Q&A: Questions About the Flood
Questions About the Flood
Question
With the help of Heaven (or rather, with the help of heavenly wickedness).
Hello.
A. Why did God save Noah specifically?
B. Why did He destroy all of humanity in the Flood, while in the case of Sodom, which was just one city, He held off over 10 righteous people?
C. What did they do to deserve destruction? What could they possibly have done that was so terrible?
D. How were those whom He destroyed in the Flood different from the other generations in human history that He did not destroy?
Answer
I assume that generation was not only more wicked, but entirely wicked as well (that is, there were no righteous people, aside from Noah, whom some interpret favorably and others unfavorably). Therefore, the Holy One, blessed be He, thought it proper to destroy them all.
Discussion on Answer
That’s not an answer. That’s what is written. The creatures that come out from under the hand of the Holy One, blessed be He, come out with free choice. Whether they choose good or evil—that’s their decision.
That, for example, is a distinction every little child knows how to make.
It says, “The wickedness of man was great on the earth, and every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all day long” [Genesis 6:5]. It doesn’t say they were characterized by any special evil compared to the rest of human history. And when you read history and think they had some unique and exceptional evil, that’s foolish. And I don’t accept the second distinction for a simple reason: the Holy One, blessed be He, has to bear responsibility for what He created. Didn’t He learn what Rabbi Shlomo Alkabetz wrote: “The end of the deed is in the initial thought”?
A question for Rabbi Michi, since we’re already discussing Noah.
Seemingly, only Noah could testify to what happened in the Flood and before it; thousands of people didn’t see it, because only he and his children were alive on the day they left the ark. So how do we know for sure that the story written in the Torah is true and that this is indeed what happened? Maybe wealthy Noah had a boat, which other people didn’t have, and thanks to that, when the Flood began he entered the ark and took animals with him, and that’s how he was saved. In other words, everything was true except for the fact that God appeared to him, commanded him to enter the ark, and so on…
Why is it that if I say this thesis to a mainstream religious rabbi he will get angry at me, while at the same time he refutes the claim of the truth of the prophecies of Jesus and Muhammad by saying that it’s a prophecy that only one person (or 12 people) claims to have seen?
But according to the Torah, it was given to Moses by God, who wrote in it things as they actually happened, and we do not live by Noah’s account.
Elisaf, I don’t understand the question. Beit Hillel wrote well: do we know about the Flood from Noah’s mouth? It’s written in the Torah that was given by God to Moses before the eyes of all Israel.
I’m part of Israel, and it wasn’t given before my eyes. When it is given before my eyes, we’ll talk.
Great God.
Any of the quick people here—answer question C for me. In detail. And post it here.
I need it for tomorrow.
According to your answer, creatures that were, to put it mildly, not exactly successful came out from under God’s hand. But the main thing is that in every generation over millions of years there is a minority of righteous people who somehow atone for the wickedness (to a lesser degree, for some reason, than in the generation of the Flood) of the rest of the majority, instead of making a distinction that every schoolchild knows how to make. Blessed be God forever, amen and amen.