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As described The Flood - An Epilogue (Part 2) - Jesus Shows Compassion in the Afterlife, it would seem that after showing Adam’s descendants no presence of the divine in (at least) their last 120 years of life, God the Father just suddenly killed everyone.  Then, Jesus goes to Hades and tells them why.  Then, I have the gall to say that God’s silence is mercy, and Jesus’ preaching is compassionate.  How intellectually unsatisfying, huh? 

What’s unsatisfying is that God has not created a world that conforms with humanity’s black-and-white views on what is right or wrong… well guess what! Nor do we conform with God’s!  What’s most interesting is …

In The Flood - An Epilogue (Part 1) - God’s All-Knowing Patience, we noted how God knowingly waited 120 years before officially sending the flood.  We noted Christ’s statement in Luke and Matthew that the flood itself was unexpected, sent without warning.  Yet, God’s unspoken hesitancy was an act of mercy.  How contradictory, right?  But, scripture says it. 

The question is, can unspoken mercy be mercy?

Should it be troubling that God will silently give someone a chance to repent of their evil? and then punishes them without warning if they do not?  Consider the possibility that any man who met God face-to-face would change his ways. Wouldn’t …

When I wrote Genesis 7:6-17 - Where was the ark? (Part 3) - Only Noah’s Family Knew, I went through every verse in the Bible about Noah to see if the people killed knew of anything about the ark and coming flood.  What I found was quite the contrary.  Here are just a few key verses, recalled in a sequence that I think tells the story…
Hebrews 11:7 - By faith Noah, when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family. By his faith he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness that …

Here are the particulars of God’s promise that he would never again “curse the ground because of man” or “destroy all living creatures”…
 22 “As long as the earth endures,
       seedtime and harvest,
       cold and heat,
       summer and winter,
       day and night
       will never cease.”
It is an interesting promise, because it reiterates God’s promises above, but it is not immediately clear how so.

“Seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night,” are now conditional on the earth enduring.  Enduring what?  Well, the word translated “endures” is “yowm”.  As used, it refers to the remaining designated time of something.  In this case, for the time the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, etc., will never cease.  In …

Yesterday, I took some poetic license with Noah’s story, in Genesis 8-9 - Noah feels overwhelmed.  Funny thing.  I mentioned “Noah’s tent” but forgot to add a stage where he pitches one.  Well, clearly he pitched a tent at some point. When I make omissions like this, I realize how human the Biblical authors were.  It is the same kind of omissions, and people point to the lack of authenticity, implying the author didn’t think it through.  What it tells me is that the author was human.  And in the case of the flood, I can that Noah was human, too.

I love the fact that Noah could remain so obedient throughout …

So, imagine this.  The ark lands on the mountains of Ararat.  Noah’s jarred. He doesn’t know what to think, but apparently, the ark has landed.  He looks outside… yeah, ”We’re still at Ararat,” he says to himself.  Then he waits.  He sends out a raven, but the ground’s not dry enough for it to land.  “Well of course not,” Noah thinks. “They’re  a desert bird.”  So, he sends out a dove, but the water hasn’t receded enough for even the dove.  He sends it out again, and it brings back an olive branch.  Sends it out again, and it doesn’t return.  ”I guess the water’s receded enough, even beyond the mountains,” Noah thinks.

Noah’s birthday is approaching, and he’s thinking about it.  ”Happy Birthday to me” he thinks to himself sarcastically.  He doesn’t really …

 13 By the first day of the first month of Noah’s six hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth. Noah then removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was dry. 14 By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was completely dry. 
What are the dates in verses 13 and 14 above?  I can tell you what you what they’re not.  Verse 13 is not the date when the water had dried from the earth… it was the latest date at which the water dried from the earth.  And verse 14?  That is the latest date by which the earth was …

 13 By the first day of the first month of Noah’s six hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth. Noah then removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was dry. 14 By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was completely dry.
This is a good opportunity to point out an interesting pattern in the flood narrative.  In verse 13, cutoff date for when “the surface of the ground was dry.” It is followed by verse 14, where see cutoff date for when the “the earth was completely dry.”  In Hebrew, “ground” and “earth” are the same word we have been seeing …

In Genesis 8:6-7 - “Is the land dry?”, we saw that Noah used a raven, potentially a fan-tailed raven, to see whether the flooded land had dried.  It would seem that the fan-tailed raven’s habitat was almost exactly the sections of the Middle East and Africa that would have been impacted by a flood overflowed both the Mediterranean and the Red Sea.  This doesn’t mean it rained all that way, just that it was effected enough for the raven to find no dry land 150 days after the floodwaters stopped flowing.  However, just because the land wasn’t dry does not mean the waters had not receded.  So, Noah changed …

 6 After forty days Noah opened the window he had made in the ark 7 and sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth.
Having spent time developing the argument that Noah built the ark within the mountains of Ararat, away from the general population that was to be destroyed, it starts to paint a picture of Noah’s thought process as he processes what to do after the ark lands.

One of the things that always confused me was why he sent out the birds.  After all, he knew the water outside the ark was going down.  Why wasn’t watching it good enough?  Well, …