of people don't know what to do with it.

[00:44:47] So the three major interpretive options here of the 120 years bit is that it's the countdown to the flood, or it's a limitation on human lifespan, or it is just a general boundary and limitation principle.

[00:45:03] And I'll talk a little bit about each one of those here. Whether the limit is the time until the flood or people's lifespan, the narrative effect is the same here, that the clock is ticking now. There's an emphasis on judgment. It's not random and God is seeing a problem and he's going to do something about that problem.

[00:45:26] There are three main debated elements within this verse. The first one is, what does the verb even mean? My spirit shall not abide in man forever, remain in man forever, contend or strive with man forever, or judge man forever. Every single one of these kinds of lands on the same point that God's spirit will not continue indefinitely in or with humanity as it is. The choice of which verb you're gonna translate this as is probably going to be in alignment with how you understand the 120 years.

[00:46:07] But even before we get there, what does "My Spirit" mean in this verse? Here's a few different options, and they aren't mutually exclusive, by the way. My Spirit could be the life breath or the animating principle. God gives life and God can withdraw life, and he does this via his Spirit.

[00:46:30] " My Spirit" here can be God's sustaining presence, which is a gift that won't be endlessly extended in a corrupt world. It can be God's moral patience and forbearance. Spirit as being something like the idea of God dwelling with his people, and that's just not gonna last when people are going to be wicked.

[00:46:54] Another option here is that this is a description of the Holy Spirit, and perhaps even people were indwelt with the Holy Spirit.

[00:47:04] Now we do have to be careful about not reading later interpretation and ideas into an earlier text. Whether or not we're actually doing that, though, is going to depend on how we understand Spirit in general in the Old Testament. I will talk a lot more about that in the future, but I did have that conversation a little while ago with Courtney Trotter. So if you're interested in a little bit more of that, go check out that episode. So I'm not putting that off as an interpretation here by any means, but we do want to be very careful with that.

[00:47:40] Another question for this passage is whether the man is humanity in general or the representative, human or individual humans. The representative human is still basically humanity in general, but either way, this is gonna matter because it affects whether the 120 years is a universal lifespan cap, or the time window before the judgment or a policy statement about the human condition in general.

[00:48:10] Well, let's talk about the different options here and their strengths and their weaknesses. If humanity has 120 years before the judgment falls of the flood here. There's a few things that this interpretive option does really well. It fits the immediate storyline. For one thing, the decree comes right before the flood narrative launches. It emphasizes God's divine patience. God does not judge instantly, but gives humanity a little bit of time.

[00:48:42] But there are some weaknesses here. Genesis does not explicitly say this is going to be the time span before the judgment. We have to infer the count down from the verse's placement. So it is a bit of an argument from silence.

[00:48:59] Our second common interpretive option here is that it is a lifespan cap on humanity. A ceiling of mortality. God reduces human longevity to 120 years. What this interpretive option does really well is that it fits the Spirit versus flesh framing where Spirit sustains life and flesh is seen as mortal, and so their days are limited. It fits the broader Bible's theme of human mortality under divine decree. It hooks naturally into the limits after the flood comparison in all of these flood motifs and describes how people are different after the flood than before.

[00:49:41] If the reason for God capping humanity's lifespan is so that they get less time to sin and be violent and get themselves in trouble, well that is part of the mercy of what we see going on so often in Genesis and the Old Testament.

[00:49:59] I think there is a lot to recommend this here, but there is a major complication where after the flood, Genesis is still recording lifespans well above 120 for a whole lot of people. Now, people will try to fix that and say the cap is a gradual trajectory toward 120 rather than an immediate ceiling. And maybe 120 is the idealized maximum rather than a strict biological law. And so people were still able to live longer.

[00:50:31] I do think that this does read like a mortality statement where God's Spirit will not sustain people indefinitely and human days are numbered. And I think it fits the mercy angle here, but we do have that major problem of, we don't actually see it happening. Either interpretive option we've talked about, it really is an argument from silence, and we have to put in a whole lot of supposition either way.

