I have an article in preparation on exactly this topic; it hasn’t been published yet. The questioner is welcome to email me and share his comments and observations. giladstn@gmail.com

To the questioner, see here:
https://mikyab.net/responsa/The Flood—Myth and Legend/

Gil, is the article going to be published on the content site of the Yedaya Institute? When?

Gili — send it to me too. Note that the main question is “where do you stop” (regarding the allegorical reading of the creation passages, the answer is simple as is known; regarding the Flood, as far as I know there’s only what we discussed about the format, the genealogical structures, and so on around the Flood in the ancient Near East).

Y — possibly. In a few months.

Gili, I’d be glad if you would send your article to me as well, at the address elnatanba01@gmail.com
Thanks in advance,
Haim.

Hello M, at first glance! I assume the boundary depends on two points. First, on the present point in time of the writing of the Torah’s events — that is, the time of Moses, who describes the facts of his own day. That is history, whereas what speaks about oral traditions passed down from the past is not necessarily history, and at times may be mixed with aggadic material. (Personally I assume that in all of them, without exception, there is historical truth whose mode of expression is aggadic expansion/exaggeration, but this is not the place to elaborate.) The way to distinguish between one genre and another will be discussed immediately.

According to this approach, we need to change our mistaken expectation of the text. It is quite possible that many parts of the Torah do not reflect historical reality but rather ideal or conceptual reality. The assumption that the story of the Flood belongs to this genre is not baseless, and that it is in fact aggadic material — or better, “aggadah” — akin to the profound aggadic passages of the Sages found in the Talmud and midrash, mixed in among halakhic discussions relevant in practice.

Obviously, these things are not correct with regard to the story of the Exodus from Egypt, which is brought — according to what is written in the Torah — by Moses our teacher, who took the people out and testifies before them that they are the generation that experienced the revelation and the miracles with their own eyes, and that because of this they must observe the commandments of remembrance in memory of those very events (“Because of this the Lord did for me when I went out of Egypt… Not with our fathers did He make this covenant, but with us, we ourselves, here today, all of us alive,” and more). To be sure, the gates of answers have not been locked even for this topic — but the straightforward understanding is as I wrote. That is to say: true historicity for the generation that received the Torah, and a history that may be fictive/aggadic and rhetorical for the generations prior to the recipients of the Torah. (On the difference between the stories of the Patriarchs and the stories of Noah and the ten generations before him, this is not the place to elaborate.)

Think about it: before the method existed of gathering different books according to different genres (like Midrash Rabbah as opposed to Shulchan Arukh and Ketzot HaChoshen), what was Moses our teacher (by God’s command) supposed to do when before him were collections of law, history, and “aggadic teachings of the Sages”?! He would act exactly as they did in the Babylonian Talmud — and write them all in a mixture. Therefore it is possible that the Flood, like the stories of Eve and the serpent, the sons of God and the daughters of men — these are aggadic teachings that were widespread among the people and the surrounding culture, and Moses’ options were either to ignore them and leave them circulating among the people with their theological distortions, or to incorporate them into God’s Torah while updating them anew. At that point, the reader must know how to distinguish between aggadic material and actual history (like the Exodus and the giving of the Torah), and all the more so actual Jewish laws and commands — which are not mere allegory, Heaven forbid. But this task — which seems rather complex — must not weaken one’s hands from making this distinction, which seems simple, and in fact it is standard practice for every student of Talmud, who is trained to distinguish between halakhah and aggadah, and between realistic reality and parables and legends.

The matter is similar to the distinction made by Rabbi Yosef Tov Elem regarding the difference between the commandments in the Torah and the narrative sections: “Furthermore, our Rabbis of blessed memory said in Sanhedrin, chapter Helek (99a), that even one who says the entire Torah is from Heaven except for this verse, which the Holy One, blessed be He, did not say but Moses said on his own, concerning him Scripture says (Numbers 15:31), ‘For he has despised the word of the Lord.’ One may respond that this refers to the matter of the commandments, as we said above, and not to the stories.” Here, however, I am not making that claim about the difference between the writers — for according to our claim all of it is from Moses, who wrote from the Mighty One — but about the difference in the truth-status of what is described in those texts. Aggadic material on the one hand, and commandment material on the other (where part of the commandments is to remember events from the sacred and true history that took place in the Exodus from Egypt before the eyes of all Israel). (Though one must still examine the commandment of the sciatic nerve, and this is not the place to elaborate.)

