by Tim Chaffey
Finally, before you get the idea that creationists have a big problem on our hands, you should consider the incest problem we would have if evolution were true. Not only would all of humanity have needed to come from a single pair, or a small community of early humans, but every single plant, animal, and microbe supposedly evolved from the first one-celled organism. Why do skeptics think it is a problem for all of humanity to arise from two people when they believe that all of humanity and every plant and animal came from a single organism?
If it never rained before the Flood why did the story include rain and rainbows?
In our story we mention several instances of rainfall in the pre-Flood world. You may wonder why this deserves mention in this section. Well, many Christians believe the Bible teaches that it never rained prior to the Flood. The primary argument comes from the second chapter of the Bible.
This is the history of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, before any plant of the field was in the earth and before any herb of the field had grown. For the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the earth, and there was no man to till the ground; but a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground (Genesis 2:4–6, emphasis added).
Yes, the text states that God had not caused it to rain on the ground. But what period of time are these verses describing? The answer is that these verses state that up until the sixth day of the creation week, God had not caused it to rain on the earth. Is it a safe assumption to extrapolate from this verse through the next 16-plus centuries and claim that it never rained until the Flood? Perhaps, but the text certainly does not demand such a view.
Another argument is based on Hebrews 11:7, which states that Noah built the Ark by faith after being warned by God of “things not yet seen.” Some supporters of the “no rain before the Flood” position claim that the “things not yet seen” refer to rain and other effects associated with storms. But Hebrews does not necessarily have ordinary rainfall in view. In all likelihood, the phrase in question refers to the Flood and its effects.
A third argument used by those who do not believe it rained prior to the Flood is based on the idea that the early earth had some sort of water canopy around it. This is based on a certain understanding of the events on the second day of creation when God separated the waters below the expanse (or firmament) from the waters above it (Genesis 1:6–7). This proposed canopy somehow created an ideal environment around the globe, blocking harmful rays and permitting longer, healthier lives. However, there are numerous scientific problems with the canopy theory, such as the fact that it would have created a massive greenhouse that would have destroyed life on earth. Even more important is that Genesis 1 also states that the sun, moon, and stars are in the expanse, so that would mean that “the waters above” should probably be understood as being beyond the stars instead of some sort of canopy around our planet.
The final argument given to support the “no rain” position has to do with the rainbow. Following the Flood, God made a covenant with Noah and all the inhabitants of the earth, human and animal, that He would never again destroy the earth with a Flood (Genesis 9:9–11). Regarding the sign of this covenant, the Lord stated, “I set My rainbow in the cloud, and it shall be for the sign of the covenant between Me and the earth” (Genesis 9:13). Supporters of the idea that it never rained before the Flood claim that this was the world’s first rainbow, so it must not have rained before.
There are at least three big problems with this statement. First, we know it had rained for 40 days and 40 nights beginning at least a year before God announced this covenant. And it undoubtedly rained following those first 40 days, so if sunlight shone through at all during this time, then we should expect a rainbow to appear as well. Second, rain does not even need to fall for a rainbow to form. If waterfalls existed in the pre-Flood world, then a rainbow would appear in the mist that inevitably forms if sunlight reached the water droplets in the air. Third, and most importantly, the Bible does not claim that this was the first rainbow. God used the rainbow here as a sign of the covenant He made. Nothing in the text necessitates this as the world’s first rainbow.
If rainbows had appeared before, then what we see here is an example of God attaching special meaning to them at this point. He did the same thing with the Passover lambs roughly a thousand years later. When the Lord told Moses and the Israelites to sacrifice lambs at Passover, He did not invent lambs at that point; He attached special significance to them at that point in history.
In our view, the arguments used for the “no rain” position are not compelling enough to adopt such a position, but at the same time we want to acknowledge the plausibility of such a view. However, since many creationists have heard and repeated these claims as found in the Bible, we wanted to take the opportunity to challenge these assumptions and encourage readers to look closely at the biblical text so that they could learn whether their beliefs are based on Scripture or tradition.
Why does Noah have anger and pride issues when the Bible describes him as a righteous man?
The Bible certainly tells us several times that Noah was a righteous man, but we have several reasons for giving him these character flaws. First, the Bible’s description of Noah as being a righteous man had to do with his character at the time God called him to build the Ark. He may have sinned regularly in his first several centuries, and undoubtedly struggled with sin throughout his life.
Second, every story needs to see the protagonist change during the course of his journey. This is especially true in a coming-of-age tale like this one. Readers want to relate to a character, so they need to see a realistic person instead of an idealistic one. They need to see him struggle with difficult situations, make mistakes and learn from them, see the consequences of his decisions, and grow as a person as a result of his experiences.
