This Lent, until Palm Sunday six weeks from now, we are going to engage in a series of reflections at sermon time that focus on our Hebrew Scripture lessons.  During Lent this year we will have lessons from Genesis, Exodus, and Jeremiah that are about covenants offered by the Holy One of Israel.  In addition, our cantatas for the first three Sundays in March take Hebrew Scripture as their texts, most notably Psalms.  Next week after church, John Harbison, Rabbi Howard Berman and I will form a panel to offer our thoughts about the role of Psalms in Jewish tradition, Christian tradition, and in Bach’s cantatas.   

I want to start by explicitly addressing a matter of nomenclature with regard to our Bible.  You may know that in the last couple of decades there has been a concerted effort in the academy and in more progressive Christian churches to change the way we talk about books of the Bible that were called the Old Testament when I was growing up.  While the testament of those books is undeniably old, we must not consider it supplanted by the New Testament or Christian Testament.  Hebrew Bible is a more accurate and value-neutral description of the books that consist of the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings.

So the Hebrew Bible’s story of God’s promise to Noah after the Great Flood is before us this morning.  You probably know that nearly every culture, society or tribe has an ancient legend of a great flood.  Archaeologists speculate that in the Middle East 7,000 years ago, seawater from the Mediterranean flooded the area which is now the Black Sea, destroying the surrounding population, and that the various flood legends stem from that cataclysmic event.  Anthropologists know that the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh predates the Genesis flood story by at least six centuries and that the flood story in the Hebrew Bible is a kind of response to that story, which the Israelites learned during their captivity in Babylon.  They learned it and adapted it.  Actually, there isn’t a Genesis flood story – there are two Genesis flood stories intertwined, each of which can stand alone as a complete story and each of which contradicts the other at points.  All of this is to say that if the last time you studied the story of Noah and the Flood was in Sunday School, you have some catching up to do!     

For my part, what archeologists and anthropologists speculate is interesting but not compelling.  It’s not as compelling to me as this theological question:  what does a Biblical story’s understanding of God – of the Divine -- say about the community which told it?  What if we look at this as being a story focused on God that reveals more about the tellers than about the subject of the tale?  What is being disclosed about this people in captivity in the record of God-talk – theology?

Jack Miles, who wrote The Drowning of the World, says that, “historically, the Flood story entered the national literature of Israel from Babylon, where it was the story of a good god of dry land and order triumphing over an evil goddess of deluge and chaos.  When monotheistic Israel borrowed this story from polytheistic Babylon, it faced a difficult choice.  It could cast the flood goddess as a natural disaster which …[God] could not stop, admitting an embarrassing limitation upon [God’s] power.  Or it could cast [God] in both roles as the bringer equally of weal and woe.  Israel made the second choice; and though the motivation was probably theological rather than literary, the result was a stupendous literary character, one combining immense physical power with absolutely terrifying moral ambivalence.  God created the world for no clear reason…[and]…destroy[ed] the world for no clear reason.”(1)

The Flood story in the Hebrew Bible was told and written down by a people in captivity who had their own counter-cultural version of how to make sense of their lives, and what I imagine was their own terrifying moral ambivalence.  Should they fight the oppression of the Babylonian empire or assimilate -- build houses, settle down and make the best of a bad situation?  Should they drown in a flood of despair or build an ark as righteous survivors?  The tensions of moral ambivalence echo throughout both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Testament.  You’ll also hear them in today’s cantata text.

What seems particularly poignant to me is this story of God as both sorry and forgetful.  Three times our text indicates that God says something to Noah without Noah’s intervening response.  According to Robert Alter who has recently published a new translation of the first five books of the Bible, “this [writing pattern] generally indicates some sort of significant silence – a failure to comprehend, a resistance to the speaker’s words.” (2)  In other words, Noah’s silence is significant.  In this story, Noah is not speaking to God.  Noah is giving God the silent treatment.  And the solicitous God, in this story, is self-aware enough and concerned enough to know that frequent reminders will be necessary for God to be faithful to the covenant that God is offering.  This is a picture of a God who needs to tie a string around a finger or write on a hand.  Note to self:  don’t destroy the world with the flood again.
I imagine the same qualities of ambivalence, remorse, and forgetfulness might describe the people of Israel, captive in Babylon.  (They’re all qualities that I recognize in myself and in my community of faith, particularly in light of the beginning of Lent.)  It seems remarkable and quite delightful to me that they are qualities that get projected onto God by the ancient Israelites. 

There’s one more quality that I find in this covenant story, made all the more remarkable by the timing of its telling in development of Hebrew Scripture.  There’s wide agreement among Biblical scholars that the beginning parts of the book of Genesis were among the last parts to be developed and written down.  In other words, the Flood stories are actually newer than the material that comes after it.  It’s like when a book gets written, and before publishing, the writer or editor determines that it needs a prologue.  The creation stories and the flood stories in the beginning of Genesis are all prologue, developed and written down after the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and as many as 500 years after the stories Moses and the Exodus.

Here’s what’s interesting to me about that.  In the story of God’s covenant with Abraham, the promise is specific to Abraham and his children – his descendents – his seed.  God’s covenant with Moses has been expanded to include all of the Israelites.  But this covenant that God is offering to Noah is with and for all of creation.  In the narrative, once it’s put together by the priests returning to Jerusalem after the exile, the covenant stories grow more particular.  But if we look at the development of covenant stories chronologically, there’s much more give and take, and this is an incredibly expansive, universal covenant with all living beings – all flesh.  It’s radically   inclusive in its aspirations.  And it’s hopeful.  This story reveals a deep hope for reconciliation with the Divine.  In the Babylonian flood legend that formed the basis for this story, a necklace of jewels was flung into the sky as a sparkling reminder of a promise to never again destroy.  Here, a bow – a weapon – an instrument of the people’s oppression has been hung up and turned into a thing of beauty, a sign of the pledge of the loving kindness of the Holy One.  That’s a story worth repeating!