What is the distinction between history and allegory? According to Rabbi Levi ben Avraham in Livyat Hen, every story that does not accord with reason is a signpost for the enlightened reader to switch gears and move to a deeper allegorical reading. But so long as the history being described does not indicate such a deviation, there is no reason to remove it from its plain meaning. For example: a talking serpent is such a signpost. In Rabbi Levi’s view, the Flood is too: “One may wonder at the destruction of all seed in the Flood, such that existence did not continue except through Seth; and after all, the Flood was not in the Land of Israel. Also, why did God not command Noah to go to the Land of Israel, as our Sages proved from His statement (Ezekiel 22:24), ‘a land that is not cleansed, nor rained upon in the day of indignation’? Moreover, that region was too small to contain two of every species. And what is meant by their saying (Shabbat 41a and elsewhere), ‘And I will look upon it to remember the everlasting covenant’ (Genesis 9:16)? Besides, the rainbow is a natural phenomenon. However, all this is possible according to the hidden meaning, and the hidden meaning is that the Flood hints at destruction… and Scripture speaks of destruction under the imagery of a flood of waters,” etc., and this is not the place to elaborate. Yet according to him this does not negate the historical core of the story, which did take place in part. And similarly Rabbi Nissim of Marseille:
“‘The matter of the Flood is strange and wondrous; however, it is within the realm of possibility, especially according to our Rabbis, who understood that the Flood did not encompass the whole inhabited world, for they already said that the Flood was not in the Land of Israel. It is of this type that I called it ‘wondrous.’” Notice the nice little move by which he learns by analogy from the fact that the Land of Israel was not rained upon (something derived from a midrash of the Sages that took Ezekiel out of its plain sense), that other areas too were not flooded. Rabbi Levi says this also with regard to the animal species: just as the re’em and others did not drown, so too distant species elsewhere in the world. And there were additional thinkers in the Middle Ages.

What is the constraint? That it goes against reason. Now the difference between this and the descriptions of the Exodus and the miracles at Sinai becomes clear: those too go against reason, but there the situation is different, from two sides (and one can examine which of them is primary): 1. The miracles of Egypt are contemporaneous with the time of writing of the text, and therefore they are testimony, not memory, as above. 2. They are described without embellishment as divine revelations and as God’s overriding of nature. That is: they are not trying to dress themselves up as natural events, but to nullify nature in order to show God’s power (the miracles of Egypt and the descent of the manna) or His revelation (the fire at Sinai, the pillar of fire and the cloud).

Therefore even rationalist thinkers can (not always) accept these events as reality and not allegory. But the Flood is not described as a miracle or revelation; it is seemingly an event occurring through natural means — rainfall and great subterranean waters (which God, of course, caused, just as He causes everything). Since that is so, we must ask whether it is realistic that such waters covered the highest mountains — and then disappeared entirely within forty days. Similarly, is it realistic that all the animals of the world came to the ark and entered it, and afterwards dispersed from it to all the continents of the earth? If this is not realistic, and it is not written that there was a miracle, then according to those thinkers it can be explained as allegory. (I don’t have the time, but all this also depends on another element — the factor of the story’s spread and its universal fame before its being committed to writing in the Torah, etc.)

Let me do a small exercise:

1. Abraham fathering a child at a hundred years old (against nature) — this is described as a miracle and therefore can be historical and not allegorical — but only if the criterion for realism is that it is described as miraculous and not as natural. By contrast, if the criterion is the timing of the event relative to its writing — then Abraham lived hundreds of years before the writing of the Torah, so the writing about him is not contemporaneous testimony but “memory” that was passed on (perhaps) in the nation — and therefore there is no obstacle to explaining him too allegorically.

2. Six hundred thousand Israelites at Sinai surviving forty years (against nature) — the time of writing was the time of the event, that is, Moses wrote in the Torah the number of those who went out in his own time — and therefore this is history and not allegory, but that too, as above, only if this is the measure of “truth” as against allegory. If, however, the criterion is the description of the matter as a directed miracle and a deviation from nature — then regarding the number of those who went out and their survival there is no such description of a miracle. True, manna came down from heaven (and Moses wondered beforehand, “The people among whom I am are six hundred thousand on foot… shall flocks and herds be slaughtered for them and suffice them?!”), but no miracle at all is described regarding the water supply for such a number of people. Sometimes a striking of the rock, and that’s it. Were it not for the Sages’ assumption about Miriam’s well, we would have no way to explain how Israel did not die of thirst! According to this, it is possible that the description of the number of those who went out is allegorical, and that a smaller number in fact left Egypt (whether by assigning another meaning to “six hundred thousand,” or by understanding the number as some kind of allegory), and as such could have survived in the oases of Sinai and Transjordan.