Third, the fact that Noah needed God’s grace (Genesis 6:8) reveals he was not perfect. While it would be nice to think of him as never struggling with any sin, we realize he was just as human as we are, and surely battled the desires of the flesh regularly. This made things tricky for us because the Bible only tells us about one mistake made by Noah, and that episode of drunkenness happened years after the Flood (Genesis 9:21). Many novels about Noah use this event in his life as justification for giving him a disposition toward drinking alcohol. While this may be reasonable, it is a bit overdone in these books, so we decided to give Noah a couple of other sinful issues to struggle with.
The two main areas where our Noah struggles are pride and anger. The pride issues are more subtle in the book, but they can be seen a few times as he admires his own appearance or focuses too much attention on himself. Pride also rears its ugly head in the way Noah is tempted by Naamah, although he does a great job in handling his most difficult encounter with her.
The anger issues are more noticeable. He allows his frustrations to boil over in chapters 14 and 18. But in each case, his temper subsides before too long. Why would we give him such a temper?
We decided to borrow characteristics from the Apostle Paul for aspects of Noah’s personality. Like Paul, Noah was a preacher of righteousness (2 Peter 2:5), something we will see him become in the next two books. In the Bible, these men seemed to share a common boldness, willing to stand before anyone at any time and proclaim the truth, regardless of personal harm that may come to them. Paul endured flogging, imprisonment, and many other punishments because of his desire to spread the gospel (2 Corinthians 11:24–27). While the Bible doesn’t give us any specific instances about Noah’s boldness, there is little doubt he strongly contrasted with the rampant wickedness of his day.
People with this sort of boldness seem to share a righteous anger toward sin, which is a good thing, but there is a fine line that can quickly be crossed when that righteous anger is personalized and becomes a sinful temper. There are signs that Paul had a fierce temper. Prior to his conversion to Christianity, we read
that Paul was “still breathing threats and murder” against Christ’s disciples (Acts 9:1). Years after his conversion, the high priest ordered Paul to be struck. In the next verse, Paul immediately responds with a strong insult, saying, “God will strike you, you whitewashed wall!” (Acts 23:3). It is hard to overstate how offensive that remark would have been at the time. After being informed that this man was the high priest, Paul recognized his outburst was wrong (v. 5).
Like so many other sins, if not all of them, temper stems from human pride, and Paul was not immune to that. He had a major falling out with Barnabas because of John Mark, whom Paul refused to travel with, thanks to John Mark deserting them on a previous missionary journey (Acts 15:36–41). Paul highlights his prideful failings when he openly admits his daily struggle to do what is right and not do what is wrong (Romans 7:15–19).
If this godly man who wrote 13 books of the New Testament can struggle with pride and anger, then it is certainly believable that a fellow preacher of righteousness, Noah, could struggle with the same issues, particularly at a young age.
Why is the serpent god called Nachash?
By the end of the first book, readers learn about the false god Nachash (pronounced nah-KOSH). Bible readers may be familiar with some of the other pagan gods and goddesses mentioned in Scripture, such as Dagon (1 Samuel 5:7), Ashtoreth (1 Kings 11:5), or Molech (1 Kings 11:7), but Nachash is not mentioned — at least not in English Bibles.
Genesis 3 describes man’s rebellion in the Garden of Eden, typically referred to as the Fall. The serpent deceived Eve, and she ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil — violating the one prohibition God had put in place. Then she gave some to Adam and he ate. Adam’s sin brought sin, disease, suffering, and death into the world. God also cursed the serpent and the ground at this point.
So where does Nachash fit into all this? Nachash is a transliteration of the Hebrew word used for serpent in this passage. This explains why we chose to use a serpent idol to represent Nachash and have Noah refer to him as the Great Deceiver.
Christians generally recognize the serpent as Satan (Revelation 12:9), but Genesis does not make this identification for us, and somewhat surprisingly, neither does any other place in the Old Testament. So readers should not expect Noah or anyone else in the novels to refer to Nachash as the devil or Satan, which leads to the next question.
Why did Noah seem to have a fairly limited understanding of God and the things described in Genesis 1–5?
Early in our story, Noah and Aterre have a conversation about the Creator, and Noah doesn’t seem to know how to properly address each of the issues. Some readers may wonder why we portrayed this faithful biblical hero in this way, but we have two major reasons for this decision.
First, at this point in our story, Noah is a young man who has not encountered beliefs contrary to those he was taught from his childhood. He does not have years of experience to draw from in knowing how to respond to challenges to his beliefs. In our day, this situation would be like an average recent high school graduate being drawn into an important philosophical and theological discussion.
Second, modern readers often assume that biblical characters knew much more about God and His plans than what they may have. We tend to think that they should be aware of everything the Bible mentions about the people and times in which they lived. Some Christians assume that these characters even knew about teachings that would not be revealed until the New Testament.
The main problem with this latter idea is that the Bible describes a concept that has come to be called progressive revelation. Numerous verses could be cited to illustrate this, but the following passage explains it well.
Now to Him who is able to establish you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery kept secret since the world began but now made manifest, and by the prophetic Scriptures made known to all nations, according to the commandment of the everlasting God, for obedience to the faith (Romans 16:25–26).
