There is an ancient story originating in India about a group of blind men who attempt to describe an elephant. Since each of them is feeling a different portion of the animal, they all come to different conclusions. Sometimes the same thing happens when scholars attempt to explain the Bible. Each one approaches the subject according to his or her individual prejudices and interests. As an example, look at the story of the Flood found in Genesis 6-9. The different approaches can be divided into the broad categories of the literal, literary, biblical, theological and exegetical. Some of these have sub-sets within them, and a complete picture can only be obtained by putting all of them together.
Literal Approaches
This category contains some seemingly strange bed-fellows, both the skeptics and the fundamentalists as well as everything in between. The commonality between them all, however, is that their main concern (or only concern), is whether or not the event actually occurred historically. The skeptics attempt to show the absurdities in the passage; more conservative believers reply with possible historical and scientific explanations in defense of the historicity; and many fundamentalists simply refuse to engage in any sort of dialogue with unbelievers.
Fundamentalists: Here are three examples I have heard of or personally experienced regarding some of the stories in the early portion of Genesis. One of my pastors when I was in middle school explained that the whole fossil record was purposely placed in the earth by God as a test to see if we would choose to trust our own senses and thoughts or choose to believe the Bible instead. My wife was subjected to a variation of that approach in her church, namely, Satan placed the fossil record there in an attempt to lead us away from God. And then when I was in high school, I ran into a preacher who learned that I was planning to be a chemist. He came up to me and stated that the only reason anyone went into the field of science was to disprove God. It is an easy way to totally ignore any facts that you do not agree with -- discredit the messengers.
Conservative Christians: This is a rather broad category of believers, and they fall into two groups regarding the Flood depending on whether they feel it was a universal event affecting the surface of the whole earth or whether it was a more localized flood covering a large portion of the Middle East. This difference in approach can be best illustrated by briefly looking at proponents of each view.
In 1954, Bernard Ramm wrote an excellent book titled The Christian View of Science and Scripture in which he devoted fourteen pages to refuting all the “scientific” evidence for a universal flood that had been previously proposed. He explained: “It is not a question as to what God can or cannot do...but 'What did God do?” The problem is one of interpretation, not inspiration. Without going into all his details, it can be stated that his results caused him to conclude with two contentions regarding the idea of a universal flood: (1) “It cannot demonstrate that totality of language [i.e., “all the earth”] necessitates a universal flood”; (2) “the universality of flood traditions cannot be uncritically appealed to”; and (3) “There is no known geological data to support those who defend a universal flood.”
In response, Henry Morris and John Whitcomb co-authored The Genesis Flood in 1961. Since Morris has a PhD in hydraulic engineering, those credentials convinced many evangelicals that he had the requisite scientific background to be trusted in his contention that a universal flood was adequately proven by the geological record. In addition, this so-called Flood Geology supposedly exposed the evolutionary view of the development of life on earth as a fraud by explaining that different animal fossils were found in different geological strata depending on how fast those animals could navigate to higher elevations before the rising waters overtook them.
Laymen often do not realize two things regarding scientists: (1) Engineers are not scientists. Although they may work closely with scientists, they must totally rely on scientific findings and theories in carrying out the duties of their own field, which concern the practical applications of those findings, and (2) Even a PhD in one field of science may know little or nothing regarding another field of science.
To illustrate the second point, I have a PhD in organic chemistry. However, I have never taken a biology class in my life and do not even consider myself competent to make any authoritative statements regarding physical chemistry or chemical thermodynamics. So when Morris makes pronouncements regarding the scientific fields of geology, paleontology, or biology, one should keep in mind that his opinions are worth little more than one who has but a passing acquaintance with those fields.
And Morris is not by far the most extreme example in that regard. Just consider a popular Christian presenter on YouTube who is a flat earth proponent and insists that there are large dinosaurs hiding in the jungles of Africa since even the dinosaurs must have been present on the ark. Some teaching material by this “expert” is now being used in Christian home-schools to teach science to students.
Thus, when the astronomer Hugh Ross founded Reasons to Believe in 1986 to defend the truth of the Bible against skeptics, he gathered together a very impressive brain trust of Christians who were experts chosen from a number of different scientific disciplines. The general approach taken by that group regarding Genesis 6-9 is a solid scientific defense of a limited flood theory. But even within that respected group, Ross himself probably goes a little too far in his personal opinion that all of mankind outside the ark was destroyed at that time. That idea is soundly refuted by atomic dating results and DNA evidence. Again, it points out the great danger of anyone attempting to speak on a subject in which they are not a real expert, including myself.