With God’s help, 4 Av 5778

To Gil — greetings,

The traditions about the Flood were not distant “prehistory” in the days of Moses. Take into account that Jacob, the grandfather of Moses’ mother, was 50 years old at the time of Shem’s death.

Meaning: among the Israelites in Moses’ time there were solid traditions about the events of the Flood. One certainly cannot sell a “stiff-necked,” opinionated, critical people mythological stories that never happened.

From the Torah’s descriptions it is clear that this was not a natural event, but divine intervention. The Flood came because of humanity’s sins, and Noah’s rescue came because of his righteousness. This teaches us that the world’s existence depends on fulfilling its moral purpose.

What needs discussion is whether when the Torah says “He blotted out every living thing that was upon the face of the ground,” it means the entire globe, or whether, just as what is said about Joseph — that all the earth came to Joseph to buy grain — means the whole surrounding region, so too in the Flood the intent is the known “civilized world,” and the Torah does not address what lay “beyond the mountains of darkness.”

Support for the possibility that this was a worldwide event comes from the fact that many cultures around the world have traditions about a flood. On the other hand, the list of nations descended from Noah from whom the earth spread out deals entirely with the region of the Middle East and the Mediterranean basin, from Persia in the east to Greece in the west, and from the Ararat mountains in the north to Cush in the south. From this it appears that the Torah’s focus is the space in which the Israelites live.

With blessings,
Shatz Levinger

Regarding the approach of allegorical interpretation of Torah stories, Rashba’s opposition to the philosophers of his time is well known; among them one heard things like “Abraham and Sarah as matter and form” (whereas regarding the aggadic teachings of the Sages there is more tendency among the medieval authorities, including Rashba, to accept allegorical interpretation).

Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (in letter 95, if I remember correctly) speaks about the possibility of doing this regarding the story of the creation of the world, since “the Account of Creation” is among the secrets of the Torah where allegorical interpretation is fitting. But to make the Torah’s narratives into allegory is less plausible. The intellectually demanding Jewish people would not have bought “mythological stories” without a solid historical basis.

Gil, I didn’t understand — do you hold that the Torah lied to us regarding the six hundred thousand?
We have detailed genealogies and precise numbers for every single tribe in the wilderness…
It sounds far-fetched to me that the Torah actually concealed the real data from us…

Hello Kehat, when I have time I’ll write, God willing, about the meanings of the six hundred thousand. In any case, this is not a new topic at all, and many have dealt with it. They showed that there are several ways of reading these numbers. According to this, let’s say that in the tribe of Reuben there were sixty-five thousand and four hundred — the meaning would be sixty-five “thousands” — with four hundred men. “Thousand” is a military unit, and there were sixty-five units. Or alternatively, it is not the word “thousand” that must be interpreted, but rather the number six hundred, which is a symbolic number for a large military multitude (the six hundred men of Dan, the six hundred chariots of Pharaoh), just as the number 400 functions in the Sages. This is very similar to the aggadic descriptions of the Sages about the destruction, where they speak — not long after the events — of millions upon millions of children slaughtered in the city of Betar: “The emperor Vespasian, who killed in the city of Betar four hundred myriads, and some say four thousand myriads (= 40 million human beings!),” and from their blood that flowed to the sea the horses swam up to their nostrils:
“They went on killing them until the horse sank in blood up to its nostrils, and the blood rolled along stones weighing forty se’ah until the blood went four mil into the sea. And if you should say that it is close to the sea — behold it is forty mil from the sea… For seven years the nations of the world fertilized their vineyards from the blood of Israel without manure.”
This is a stirring description of the intensity of the pain that the destruction left in the Jewish people — and it was clear to the listeners that the description was not objective but psychological-subjective. Thus all the literary intensification and exaggeration only added to the credibility of the event — a credibility that rises above the technical details of the data to what they express at the emotional level.

