It’s been 40+ years since I last went to church regularly, and I wasn’t paying a lot of attention even then But: People went bad and God drowned them all like rats. It always bothered me that God either didn’t see that coming and make humans a little more godly by nature, or He set it up that way so he could indiscriminately drown men, women, and babies like rats–unless they happened to be living in the same neighborhood as Noah AND get themselves married into Noah’s family. I don’t recall hearing anything about the contribution of the Nephilim to the corruption of humanity, and certainly nobody ever told me where the Nephilim came from. Too much info, I guess. They wanted the message to be “Behave yourself, God has promised he will never again drown us all like rats, but He never said he wouldn’t burn us all to ash.”
Book of Enoch (from Ethiopia, I think). It’s an ancient text discovered in 1948. Details the names of the angels who were cast out of Heaven (Grigori, Watchers, devils), and what they did when they landed on Earth. They allegedly delivered a lot of knowledge to humans. When they made babbie with human women, the offspring were The Giants (they make an occasional appearance in The Bible, ya?). Giants don’t have the sort of souls that go to heaven, so the souls remain on earth as demons. But anyways, the giants/Nephilim apparently corrupted the humans they interacted with. I may have gotten some details wrong, but in the main, I think that’s what FriarTed was talking about.
I would say that both were taught together. Man was so evil that God was so angry that he righteously was going to end it all, however God had mercy with one man of faith and decided to save him/family. God complaining about man’s stubbornness is common and was taught at many instances.
How did you later become a Christian when you were already one?
And yeah, I did have the sense, as a child, that Noah tried to warn others, and that they had a genuine opportunity (which they refused) to be saved. I don’t know if I got that from Sunday School, or just from general cultural osmosis. But while God might have foreseen (without interfering with) their decision to not be saved, the flood itself was unambiguously a literal Act of God.
Seems like as time went on God became more likely to give populations more of an opportunity to get their shit together before unleashing his/her wrath. When Jonah warned the people of Ninevah (which he wouldn’t even do until swallowed and disgorged by a giant sea creature) that God was mightily pissed off and fixing to wipe them out, they actually pulled out the sack cloth and ashes. Needless to say, Jonah was pissed off that they weren’t destroyed and went off to pout.
Anyway, I never heard anything about anyone being given the opportunity to get it together before drowning.
What **Keeve **said. Scripture is pretty unambiguous. God could not tolerate the evilness of humanity, so He caused a Flood to kill 99.99999% of them. There is no room for confusion there as far as intent is concerned - nothing to suggest the Flood was an incidental event, or unintentional - it was most definitely meant to kill.
If someone wants to argue that it is allegorical, or that it never happened, that would be one thing. But as far as the words in the text itself, it is 100% intentional, meant to kill.
What I found interesting about my friend’s story is that she was taught that God only foretold the deluge, rather than actively starting it. that lets God off the hook for genocide, but reduces God’s omnipotence sense, in this really sanitize version, God is unable to avert the catastrophe.
I know plenty of Pentecostal Christians who claim that Catholics are not Christian. Though I never shared this opinion, it doesn’t shock me to hear it echoed.
He’s certainly not consistent. The people of Babel tried to build a tower a little to high and he confused their langauage and dispersed them throughout creation.
Here we are building tall skyscrapers and flying to the Moon and not a peep from him.
God did send the flood, as people had rejected him and were behaving badly. Noah and his family, along with the animals, survived.
My denomination, (I belong to a different one now), was, and still is, quite literal.
but I remember a story from second grade, learning about the Exodus. I asked the teacher, “If we go to the bottomw of the Red Sea now, would we still find the soldiers and horses and chariots of Pharoah?” The teacher said no, because bodies “go away” , metal and wood rust and fall apart. I think he knew I was looking for “proof” He didn’t tell me I wasn’t supposed to question the word of God, or not to worry about such things, he was simply giving me a frank and honest answer.
I wasn’t exactly raised Christian but I did attend Sunday School (Presbyterian) for a few years. My memory, which may be inaccurate, is that we were taught that God caused the flood on purpose to wipe out everyone but Noah and his family, that the other people laughed at him for building an ark at first, but when the rains came they begged Noah to save them. Presumably he didn’t because that wasn’t God’s plan? Did anyone else get the version with that last detail?
IIRC, there isn’t anywhere in Scripture that it is mentioned that anyone mocked Noah for building the Ark, or suddenly plead with him to let them into the boat once the water started hitting in earnest - that’s probably artistic license - but it is certainly what you would expect people to do in that situation.
In addition, with 2 of every animal in the Ark, Noah probably would have had just about zero room to save anyone else even if he had wanted to. And to do so might actually be disobedience of God, since God had only commanded Noah to take his immediately family aboard.
Mom was Lutheran Brethren and believed the Bible was all literal truth and the word of god. Dad was a geologist and showed me rocks that were millions of years old.
Re option #2, the Mesopotamian version has that the gods decided jointly to wipe out the humans, but one god, Enki, rebels. Forbidden to tell the humans directly, he speaks a warning to a reed hut which, because it was a god talking, passes the story on to its occupant, Ur-Noah. The rest is … not history.
Meanwhile scripture seems unclear on what happened.
Genesis 6:19-20 – And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every kind into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female. Of the birds after their kind, and of the animals after their kind, of every creeping thing of the ground after its kind, two of every kind will come to you to keep them alive.
Genesis 7:2-3 – You shall take with you of every clean animal by sevens, a male and his female; and of the animals that are not clean two, a male and his female; also of the birds of the sky, by sevens, male and female, to keep offspring alive on the face of all the earth.
The one Sunday School session I was tricked into attending happened to cover Noah, and it was definitely intentional destruction in that lesson.
The only place I’ve encountered anything close to a suggestion that the flooding was not deliberate is in the kind of children’s picture book that focuses on the animals on the Ark, where they usually just skip or gloss over the reasons for or origin of the flooding entirely.