Literary Approaches
Comparison with Other Ancient Cultures: Skeptics often point to the fact that earlier ancient Near Eastern (ANE) documents also recorded a flood myth, and they possess some surprising parallels to the later Genesis account. For example, both involve a deity or deities deciding to destroy mankind in a flood. But one man and those with him escape this fate in a water-going craft. Birds are sent out to see if there is any dry land around after the flood has subsided, and when the inhabitants of the boat disembark they send up a fragrant sacrifice. These striking parallels are then used by critics to proclaim that the biblical account was obviously lifted from such pagan sources and adapted by the Jews to their own theological purposes.
However, first one must realize that the relative ages of the various existing documents say nothing regarding which tradition was in fact the oldest. So that while one must admit that certain details within the pagan sources are very similar to the biblical account, that says nothing regarding the direction of borrowing. A could have borrowed from B; B may have come from A; or both A and B may have come from the same oral or written tradition which preserved remembrances of the same ancient event. In addition, the differences between the two accounts are just as striking as the similarities. More on this subject will be discussed under the heading of “Theological Approaches” in part 2.
Source Criticism: This field of endeavor, when practiced by liberal Christian theologians and applied to the Pentateuch, is based on the acceptance of the Documentary Hypothesis. Halpern summarizes: “The documentary hypothesis has been the dominant scholarly approach to the history of the Pentateuch or Hexateuch for two centuries. In its mature form, this hypothesis posits that three narrative sources, J, E, and P, have been combined with Deuteronomy to form the present Pentateuch. The first stage of this combination was the editing of the J and E sources, by R(je). P was written as a bowdleriztion of that combined text...Subsequently, JE was combined with P, by R(jep).”
One major problems with this theory is that no document has ever been found that corresponds to any of the original sources or even their intermediate combined forms. Another, more practical, problem with this approach to the text is that it ends up atomizing the story into numerous individual bits and pieces, which makes it difficult to focus on the narrative in its present form. For example, concerning Genesis 6-9, the current form of the Documentary Hypothesis analyzes it as fourteen different blocks of JE material alternating with an equal number of small passages derived from the P source.
Even the source critic Brevard Childs came to the point where he recognized that this approach not only had grave problems with its methodology but also led to a dead end in helping us understand the present text. A few quotes from Childs are in order here:
“[T]here is frequently no objective evidence within the two strands [J and E] by which to assign a source designation...Moreover, efforts at determining the relative age of the sources must remain extremely provisional...Such insistence on different isolated sources disregards the canonical shaping and threatens its role both as literature and as scripture.”
New Literary Criticism: In stark contrast to the above approach, a number of conservative Bible scholars have begun to look at the stories in the Bible as they would any other work of literature. They approach them in their present form without attempting to delve into their supposed prehistory, looking for the sort of literary techniques found in other examples of world literature. As one example, Kenneth Gros Louis highlights the literary technique of foreshadowing: “At Noah's birth, Lamech recalls the cursing of the ground and anticipates a new beginning with Noah: 'Out of the ground which the Lord has cursed this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the toil of our hands [Genesis 5:28-29].' In a sense, of course, Lamech is right, but he surely does not expect the relief to be the destruction of the earth.” You may also note that this is an example of irony as well as foreshadowing.
John Sailhamer gives an example of the narrative technique of “recursion,” which he defines as “the author's deliberate shaping of narrative events so that the key elements of one narrative are repeated in others. The cumulative effect of such stories is the sense that the whole of the real world has a shape and order that is reflected in the shape and order of the biblical narratives.” Thus, he demonstrates the way the Flood Narrative systematically reflects and reverses the Creation Story. Look up the following pairs of parallel or contrasting passages in Genesis yourself to see if you agree with him:
Creation Account Flood Account
1:2 7:11
1:9 8:5
1:11-12 8:11
1:14 8:13f
1:22 8:17
1:24 8:17
1:26 8:18
1:28 9:1
1:28b 9:2
1:29 9:3
Structural Analysis: One approach growing rapidly in favor with conservative Bible scholars is an outgrowth of rhetorical criticism. It focuses, unlike Source Criticism, on how each portion of Scripture is designed to hang together as a whole and the result helps guide the reader, consciously or subliminally, to key points in the text while also locating where parallel ideas in the passage exist. When it comes to the Flood Narrative, there is general agreement that its organization can be pictured as shown below, in the version defended by B.W. Anderson with the main point in the center:
A. introduction (6:9-10)
B. violence in creation (6:11-12)
C. God's resolve to destroy (6:13-22)
D. entering the ark (7:1-10)
E. beginning of flood (7:11-16)
F. rising flood (7:17-24)
G. God remembers Noah (8:1a)
F'. receding flood (8:1b-5)
E'. drying of the earth (8:6-14)
D'. leaving the ark (8:15-19)
C'. God's resolve to preserve order (8:20-22)
B'. covenant between God and creation (9:1-17)
A'. conclusion (9:18-19)
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