And this is how Maharal of Prague explained the matter in his book Netzach Yisrael: “We have already told you that it always mentions it with the expression ‘the city of Betar,’ because it was a very mighty city, and it represented the strength and power of Israel… Therefore it says that in the city of Betar four hundred myriads were killed, etc., for just as the number six hundred thousand indicates multiplicity, as explained above, so the number four hundred myriads indicates an inhabited place, since the number four is an area spread to four directions, and every place is measured by four, as they allotted a person four cubits of space (Gittin 77b), because place is square. Thus we find that the Land of Israel is four hundred parasangs by four hundred parasangs. Therefore he said that four hundred [myriads] were killed, because that city was an important place, and according to its importance the number four in its greatest form suits it, for place is measured by the number four, and the people dwelling in it are measured likewise by the number four. Therefore he said that when the city of Betar was destroyed, four hundred myriads were killed in it. And some say four thousand myriads.”

In short, the Sages did not lie and the Torah did not lie. It gave symbolic meaning to the numbers, or it described the counting of the tribes differently from what we are accustomed to. True, the joining of all the half-shekels to the weight of the sockets gives support to taking the count literally — but on the other hand it can also provide meaning for the symbolic idea the Torah seeks to describe: that all Israel are the foundational sockets of God’s Tabernacle in the world. And this is not the place to elaborate, and more on that another time. But clearly the simpler approach is that there really were six hundred thousand in the literal sense.

With God’s help, 5 Av 5778

We do indeed find that Scripture speaks in exaggeration, such as “cities great and fortified up to heaven,” which is a metaphorical expression whose metaphorical meaning was clear to every listener.

However, in the count of the Israelites, the thousands mean exactly that — the number 1000. The proof is from the accounting of “the silver of those of the congregation who were numbered,” where the half-shekel from each person came to a total of “one hundred talents and one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five shekels…” (Exodus 38:25).

With blessings,
Shatz Levinger

Shatz, peace and blessings! I’ll begin with a short quotation from your words and answer: “Meaning: among the Israelites in Moses’ time there were solid traditions about the events of the Flood. One certainly cannot sell a ‘stiff-necked,’ opinionated, critical people mythological stories that never happened… Rabbi Kook (in letter 95, if I remember correctly) speaks about the possibility of doing this regarding the story of the creation of the world, since ‘the Account of Creation’ is among the secrets of the Torah where allegorical interpretation is fitting, but to make the Torah’s narratives into allegory is less plausible. The intellectually demanding Jewish people would not have bought ‘mythological stories’ without a solid historical basis.”

Well, the Jewish people did not “buy” mythological stories. They already held them themselves beforehand. They had been occupied with their scrolls long before the giving of the Torah as a book. The Torah’s role (in the narrative sections) is like that of Rabbi Judah the Prince’s Mishnah. It merely edits the existing material — sometimes expanding, sometimes shortening, sometimes adding, sometimes censoring. Therefore the Flood story was not regarded by Israel as a mythological-aggadic imposition from outside, but as a solid tradition equivalent to scientific information. This is not the place to elaborate. (That is, I don’t have the time.)

