Chapter 4. Violence in the Flood Narrative: Text and Reception

The story of the elimination of humankind in the great deluge (Genesis 6–9) is one of the most violent narratives in the Hebrew Bible. It not only has a rich history of reception, but also a kind of prequel in the Mesopotamian flood traditions. This contribution focuses on the nature of violence in these traditions and in the biblical Flood Narrative itself, also against the background of its dialogue with Mesopotamian worldviews and its reception in 1 Enoch and Jubilees, as well as in the film Noah (2014). Despite the fact that all of these stories are more or less intertextually related and take a primeval cosmic imbalance as their point of departure, their different descriptions of the incentive for the divine violence in the deluge turns out to be of major importance for their views of the nature of this violence and the relations between the divine and human realms. In addition, the reception history of the biblical text shows that serious interactions with the biblical text itself evoke the question of the nature of the relation between these readings and their biblical source.