Noah's Flood in the Anthropocene
Climate Anxiety and the Deep Past
A dire study was released last week that found that a major current in the Atlantic Ocean is tracking toward a sudden and disastrous tipping point. The current is called the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, or AMOC, and it circulates water between cold and warm climates and between the deep and shallow ocean, regulating temperatures across the Atlantic basin, on both the western (North American) and eastern (European) shores. The problem with this current is that as glaciers melt, the sea is being inundated with meltwater from Greenland and the Arctic, and that fresh meltwater keeps the dense and salty water from the southern and warmer climates from plunging toward the ocean floor. My understanding of it, which might very well be partial or wrong since I am not a scientist, is that this current works in a way that’s analogous to the thermal lifts that keep birds aloft in the air—the warmer water needs to sink, and then rise again as cooler water, in order to keep the current pumping. Without that current, a lot of things in our world go haywire, including dramatic cooling across Europe, sea level rises of as much as a meter in some areas, and devastating shifts in seasonal patterns as far south as the Amazon. (Read the article linked above for more).
The urgency of the new study comes partly from the way it shifts our understanding of the timing of the current’s collapse. Scientists have known for a while that the current would be vulnerable to failure under certain conditions, but this study pulls those conditions far closer to the present than we would like. Although the collapse is still very likely to happen in the 22nd century or beyond, it could happen as soon as 2025, which is next year. Whenever it happens, the collapse of the current will be catastrophic to the people who live through it, creating public health and refugee crises like we have never seen before, and it will be irreversible on any scale shorter than thousands of years.
Climate anxiety is a defining feature of our age, but it’s not necessarily anything new. Human beings have adapted to shifting climates as long as they have existed, undergoing mass migrations and population booms and collapses in response to a changing world. Although the Bible is often cited by climate deniers, and claimed by anti-science forces, Biblical texts are emerging as an interesting conversation partner among people who are looking for resources for how to think about climate change. A very smart friend of mine, Tim Beal, wrote a book not long ago titled When Time Is Short: Finding Our Way in the Anthropocene, which puts the climate crisis (and the Anthropocene more broadly, with its human-generated environmental destruction) in conversation with Beal’s subject expertise in Hebrew Bible.
The Hebrew Bible was written a long time ago, but it was also written yesterday, in geological terms. It’s an ancient text, certainly, and it reflects traditions and stories from even longer before that. But like a lot of other texts that come to us from antiquity (like the works of Homer, or the Epic of Gilgamesh), it sits in a middle place between our modern world and pre-history. It’s a bridge, linking us to ideas and traditions from the Iron Age or even earlier. If you read the Hebrew Bible with an eye to the kinds of anxieties that would have afflicted Iron Age people, you’ll find a ton of them: worries about crop failures, invasions by rival fiefdoms, natural disasters, patrilinear inheritance, territory, the security of the household, the birth of progeny, appeasement of deities, the new (to them) friction between urban and rural settings, and the perils of centralized government, to name a few.
But perhaps no anxiety is as consistent and prominent in the Hebrew Bible as the anxiety about the natural world and its capacity for destruction. This might be because the Hebrew Bible was written by literate elites within a rapidly urbanizing society, who might have felt the tension between old and new ways of life. And it might have been related to the experience of living in an arid-and-getting-drier part of the world, where religious traditions tended to center deities associated with rainfall and crop growth, as another very smart friend Erica Ferg has demonstrated. But some scholars have suggested that the Bible’s anxieties about the natural world might also be connected to a social memory of environmental collapse—stories and traditions passed on from the deep past about severe shifts in climate and landscape. This makes sense, if you think about it: the migrations that helped shape European populations today, for example, began in the Asian steppes between 3,000 and 6,000 years ago, carrying people and stories across precisely the populations and geographies that then went on to write the Bible beginning about 3,000 years ago. Climate change might well have been one of the causes of this migration; around the beginning of that period of migration, widespread drought led to movements of people-groups, and a cooling Europe weakened the cultures already present there.
(As an aside, if you doubt that stories can be transmitted across such vast stretches of time, consider the example of the Pleiades, also known as the “Seven Sisters.” Folklore from across the world understands this constellation as the “Seven Sisters,” and often includes explanations of why there are only six stars—or “sisters”—visible in it. But the naming of the constellation as the “Seven Sisters” might date to a time when seven stars, and not six, were visible to the naked human eye, which last happened about 100,000 years ago. It’s striking that oral traditions might have preserved a memory of the shape of a constellation for a hundred thousand years, but that is very possibly how the widespread “Seven Sisters” folklore has been preserved, even as there are only six visible stars.)
