The Lost World of the Flood: Mythology, Theology, and the Deluge Debate by Tremper Longman III and John H. Walton, Part 1- Propositions 4 and 5

We are blogging through the book: The Lost World of the Flood: Mythology, Theology, and the Deluge Debate by Tremper Longman III and John H. Walton.  Today we will look at Proposition 4- The Bible Uses Hyperbole to Describe Historical Events and Proposition 5- Genesis Appropriately Presents a Hyperbolic Account of the Flood.  The dictionary.com definition of hyperbole is: 1. Obvious and intentional exaggeration. 2. An extravagant statement or figure of speech not intended to be taken literally, as “to wait an eternity.”  It is a subset of rhetorical device as was discussed last week, but Walton and Longman feel its importance in use in the Bible is worth its own discussion.  They claim that the Bible is not hesitant to describe historical events hyperbolically to produce and effect in the reader in order to make a theological point.

The description of the conquest of the Promised Land in Joshua 1-12 is a case in point.  Joshua 1-12 presents a complete conquest of all the land.  Joshua 11:16-17 says:

16 So Joshua took all that land, the hills, and all the south country, and all the land of Goshen, and the valley, and the plain, and the mountain of Israel, and the valley of the same; 17 Even from the mount Halak, that goeth up to Seir, even unto Baalgad in the valley of Lebanon under mount Hermon: and all their kings he took, and smote them, and slew them.

So if we read Joshua 1-12 as a straightforward, dispassionate report, we would have to conclude that all Canaan was conquered and not a single Canaanite survived unless they, like Rahab, came over to the Israelite side.  But in Joshua 13:1-6 we read:

When Joshua had grown old, the Lord said to him, “You are now very old, and there are still very large areas of land to be taken over.  2 “This is the land that remains: all the regions of the Philistines and Geshurites, 3 from the Shihor River on the east of Egypt to the territory of Ekron on the north, all of it counted as Canaanite though held by the five Philistine rulers in Gaza, Ashdod, Ashkelon, Gath and Ekron; the territory of the Avvites 4 on the south; all the land of the Canaanites, from Arah of the Sidonians as far as Aphek and the border of the Amorites; 5 the area of Byblos; and all Lebanon to the east, from Baal Gad below Mount Hermon to Lebo Hamath.

6 “As for all the inhabitants of the mountain regions from Lebanon to Misrephoth Maim, that is, all the Sidonians, I myself will drive them out before the Israelites. Be sure to allocate this land to Israel for an inheritance, as I have instructed you…

A close look at a Bible atlas would show the conquest to be, roughly, 50% complete, with major cities like Jerusalem and Hebron still firmly in the hands of the Canaanites.  In point of fact, Canaan was not completely subdued until the time of David, centuries later.  The simplest and most concise resolution to the seemingly disparate accounts is to view Joshua 1-12 as the use of hyperbole for affect in order to communicate an important theological method.  The conquest narratives are interested in the successes of the conquest since they showed God was fulfilling his promise made in Genesis 12:1-3 regarding the land.

The authors note the work of K. Lawson Younger (Ancient Conquest Accounts: A Study in Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical History Writing, Sheffield, UK: JSOT Press 1990, 190-92) who presents many examples of hyperbole as an expected feature of battle accounts from Egypt, Assyria, and Babylonia.  Lawson says:

Just like other ancient Near Eastern conquest accounts, the biblical narrative utilizes hyperbolic, stereotyped syntagms [a linguistic unit consisting of a set of linguistic forms (phonemes, words, or phrases) that are in a sequential relationship to one another] to build up the account.

Walton and Longman recognize that some of their readers will have difficulty acknowledging this use of hyperbole; seeing it as an attack on the inerrancy of scripture.  But they note that the biblical author’s use of hyperbole was expected to be recognized by their intended audience as making a theological point.  As stated earlier, we are to remember that the event is not inspired, it’s the interpretation of the event that is inspired, because that interpretative theological point is what scripture affirms.  Walton and Longman also note that the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy states in Article 13:

We affirm the propriety of using inerrancy as a theological term with reference to the complete truthfulness of Scripture.

We deny that it is proper to evaluate Scripture according to standards of truth and error that are alien to its usage or purpose. We further deny that inerrancy is negated by Biblical phenomena such as a lack of modern technical precision, irregularities of grammar or spelling, observational descriptions of nature, the reporting of falsehoods, the use of hyperbole and round numbers, the topical arrangement of material, variant selections of material in parallel accounts, or the use of free citations.

