James Alison on Noah and the Flood

The story of Noah is less obviously a story of origins than either that of Adam and Eve or Cain and Abel, yet since it, too, is subjected to a christological rereading in the apostolic witness, I beg indulgence for a quick glimpse at this story too. In the first letter of Peter it is pointed out that in the days of Noah "a few, that is eight persons, were saved through water. Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you" (1 Pet. 3:20-21). That is to say, the water of baptism corresponds to the water of the flood. Yet baptism, we know from Paul, is being immersed in the death of Christ, in order to be able to share in his resurrection, and it is he, and after him the Church, which the Ark prefigured. This implies a rather particular christological rereading of the Noah story: the implication is that the Ark actually went under the flood rather than escaping it miraculously!

In this rereading, we would have all the violence abounding on the face of the earth and, at a time of particular mimetic crisis of indifferentiation symbolized by the Flood, the collective putting to death of someone (Noah) or a group (Noah and his family). It was this putting to death which brought about peace, permitting the reestablishment of order, the categorization of animals, and the setting up of a new tribal system. There are of course many myths of this sort whereby a more or less hidden collective expulsion or murder is seen as producing a new social order where fruit or animals or foodstuffs start to abound as the result of a mysterious visitation in which it can either be the collectivity which perishes at the hand of a god or a god which perishes at the hand of a collectivity and, as a prize, leaves behind the basis for the new culture. The Noah story as we have it could very well be a Jewish demythologization of just such a story in the light of their experience of salvation from out of Egypt leading to the setting up of the covenant. Here Noah is saved from out of the flood, and God makes a covenant with him never more to destroy all flesh.

The Jewish rereading already shows the Jewish tendency to tell the story from the point of view of the victim, the tendency which we have already seen with relation to their flight from Egypt. The partial demythologization has God rescue Noah and his family from out of the hands of violent men, in order to establish a new peaceful sociality. The christological rereading merely takes this tendency one vital step further back, by revealing the founding murder and indicating that those who are prepared to share in the self-giving toward the founding death are those who will be brought to everlasting life. The new sociality is made possible because of the self-giving up to death, not a sociality derived from self-deceit following a collective murder, as in the myth behind the Noah story. Once again, the christological rereading, already implicit in the use of the Noah story in 1 Peter, points to an originating murder at the base of human sociality.