The Flood is a brutal story that didn’t really happen. So why is it in the Bible?

On divine evolution and reading problematic texts

The Bible has a lot of WTF stories in it, and perhaps none is more problematic than “The Flood.” God is portrayed as violent in many different stories, but in the flood story, God wipes out all life on earth! Where is the God of love in this story? What are we supposed to do with it? Why is it in the Bible?

For me, the flood story is a great example of how we can still learn things about God without buying fully into the way God is depicted in the story. Pete Enns describes this in his book, “The Bible Tells Me So:”

"The biblical writers were storytellers. They were more like an artist painting a portrait than a photographer taking a picture. [...] The biblical writers painted portraits of God, portraits that rose out of their encounters with God in their time and place. Those portraits captured something true and real about God, but not in a way that was meant to be universally binding, timelessly accurate, or prescriptive. Rather, those portraits captured moments of encounter and revelation, genuine and authentic moments, but ultimately fleeting and conditioned.”

Learning to read the Bible like this has been very important— otherwise we are forced to believe that our supposed “God of love” is also occasionally a genocidal maniac. So if the God of the flood is not a perfect portrait of the divine, what is the point?

Le déluge de Noe et les compagnons by Léon Comerre