As he frequently did, the Apostle Paul spoke of a “mystery” that had now been made manifest. When using this term, Paul refers to a concept that God had hidden from the generations before him but had been revealed in his day, such as God’s plan to establish His church (Colossians 1:24–27), end times teaching (Romans 11:25; 1 Corinthians 15:51), and the content of the gospel (Ephesians 6:19).
As far as we know, there is an enormous amount of biblical information that Noah was not privy to. It is possible that God had revealed some information to him or others that is not recorded for us in Scripture, but even if this were the case, we cannot know the details of this revelation.
So if Noah was unaware of later revelation, would he have been familiar with all the things written in Genesis 1–5? Many creationists have adopted a view known as the tablet model, which states that the Book of Genesis was written by multiple people, including Adam, Noah, Shem, Abraham, et al., and then later compiled by Moses. Personally, I believe there are some strong arguments against such a view, but even if this model turns out to be correct, it would not guarantee that Noah, as a young man, would have been familiar with all the details at that time. After all, the earlier records may have been passed down to him hundreds of years later.
Another assumption made by many creationists is that Adam knew Methuselah and that Methuselah would have passed this information down to his grandson Noah. It is true that Adam lived 930 years, long enough to be alive during the first two centuries of Methuselah’s long life. However, this fact does not guarantee that the two men would have known each other. Methuselah was the seventh generation after Adam. Given their very long lives, it is very possible that these people had dozens of children.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume a minimum number of children for each of the men listed between Adam and Methuselah. The Bible names at least one son for each of these men and then states that after they had other “sons and daughters.” So each of these men had at least five children — an extremely low number for people living over 900 years. If each generation had five children on average, and each of those children averaged five children, then by the time Methuselah was born, Adam would have had more than 78,000 descendants. But remember, that number is assuming a small number of children for people who may have been capable of producing offspring from at least age 65 (Genesis 5:15, 21) to over 500 (Genesis 5:32). If each family averaged a dozen children, which is probably still a low number in such a long lifespan, Adam would have had over 35 million descendants at the time Methuselah came along. Why should we assume that he happened to know one particular great, great, great, great, great grandson named Methuselah?
The truth is, we cannot know for certain how many people were on earth at that point, and we cannot know if Adam knew Methuselah. In fact, we cannot even be sure that Methuselah and Noah knew each other. In keeping with our goal of challenging stereotypes, we decided to minimize the amount of biblical information from Genesis 1–5 that Noah may have known, at least as a young man. In our story, he is aware of some of the key events in these chapters, such as creation and the Fall, but he does not know all of the details. If these events were not faithfully recorded or passed on to him at this point in his life, legends based on the events would surely develop, making it hard for him to know what really happened. For example, he knows of Enoch’s disappearance, but he is not entirely sure what happened to him. Since the time of Babel, many cultures passed their histories to the next generation through storytelling and song. Perhaps some of the people living prior to the Flood did the same.
Traditions would be another way to hand down this information, but as is often the case, a tradition gets passed down while the meaning behind it becomes muddled or lost. An example of this is seen with the Zakari assuming a strange position while praying. This practice comes from a tradition handed down to them derived from a key event in Genesis, but they have lost the truth behind it. Readers will need to wait until the third book
in the series to learn why they do this.
Finally, one tricky element in our story has to do with the way in which an individual related to God prior to the Flood. As Christians, living after Jesus Christ’s death, burial, and Resurrection, and after the Holy Spirit came on the Day of Pentecost, we have the advantages of hindsight and having the Spirit dwell within us. We also have 66 books in the Bible to guide us as we seek to live in a way that pleases the Lord.
The people of Noah’s day did not have these advantages, so how could they know what they should do to please the Lord? They would need to rely on the truth passed down to them, however much that may have been. Some people, like Cain (Genesis 4:6) and Enoch (Genesis 5:21–24; Jude 14–15), had the opportunity to hear directly from God, just as Noah would in the years leading up to the Flood. Perhaps other people had this privilege as well. Even if the people did not have access to these first two options, they still had a God-given conscience to help them discern between right and wrong.
We see examples in the early chapters of Genesis that people made sacrifices to the Lord. Abel offered the “firstborn of his flock” (Genesis 4:4), and after the Flood, Noah offered sacrifices from every clean animal and clean bird (Genesis 8:20). So these individuals must have had some comprehension of their sinfulness and that the cost of sin was death. This practice almost certainly came from the first sacrifice when God killed at least one animal to provide “tunics of skin” to clothe Adam and Eve (Genesis 3:21). These sacrifices may have become mere ritual for some people, but in the cases of Abel and Noah, we know they were righteous men (Matthew 23:35 and Genesis 7:1), so we have every reason to believe that the proper reasons for offering sacrifices were passed down to Noah. Our novel depicts Noah’s recognition of the right reasons to offer sacrifices at his coming-of-age ceremony and just prior to his wedding.