The upshot of all this history is that when authors in the Bible told stories or shares traditions about the natural world, they might well have been tapping into a social memory of environmental destruction, either from the deep past or their more recent past of a few thousand years. Lots of biblical texts might be linked to Iron Age (or earlier) anxieties about the world and reactions to it: prophetic texts predicting famine, historical texts describing grand migrations like the one undertaken by Sarah and Abraham and their family, and even Psalms singing about the awe of the natural world or the sections of Job describing creation. It’s hard to link any one biblical text to any one climate event, of course, but the frequency of these references and the conditions of the world out of which the Bible arose suggest that this is more than just a coincidence.
Perhaps the strongest case for linking a particular climate anxiety in the Bible with an identifiable ancient catastrophe is the story of Noah’s flood, the aftermath of which is one of the lectionary texts for this Sunday, Genesis 9:8-17. It’s no secret that flood narratives were common in many cultures’ folklores, not just in the Hebrew Bible. The aforementioned Epic of Gilgamesh is one good example, but there are others. Biblical literalists take the widespread flood stories as evidence that the Genesis account of the flood is historical, and that lots of different people noticed a global flood and wrote about it, but that’s not the takeaway of most scholars. Instead, some scholars say, we should notice that these stories are clustered around the Black Sea, and look for evidence there. A popular but very contested set of hypotheses suggests a sudden flood of the area that is now the Black Sea sometime between 8,000 and 15,000 years ago. The memories of that flood might have been the seeds of the flood narratives in ancient near eastern cultures.
But then again, the culprit might have been good old-fashioned sea level rise. As glaciers melted at the end of the ice age, beginning about 20,000 years ago, sea levels rose globally, sometimes dramatically, so much that modern sea levels are as much as 400 feet higher than they were then. In the 21st century we have a lot of anxiety about a sea level rise of a few inches or a few feet—and rightly so, because that amount of rise will be disastrous, inundating coastal areas and rendering many cities uninhabitable. But imagine a change of 400 feet, over a period of several thousand years. That would have been enough to annihilate every coastal community in the world, send people fleeing miles inland, and erase entire landscapes from the surface, like Beringia between Asia and northwestern North America, and Doggerland in northern Europe.
It’s no wonder that people told stories about flooding, and it’s no wonder they theologized the flood in the way we see in this text from Genesis, attributing the flooding to God, and having God promise to never do it again. The trauma of coastal inundation might have been a distant memory by then, just something told in stories and not experienced in living memory, but those kinds of traumas have a way of sticking around. When Genesis has God promise to never flood the earth again, and seal that promise with a rainbow, it would have sounded to ancient Israelites like a promise that had already been fulfilled. They were not predicting that God would not flood the earth again, they were remembering that God had not flooded the earth again, and giving thanks for the covenant that made that possible.
As we plunge into another age of sea level rise and flooding, then, and into the abrupt climate changes that will accompany something like the collapse of the AMOC, we might be able to think about the Hebrew Bible as one of the cultural resources that can help us think about it and contend with it. Noah’s flood is a major event in Genesis, and it is referenced elsewhere throughout the Hebrew Bible. The covenant that’s made in the lectionary reading for this week, in Genesis 9, is one of the major covenants between God and humanity, and the first to be made, if you’re reading either canonically or chronologically. The covenant represents God’s promise to humanity not to destroy the world again by flooding, and the establishment of the rainbow as a sign of that covenant.
What can that say to us today, in the Anthropocene, the age of sea level rise and climate change? For starters, in a very wooden and surface theological sense, I think we can affirm that anthropogenic climate change is not God’s will. If God flooded the earth once and promised to never do it again (implying a divine repentance for the act), then God is not behind the 21st-century shifts in climate or their accompanying destruction. Though many Christians who are aligned with conservative politics attribute climate change to natural cycles or to God’s will, the text of Genesis 9 suggests that God is not behind it.
But we can also notice that in Genesis 9:17 God makes a covenant with “all flesh that is on the earth.” This is not simply a covenant with Noah, or Noah’s family, or even with all humanity. This is a covenant with an ecology, because the story of Noah’s flood is the story of an ecological extinction event. We are likely living through a mass extinction right now, with uncounted species blinking out of existence during our lifetimes, and this lectionary text tells us that when we allow that kind of destruction, and when we cause it, we are doing it in violation of God’s wishes and in violation of a covenant with God.
Perhaps the biggest-picture thing to learn from this passage, though, is that we have been here before, as a species and as God’s people. Climate change is an acute crisis for us and the people who will come after us, but human beings have been responding to climate change for longer than we have been causing it, and we have been folding it into our stories and our theologies all along the way. The anxieties that run through the Hebrew Bible are not exactly our anxieties, but we can recognize in them the same kind of struggle to understand and adapt to a changing world that we ourselves experience. As we barrel down the road toward climate catastrophe, foot heavy on the pedal and hubris in our hearts, it might not seem like a big thing to have the company of a bunch of Bronze-Age authors and their stories. But we might discover that their wisdom, and their insistence that God is in relationship and covenant with all flesh, will be welcome as we go.
Great piece!
Very helpful perspective!