Genesis 8-11

How are you coping with going back to work in the New Year? Mine wasn't the greatest start - I did that thing when you sleep comfortably assured that you've set your alarm clock, and then when you wake up the type of daylight tells you something has gone really wrong with your plan.

I went straight from zero coffee over the Christmas break ("maybe I don't actually need coffee, maybe I'll just drink green tea") to mainlining two large cups my first morning back. And I'm having post-Christmas withdrawal symptoms - sat at my desk at 10.30 I wondered what felt wrong, and realised it was in fact that there wasn't any snack foods or beverages laid out within arms reach . . . Also, I asked my colleagues the following question: "Why is it perfectly acceptable to drink sparkling wine for breakfast over Christmas, but not regular wine?" to which they replied "Who thinks it's ok to drink sparkling wine for breakfast?" I was stumped. This isn't just my family, right? Other people do this too, don't they? Hello?

Anyway, today I read Genesis 8-11 which covers Noah's Ark Part 2, a lot of fathering, and the Tower of Babel. I don't have any problems with the second part of the story of Noah's Ark - hurrah! This part of the story relays Noah finding dry land after the waters have receded, and God making His promise never again to wipe out all people. It sets a precedent for God making covenents with His people - here with Noah, later with the Israelites, and finally with all people through Jesus. Far from the Old Testament conveying a completely different God to that of the New Testament, He's actually shown to be very consistent in character.

I also think this chapter displays how events in life can have both physical and spiritual meanings. God states that whenever rainbows appear with the rain clouds, it is a sign of His promise to mankind. Now, we know that a rainbow is caused by refracted light - that doesn't mean that it can't exist on a spiritual level too. It may be caused by refracted light, but that is just the means by which it is created; The meaning is to be a sign of God's promise to his people. The scientific cause and the spiritual cause do not have to be mutually exclusive.

The Tower of Babel

 So, first battle of the day is the story of the Tower of Babel. Like the Ark, there's a 'tower' myth in many different cultures - it's mentioned in Sumerian texts, the Qu'ran, and Herodotus, to name just a few. Despite it's position in Genesis 11, the story is not in chronological order, and this event, if it was real, could have occurred much earlier in history. It describes a time before humans had scattered over the earth, and we all spoke one language.

We actually know very little about how language occurred - whether it is innate in humans or requires social interaction to develop, if it evolved out of pre-linguistic systems that other primates use, or appeared fairly suddenly during the course of human evolution. Thanks to a quick search on Wikipedia, I know the current consensus is that humans have been in their modern evolved form for around 50,000 years, which of course places a big question mark over the timeline given in Genesis.

As with the creation story, where 'days' can also mean 'ages', and we take it as describing a much longer time period than a literal reading would suggest, my personal opinion so far is that some of the events in Genesis, if they were real, occurred over a much longer period than the 5,000 years generally suggested by much of the church (To be fair to the text, no date is assigned to the story of the Tower of Babel).

Thus we get to the crux of my problem - if the texts are not completely factual, how do we make claims that scripture is infallible? As with my earlier example of the rainbow, do we need to accept two levels of truth - the factual events of the story (not necessarily true) and the spiritual level of the story (reliably and infallibly true)? How can we make those judgements?

Another kind of Rainbow