[00:51:00] A third interpretive option is that this is a functional boundary. It is a theological point more than it is a precise statistic. And I'm not gonna lie, I kind of like this option. 120 years is not primarily a technical number that we need to decode, but it's a boundary marker where God is setting a limit on a corrupt world.

[00:51:24] What this interpretive option does really well is that it lets us keep the force of the verse even if we're uncertain on whether it's a countdown or a lifespan. It matches how the biblical narrative often uses numbers... not always as precise math, but as meaningful limits. And it keeps us from building a doctrine on a single debated line where we really have to argue from silence.

[00:51:52] Well, personally, I think that in the context, they would understand this a little bit better than we do. What does the number 120 even mean? Because if it is a theological meaning, then are we breaking the number up between something like 12 and 10 and multiplying it?

[00:52:09] Well, again, I think that we should not try to over claim what the text actually says. More than anything, this is part of judgment and if nothing else, what we can say is that this is about judgment. It is a limiting factor and it is connected to what's going on up to the flood.

[00:52:30] It is not what we see in Atrahasis with a limiting of reproduction, and I do lean toward this being a mercy rather than retribution punishment. Whether that fits the countdown or the lifespans, I don't really think it matters all that much. If we're treating it as something that is this firm thing, the lifespans don't work, but it also kind of does fit a human lifespan in reality.

[00:52:59] So it's just this fascinating thing that I'm not gonna take a particular position on. But theologically, I think that we can say that it involves judgment, it involves something about life. But it definitely contrasts with those ancient near Eastern narratives. I think that when we try to over claim evidence and we try to land on something, then we end up making theological mistakes.

[00:53:27] And that's my main concern here. We get medieval Jewish interpretation that will then have to decide that we have to use a particular verb in order to get to the point that we wanna make and things like that. And I think that just holding it loosely is going to be the best way we can possibly understand this and understanding it within the context of God's justice, God's mercy, and his covenant.

[00:53:54] The limiting factor is clearly here. We have the Spirit as divine sustaining presence one way or another. We have the flesh as a human condition. We have bounded time in the days and the years, and so we are prepared for the flood story. The flood story isn't just disaster, but it is about governance of human life.

[00:54:17] Ancient flood traditions often end with new rules for humanity. But Genesis is putting the limitation right there and it involves God's Spirit, which I think that is really important, and we will talk about that more as we go later on in other episodes about the Spirit. Life is a gift and not an entitlement.

[00:54:40] Let's go ahead and bring all of this back together. In Atrahasis, population control policy is the solution, and it happens after the flood. So it's like you guys didn't even have to do the flood, but you did anyway and it failed. The gods keep failing at even judgment, which that's really quite amusing, isn't it? The gods can't even judge properly. And this is in a pagan story. This is not biblical polemic. Within their own stories, the gods can't judge properly. That's fascinating.

[00:55:17] in the Sumerian King list, we have the flood as a boundary with, again, human lifespans, but it's also connected to authority and kingship.

[00:55:27] In the epic of Gilgamesh, the focus is on mortality and exceptionalism. There are limits, and people who don't have those limits are great exceptions that nobody else is going to even come close to. Utnapishtim and his wife are granted a unique status that no one else is gonna have, and so the limit is about broader humanity. Humans are not going to get immortality. Death is just our lot.

[00:55:58] So we can see that neither Atrahasi s nor Gilgamesh is providing a good counterpoint to what we have in Scripture. The why of the story in Genesis is radically different. The stated rationale is centered on corruption, evil, violence, wickedness, and the world is morally deformed. and the limits are about morals and protection of the vulnerable and restoration and maintenance of creation order.

[00:56:31] Now you can kind of say the same thing about the other flood stories, but in Genesis, the emphasis is on relationship and humans actually being able to flourish and live out their vocational duties. And so in Genesis, it's not about the gods, it's about humanity and humanity's ability to flourish.

