Daily Lesson for January 3, 2019

Today’s Daily Lesson comes from Genesis chapter 9 verses 20 through 22:

20 And Noah builded an altar unto the Lord; and took of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the altar.
21 And the Lord smelled a sweet savour; and the Lord said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.
22 While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.

The Flood Story is full of irony, a story whose characters decorate the halls of church nurseries all over, it is also the most destructive and violent story in the Bible.

Yet there are other ways to read the Bible. St. Augustine learned from St. Ambrose to read the Scripture allegorically, so the Flood story can be read to signify God’s intervening act of love in the saving of creation. If symbolic reading sounds strange, this is in fact how at least one Biblical author read this story. From 1 Peter chapter 3 verses 20 and 21:

“in the days of Noah while the ark was being built. In it only a few people, eight in all, were saved through water, and this water symbolizes baptism that now saves you also.”

However literal or figurative we read the Story, I get that the author’s ultimate intent of the story was to to say: “Never Again.”  Never again shall life on earth be destroyed in such a violent and universal fashion.

This point is evident in two vivid scenes from the text. First, the “sweet savor” the LORD smells in the sacrifice after the water recede compels the the LORD to say, “Never again,” and God then hangs up his “bow” — literally the word for arms, signified in the sky by the “rainbow”.  We are then left to wonder if the “sweet savor” of the offering wasn’t so sweet after all as perhaps God can see that those saved in the ark will only again repeat the sins of those drowned in the flood.

Indeed, Noah, said to be the most righteous man on earth builds the altar of sacrifice, then plants a vineyard, and then immediately proceeds to get drunk, naked, and then to bring down a curse upon his family — telltale signs of the behavior of an alcoholic.

So the curious symbol of a raven being let out the window of the ark in chapter 8 verse 7 has meaning. Yes, the dove, in it’s sign of peace, is let lose and there is peace for a time after the flood. But the raven is also let lose. There will be peace; and there will also be war. Life and death. Righteousness and unrighteousness.

And so the LORD will have to find another way to deal with the evil of humanity other than by trying to drown it in vengeance and so never again will the bow be taken down from the sky, but left there to remind God that there must be another way . . .

NOTE: Daily Lessons are following a chronological reading of the Scriptures this year. Genesis is divided into separate eras and authorship. We will return to Genesis later.  Monday’s Lesson will be over the first 13 chapters of the Book of Job.