So there you go, conservative evangelical, BOO-YAH, right there in the Chicago Freaking Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, ain’t no stinking liberals up in here.  Walton and Longman:

Thus we can see the Bible is not at all averse or slow to utilize hyperbole to communicate its important theological message, and the most recent articulation of the doctrine of inerrancy fully recognizes this use and affirms that it in no way compromises the truthfulness of Scripture.  There are historical events behind these hyperbolic statements, but it is hard if not impossible to reconstruct these events in detail because the biblical authors are not so interested in the event itself as their significance for God’s relationship with his people.

Walton and Longman, based on this discussion of rhetorical hyperbole, move on to apply that understanding to the flood account.  They contend that employing universalistic rhetoric to portray the impact and significance of the flood as cosmic cataclysm does not mean that the ancient Israelites considered the physical scope or geographical range to be universal.

Other uses of universalistic language used rhetorically as hyperbole would be Lamentations 2:22, where the lament over the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem indicates there were no survivors; whereas we know that some actually remained on the land and others were taken into exile. Based on the understanding of Genesis 1-11 as a whole, we can expect at least two things: 1) the flood story is based on a real event, and 2) that historical event would be described using figurative language, showing more interest in the theological significance of the event than in giving us raw data with which to reconstruct the event itself.

Hyperbole is a common form of figurative language that exaggerates for effect.  Longman gives an example of his wife picking up his luggage and saying “it weighs a ton” (all those theological books don’t you know).  They both know it doesn’t literally weight 2,000 lbs. but her point is made.  She is not lying or misleading him, and he would be an obtuse jerk to reply, “It does not.  It weighs 70 pounds.”  In Walton and Longman’s opinion the flood account is permeated with hyperbole from the get go.  Genesis 6:5, “The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.”  If we take that statement as bare fact then how do we explain, “Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked faithfully with God” (Genesis 6:9).  But the hyperbole makes the point that wickedness had risen to such unprecedented levels that God was obligated to take action.

Secondly, hyperbole extends to the dimensions of the ark itself.  Based on the assumption a cubit was 18”, the ark as described in Genesis 6:15, would be 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high.  Although Ken Ham and the Ark Encounter project attempted to duplicate these dimensions and claimed, according to their website:

Ark Encounter is the largest timber frame structure in the world, built from standing dead timber, in part by skilled Amish craftsmen. The Ark is an architectural and engineering wonder containing three decks of world-class exhibits… The real Noah’s Ark, the one described in the Bible, was huge. It was amazingly seaworthy—a ship that kept the occupants safe during a worldwide flood.

The fact of the matter, as I described in a previous post, is that such a wooden structure COULD NOT HAVE LASTED A DAY ON A CALM OCEAN.  Even if pumps had been installed and all hands worked round the clock pumping, the Ark certainly would have leaked catastrophically, filled with water, and capsized. As said in the previous post:

If there was even the gentlest of currents, sufficient pressure would be put on the hull to open its seams. Currents are not a complete, perfectly even flow. They consist of eddies and slow-moving turbulence. This puts uneven pressure on the hull, and Noah’s Ark would bend with those eddies like a snake. Even if the water itself was perfectly still, wind would expose the flat-sided Ark’s tremendous windage, exerting a shearing force that might well crumple it.  How do we know that?  Well, once upon a time people built large wooden ships.

There was an “upper limit, in the region of 300 feet, on the length of a wooden ship; beyond such a length the deformation due to the differing distributions of weight and buoyancy becomes excessive, with consequent difficulty in maintaining the hull watertight.  The largest wooden ships ever built were the six-masted schooners, nine of which were launched between 1900 and 1909. These ships were so long that they required diagonal iron strapping for support; they “snaked,” or visibly undulated, as they passed through the waves, they leaked so badly that they had to be pumped constantly, and they were only used on short coastal hauls because they were unsafe in deep water.

Not to mention, if you watch videos of Ham’s Ark being built, that it took hundreds of workers using power tools, cranes, and steel scaffolding to accomplish the task that Noah, and his family, using only crude hand tools, were supposed to be able to do.  Ancient Phoenician and Egyptian boats from the time period Noah supposedly lived in were, at the most, a quarter of the size of the Ark.  No, the ancient authors and their intended audience would have understood that hyperbole was being employed in the Genesis description of the Ark.  Longman and Walton note:

And then the flood itself is described in what to ancient readers would have been seen as hyperbolic language. The waters come from the “springs of the great deep” and flow from the “floodgates of the heavens” (Gen. 7:11), reflecting an ancient cosmology where under the flat earth were the subterranean waters and above the firmament were waters (not the blue sky) that could be released by opening the gates of heaven.

As the water flowed from deep within the earth and from the sky, “they lifted the ark high above the earth” (Gen. 7:17).  Even the “high mountains” were covered (Gen. 7:19), and not just covered but with water to more than fifteen cubits (twenty-three feet) above the mountains.  The description truly is that of a worldwide flood, not a local flood.  Though some modern readers don’t see it, the original audience would have understood that such a description is hyperbole.