[00:56:53] So I know I bring up covenant a lot and it's one of those words that is a bit of a Christianese word. We're not quite sure what it means and we easily gloss over it. But I use it a lot nonetheless because it is really such a strong comparison to pagan stories where the gods really aren't all that concerned with humanity at all.

[00:57:16] So covenant relationship means that our creator God actually cares about us and not just the kings, not just the higher ups, but humanity in general. And that's why I bring up covenant so often. Because that is really important and it matters, and it's such a distinctive difference.

[00:57:38] And even today when you're talking to an atheist or a non-believer and they are mocking the Bible and they're mocking the stories in Scripture, if they understood this distinctive difference, where God cares about humanity, and God is continually reaching out to people and continually forming this relationship, even in spite of our failures, in spite of us thumbing our noses at God, God will still continue to pursue us through all of that. That's what I mean by covenant. That's why it's important.

[00:58:17] And so when we come to Genesis six verse three, and it's a limiting statement, that's the view I'm viewing it from, from the vantage point of covenant and God's love and his mercy. Judgment is about what's going on here with the wickedness and the evil, but it's also centered on this core attribute of God, which is love and mercy.

[00:58:42] So the limitation is about that, not about how wicked we are, not about how evil we are. It is about God caring for us and wanting the best for humanity. That's how I'm reading this, and I'm seeing a vast difference here between the pagan stories And Genesis. God is binding himself to preserve creation, and he cares about our human vocation. Humans as image barriers, the world being repopulated and violence is addressed as a structural problem. And so the limitations aren't against us. They are for us.

[00:59:25] The differences between the Genesis flood story and the ancient Near Eastern flood stories. The problem is different. The character of the deities are different. The nature of the limitations is different. The relationship between the divine and the human is vastly different. The value of humans is different.

[00:59:48] Now what does it mean in the end when we have these flood stories that are older than the book of Genesis? Does it mean that we have an original flood and that we have original stories and all of this? I'm not saying one way or another here. But I do think this is kind of the world they lived in. It's not about plagiarism, it's not about copying.

[01:00:14] So this is not proof against a global flood or a local regional flood that happened that this is all recording, but it's not plagiarism, it's not stealing, it's not borrowing. But I will say that there are no other stories that I know of yet that have anywhere near the kind of shared motifs between Genesis and the global flood stories as we have within the ancient Near East.

[01:00:43] The ancient Near Eastern stories are the only ones that are this closely aligned to the Genesis story. The fact that I have the number of motifs that I was able to go through, and we have similar language. We have just so many similar ideas, but opposite. They're opposite for theological reasons.

[01:01:05] So we do have some form of perhaps literary dependence, cultural dependence, maybe historical dependence. The differences are gonna matter hugely, but they matter in a lot of ways for theological reasons versus historical reasons necessarily.

[01:01:24] And of course I have to start with the ancient Near Eastern parallels because they are simply the closest in actual literary detail, but also in chronology and geography. So it will be very interesting when we go into other global flood stories and look at just how many shared motifs there are.

[01:01:45] I think I'm gonna go ahead and wrap up right here. I will be talking more about the Holy Spirit and where He shows up in the Old Testament. I don't personally think we should toss out the idea that the Spirit in Genesis six verse three is in fact the Holy Spirit and that maybe we even have some indwelling of the Holy Spirit going on. I know that is not really a common interpretation within Christianity, but it is a potential one.

[01:02:14] We'd like to see the indwelling of the Holy Spirit as something that only happens after Pentecost, but I don't really see a reason why it can't be the case in the Old Testament.

[01:02:27] As always, I appreciate you guys listening. I appreciate you guys sharing the episodes with others who might be interested in these as well. I invite you all over to my biblical theology community, On This Rock, and I will leave a link to that in the show notes. A big shout out to those of you who support me there, who support me through Patreon and PayPal. I really appreciate you guys. Thanks again for listening, and I wish you all a blessed week and we will see you later.