And regarding what you wrote: “In the count of the Israelites, the thousands mean exactly that — the number 1000. The proof is from the accounting of ‘the silver of those of the congregation who were numbered,’ where the half-shekel from each person came to a total of ‘one hundred talents and one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five shekels…’” — I already answered that in passing, and permit me to follow the custom of my teacher Prof. Shalom Rosenberg, who often said, “As I already wrote in one of my articles” (and would sometimes add, “I don’t remember in which one”): “True, the joining of all the half-shekels to the weight of the sockets gives support to taking the count literally — but on the other hand it can also provide meaning for the symbolic idea the Torah seeks to describe: that all Israel are the foundational sockets of God’s Tabernacle in the world.” That is, the tribes were not really counted according to our method, and as Bible scholars have already suggested, 45,500, for example, means forty-five military units — ‘thousand’ — with five hundred men. Divide 500 by 45 units and you get something like a unit of 10 men. (It’s forced, and therefore I said there are other methods too, and when I have time, “if God decrees life” — as Rabbi Yitzchak Ezrachi says — I’ll map them all out.) At present, this is the plain meaning of the matter. On top of that there is another aggadic-conceptual layer of the Torah, and it says that if you count the numbers — in another way — they arrive at one hundred and some talents of silver, which was from the outset the traditional number for the weight of the Tabernacle’s sockets (or perhaps that number too carries a conceptual-numerological message). And what is the message in the fact that the number of Israelites is exactly equal to the sockets of the Tabernacle (when calculated in this way)? The message is that Israel are indeed the foundation of God’s throne of glory in the world. God dwells within the people of Israel; they are the foundations that bear Him, they are His throne of glory and His footstool (not necessarily in Rabbi Kook’s terminology).
P.S. Counting methods in the ancient Near East were sometimes very different from what we think. See, for example, this wonderful article, which came to curse and ended up blessing:
http://www.1vsdat.org/index.php/2013-02-21-20-40-12/%D7%A4%D7%A8%D7%A1%D7%95%D7%A6%D7%99%D7%9D-%D7%A9%D7%9C-%D7%90%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%99-%D7%99%D7%94%D7%95%D7%93%D7%94/item/1739-%D7%A9%D7%95%D7%A9%D7%9C%D7%AA-%D7%A7%D7%99%D7%99%D7%9F-%D7%90%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%99-%D7%99%D7%94%D7%95%D7%93%D7%94
Notice that the primeval ancestors of Babylonia lived for hundreds of thousands of years, and once they deciphered the sexagesimal method and the inflated multiplication of each king’s reign by six hundred, the real duration of their dynasty became evident to all. Thus, Dumuzi, who reigned for 36,000 years, in fact reigned for 60 years. And Hubur, who reigned for 28,000 years, reigned only 48 years.
Could it be that the count of the Israelites is also some kind of multiplication by sixty or six hundred? Maybe they actually counted only a few thousand or tens of thousands, and the multiplication is an expression of the blessing “May the Lord make you a thousand times as many,” and the like? Just as the Sages tell us of an astronomically round number among the dead of Betar, and they certainly knew that this was not the plain sense. It is possible that the number 600,000 had a military-symbolic meaning — “the armies of God” in the world. Or something kabbalistic, similar to what Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto says in Derekh Hashem: “And the Supreme Wisdom saw it fit that this effort be divided into roots and branches. That is: first there would be a time of effort for the roots among the generations, and afterward for the branches in them… The branches of Abraham our father’s tree that are inclusive are up to six hundred thousand — namely those who went out of Egypt and from whom the Israelite nation was formed, and to them the Land of Israel was apportioned. All who came after them are considered particulars of these inclusive generations. To these the Torah was given, and then this tree is said to have reached its perfection.”
Maybe, in general, when all the language around you is rhetorical/poetic and exaggerated, then sticking to precise-realistic numbers is simply not educationally correct? For had the Torah said that there were, say, 27,476 who left Egypt, all the Torah’s readers at that time would have assumed this was hyperbole and that in reality they counted only 1/60 of that? Give to the wise and he will become wiser.

The count of the sons of Dan is: “sixty-two thousand and seven hundred” (Numbers 1:39). That is to say: in a “thousand” there is more than 700. Why not simply say that “thousand” means 1000?

With the blessing “O king, live forever,” from me, the youngest among the thousands of Israel,
Shatz Levinger

In the signature:
With the blessing “O king, live forever” (Daniel 6:7), from me…

“The count of the sons of Dan is: ‘sixty-two thousand and seven hundred’ (Numbers 1:39). That is to say: in a ‘thousand’ there is more than 700.”

As I wrote, this is the meaning of the verse: “sixty-two military units (= thousand) and seven hundred fighters.”
Forced? Yes. Impossible? No. Certainly no more so than the assumption that such a quantity actually wandered through Sinai without leaving traces.

With God’s help, 6 Av 5778

To Gil — greetings,

As I mentioned, the numbers in the Torah are unambiguous. The weights of the six hundred thousand became one hundred sockets, and the shekels of the remaining 3,550 came to a total of 1,775 shekels. So a thousand is 1000, and therefore there can be a remainder of 700 that was not divided into thousands.

As for your question about the traces: even naturally speaking it is not a question. Did anyone excavate every meter of the huge Sinai Peninsula? And in the three thousand years that have passed since then, wouldn’t the sandstorms and desert animals have sufficed to scatter any possible remnant?

All the more so because the Torah testifies that the entire existence of the Israelites was miraculous — manna from heaven, water brought up by staff or speech, pillars of fire and cloud guiding the people and protecting them from enemies, their clothing did not wear out and their feet did not swell, and the serpents and fiery snakes of the wilderness did not harm them.

When it comes to a reality of ongoing miracle, is there room to ask questions of “natural plausibility”? Is the hand of the Lord too short to leave, after they departed a campsite, a tidy place clean of refuse, as befits “the people of the Torah,” which is “the order of the world”? Go investigate whether the refuse came from what was swallowed or from what was burned 🙂

With blessings,
Shatz Levinger