Genesis of Justice: God overreacts and floods the world

THE GENESIS OF JUSTICE by Alan Dershowitz Torah Study

The Genesis of Justice - unit 3
God Overreacts

and Floods the World Schocken Bible Translation

Genesis 6:

6:Antiquity and the Preparation for the Flood (6:1–8): The final pre-Flood section of the text includes a theme common to other ancient tales: the biological mixing of gods and men in dim antiquity. Perhaps this fragment, which initially seems difficult to reconcile with biblical ideas about God, has been retained here to round out a picture familiar to ancient readers, and to recall the early closeness of the divine and the human which, according to many cultures, later dissolved. It is also possible that the episode serves as another example of a world that has become disordered, thus providing further justification for a divinely ordered destruction.

The stage is set for the Flood by means of a powerful sound reference. In 5:29 Noah was named, ostensibly to comfort his elders’ “sorrow” over human “pains” in tilling the soil. Here (6:6), however, the meaning of the name has been ironically reversed. The one who was supposed to bring comfort only heralds God’s own being “sorry” and “pained” (vv. 6–7). A similar ironic wordplay, where the audience knows what the name-bestower does not, occurs in Ex. 2:3; curiously, the hero of that passage, the baby Moses, is also connected with an “ark”—the term for the little basket in which he is set adrift.

1 Now it was when humans first became many on the face of the soil
and women were born to them,

divine beings: Or “godlings.”

2 that the divine beings saw how beautiful the human women were,
so they took themselves wives, whomever they chose.

for they too are flesh: Hebrew difficult. The text uses the singular. a hundred and twenty years: Some early interpreters take this to specify a “grace period” for humanity before the Flood. The text seems to be setting the limits of the human life span.

3 YHWH said:
My rushing-spirit shall not remain in humankind for ages, for they too are flesh;
let their days be then a hundred and twenty years!

came in to: The common biblical term for sexual intercourse. The concept, also expressed in Arabic, is of the man entering the woman’s tent for the purposes of sex.

4 The giants were on earth in those days,
and afterward as well,
when the divine beings came in to the human women
and they bore them (children)—
they were the heroes who were of former ages, the men of name.

now YHWH saw…evildoing: In contrast to the refrain of Chapter 1, “God saw that it was good.” every form of their heart’s planning: This lengthy phrase indicates human imagination (Speiser: “every scheme that his mind devised”). “Heart” (Heb. lev or levav) often expresses the concept of “mind” in the Bible.

5 Now YHWH saw
that great was humankind’s evildoing on earth
and every form of their heart’s planning was only evil all the day.
6 Then YHWH was sorry
that he had made humankind on earth,
and it pained his heart.

man to beast: Or “human to animal.”

7 YHWH said:
I will blot out humankind, whom I have created, from the face of the soil,
from man to beast, to crawling thing and to the fowl of the
heavens,
for I am sorry that I made them.
8 But Noah found favor in the eyes of YHWH.
[God then flooded the world in forty days]

Genesis 9:

1 Now God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them:
Bear fruit and be many and fill the earth!
2 Fear-of-you, dread-of-you shall be upon all the wildlife of the earth and upon all the fowl of the heavens,
all that crawls on the soil and all the fish of the sea—
into your hand they are given.
3 All things crawling about that live, for you shall they be, for eating,
as with the green plants, I now give you all.
4 However: flesh with its life, its blood, you are not to eat!
5 However, too: for your blood, of your own lives, I will demand-
satisfaction—
from all wild-animals I will demand it,
and from humankind, from every man regarding his brother,
demand-satisfaction for human life.

Whoever…: A poem that plays on the sounds of “humankind” (adam) and “blood” (dam): Shofekh dam ha-adam/ ba-adam damo yishafekh. for that human: Or “by humans.”

6 Whoever now sheds human blood,
for that human shall his blood be shed,
for in God’s image he made humankind.
7 As for you—bear fruit and be many, swarm on earth and become many on it!
8 God said to Noah and to his sons with him, saying:
9 As for me—here, I am about to establish my covenant with you and with your seed after you,
10 and with all living beings that are with you: fowl, herd-animals, and all the wildlife of the earth with you;
all those going out of the Ark, of all the living-things of the earth.
11 I will establish my covenant with you:
All flesh shall never be cut off again by waters of the Deluge,
never again shall there be Deluge, to bring the earth to ruin!

The Schocken Bible

The Genesis of Justice