However it happens, a flood is devastating. Whether it rushes through carrying all before it as happened in Toowoomba or quietly rising in other places in Queensland to soak or dampen precious belongings it can prove traumatic.
Most of us were brought up with stories of the Great Flood and had long discussions as to how Noah managed his menagerie aboard the Ark. Stories of the Great Flood reach us in Genesis chapters 6 to 9, one from a southern tradition called “J” around 900BC, the other later around 597BC during the Jewish exile in Babylon from the priestly tradition called “P”.
Nevertheless, these stories had been around in various written forms for a long time beforehand. The first form of writing emerged nearly 5000 years ago in the area we now know as Iraq in that fertile area between the Tigris and the Euphrates, those rivers mentioned as early in Genesis as 2:14. This was the first known area and time when historical records were kept.
But the Great Flood story is even older than that. Before it hit print, or should I say “tablet”, stories like this had been handed down from generation to generation over thousands of years. This struck me when listening to some Aboriginal dreaming stories and the style of these stories reminded me of some of the early Genesis stories. They were meant to be heard rather than read. It also came home to me that these stories could be very, very old.
Our first peoples settled where we now live probably over 40,000 years ago. As soon as they learned how to understand one another’s words, they would have told stories. All over the world since humans could communicate with language, they told stories.
I cannot pin down the date, of course, but there are stories of how the Tigris and the Euphrates broke their banks and flooded the whole area. Paleontologists suggest one or two really big floods caused by climatic or other conditions, and it is likely this Great Flood we now read about in Genesis occurred at least 10,000 years ago covering southern Iraq which, of course, included Babylon.
One way or another the stories reached the whole area from different sources, one through the south in 900BC and the other picked up from the Babylonians themselves during the Hebrew Exile there.
In it the writers addressed the question as to why this inexplicable Great Flood happened and they recorded the message that the people had gone off the rails, so to speak. Even today, when disaster strikes, we wonder why it happens. Often we look for some one to blame. Hindsight is always perfect, as Jesus pointed out in Matthew 24:42-44 about “the thief in the night”. Much of our learning comes through finding out the hard way.
It’s not so simple as our ancestors did all those years ago to find scapegoats (established in Leviticus 16:7-10), and much as it would be tempting to do so, burrowing into the causes as to why things happen the way they do takes a lot of persistence and patience. We know so much more nowadays, but the challenge is to use it, loving God with our mind (Matthew 22:37).
While we are doing that, we remember Jesus in that same verse, called us to love God with all our heart as well and to love our neighbour as ourselves, to put ourselves in their position. Having one’s life turned upside down in a sudden disaster is unimaginable unless one has gone through that experience.
First we reach out to those undergoing this distress and on the way we may find the causes and make sufficient sense of it all to be equipped for the future.
