The flood recedes. God tells Noah and his family to leave the ark, release the animals and go repopulate the Earth. God sends a rainbow as a promise that he’ll never flood the Earth again and there will always be summer and winter, heat and cold as long as we have the Earth.
Afterword, Noah gets drunk and his son Ham makes fun of him for falling asleep naked in his tent. Presumably after his brothers tattle on him, Noah curses Ham and says he will be his brothers’ servant and his sons will be his brothers’ sons’ servants. Some translations say for like three generations, some say pretty much forever. Later some Bible scholars decided that Ham’s descendants were black people and Japhath’s descendants became Europeans. This was the justification for slavery for a few hundred years.
Ham did give rise to the Canaanites though, so they’re all going to get killed later anyway. Shem’s sons were the first Semites, who became the Jews.
The tower of Babel gets really weird though. Right in the middle of this story following Noah’s family line to Abraham, smash cut to Babylonia where some guys (Semites?) are building a tower, a monument to their own greatness to keep them all together. God comes by and sees the tower and panics.
“Oh, shit.” God says to himself “If these guys can build that tall, brick building, they can do anything.”
Then God starts speaking to someone just off camera, other Gods it sounds like, and says “We need to ruin this political unity and keep these men fighting each other or they’re going to be big trouble for us.”
Now this, aside from not fitting in with the narrative it’s interrupting, sounds like everyone else’s religion at the time of Moses. The Gods are like us but more powerful, and they’re also kind of dicks a lot of the time. I won’t say that I don’t believe this is a legit part of the Bible, I just think that if you insist on believing that the entire book is completely literal, you’ve got some real issues that need to be addressed here. I feel like taking this passage to heart means I have to make a decision about what kind of God I believe in, because it seems for all the world to completely contradict what I know about God via Jesus.
I understand that there are plenty of intelligent, educated fundamentalists, but I think that insisting on a literal reading of the Bible is, more often than not, a cop-out by people who don’t know that much about the book in order to not have to learn any more. If you allow the context surrounding the writing to affect your reading, then you have to actually know about who wrote what when and what was going on in their part of the world at the time. Not always, but often, and to a great detriment to established church doctrine.
Moses wrote the first few books of the Bible and much of it was already ancient folklore at that time, especially these first few books of Genesis. Did God inspire Moses to only write down certain stories and to modify them so they were perfectly, literally true? Maybe, I haven’t come across anything in the Bible so far claiming that to be the case, but I’m certainly not claiming otherwise. But, neither am I willing to hang my faith on the literal veracity of the story of the Tower of Babel.
