The Truth about Noah’s Ark (1)

Genesis 6-9, for the author who wrote it and for the reader who receives it as a text that pierces the darkness surrounding beginnings and ends, is full of truth on many levels. It describes the maker of heaven and earth’s overwhelming sorrow in the presence of divine-human miscegenation and all manner of human evil (6:1-7). The titans and humanity in general fill the land with violence. After ten generations of humankind, land and landowner need a rest from its occupants.

The landowner’s response might have been to destroy without a trace. But יהוה begins all over again with a remnant, one of many acts of divine compassion recounted in Genesis 1-11. At the same time, the text is relentless to the point of dissonance in its insistence that the human inclination toward evil remains unchanged (8:21 = 6:5). Whatever good humanity enjoys is the result of a unilateral covenant in which God promises to provide seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night as long as the earth endures (8:22). God exercises selective memory. He privileges the “remembering” of things that make for hope as opposed to things that point to coming disaster (9:1, 15-16; contrast 8:21). The exercise of selective memory is salvific. It moves providence in the direction of sustaining a situation, however imperfect, that allows for the flourishing of life. In the process, humanity is the recipient of sheer grace.

Gen 6-9 is concerned with the foundations of human existence. It is a protological narrative in which the truths of existence are explained in terms of their constitution in a primeval beginning. It is an etiological narrative intent on explaining how “we,” author and reader, have come to enjoy a situation of relative equilibrium against all odds. Protological narrative contains more history, not less, than chronicle. It explores the deep structure of history, personal and collective, in terms of a powerful metaphysic according to which, to use non-biblical language understandable to my generation, violence and deceit create a disturbance in the Force, a disturbance of incalculable consequences. 

Comments

[Thomas]

Great stuff You may develop this in subsequent posts, but the volume "Before Abraham Was: A Provocative Challenge to the Documentary Hypothesis,"
by Isaac M. Kikawada and Arthur Quinn shows, as do other authors, that 6-9 is a giant chasm (palistrophe) with "God remembered Noah" at it's center. It seems to fit in with your reflections here.

[Alan Lenzi]

"Protological narrative contains more history, not less, than chronicle." More meaning, maybe, but not more history, if that term means anything.

[JohnFH]

Hi Thomas,

Thanks for the reference to Kikawada and Quinn. A nice attempt at making sense out of text as it stands.

[JohnFH]

Hi Alan,

I know what you are driving at, but history except in the limited sense of the evaluation of sources and assigning of probabilities is not what history in the sense of historiography is typically about.

History is a hermeneutical construct. Typically, the construct takes the form of a narrative. Narrative reduces experience and collective memory to a linear progression where cause and effect are fitted into a teleology. History as historians actually write it and literature have much in common: what is at stake is the sense of an ending.

History is a narrative about what people think happened, a narrative that tries to make sense out of the past, is shareable with others, and relates to particular self-understandings and understandings of the “other."

In all of those senses, protological narrative is a type of history.

But we remained influenced by the model of Thucydides. T thought of history in more exacting terms, and therefore limited himself to writing a history of contemporary events. It could not have been otherwise, but this is often overlooked. Even T, however, wanted to write a narrative that related self-understandings. For that purpose, he put speeches in the mouths of key characters. The speeches, while verisimilar from a variety of points of view, are nonetheless historical fictions.

[Gary Simmons]

Keep it up, John! I'm going to enjoy this series. Speaking of which, I'm coming along in translating Philippians. Thank you for your encouragement on that note.

[Alan Lenzi]

I understand all of what you are saying and basically agree. But I would still say you are equivocating on the word "history," probably for rhetorical effect. "history in the sense of historiography" is an important qualification.

[JohnFH]

BTW, Alan,

I hope that you allow your old blog to exist as an archive online even if you have chosen to discontinue contributing to it. There is a lot of material worth chewing on in those posts.

It is possible to emphasize genre-specific conventions, which I have not done. For example, in later installments of the Primary History, sources are cited, epic and then annalistic. This is what we expect in historiography in the strict sense.

But here I have emphasized commonalities of purpose across different genres of narrative. For ecample, the use of vignettes in historical writing of past and present - we accept that approach without question in the work of a cinematographer like Ken Burns - represents a common denominator across the genres. The fictive dimension of vignettes is strong even if, again, when we read vignettes, we do so in "enchantment mode." History-writing, epic, and protological narrative share this feature, even if the vignettes transpose into fiction, traits of individuals and collectivities with lesser or greater degrees of abstraction.