123rf
A Textual Study of Noah’s Flood
Published: October 21, 2014
|
Last Updated: October 28, 2026
Other examples include the blood and frog plagues in Exodus (7:14-8:11), and the story of the rebellion of Korach, Datan and Abiram in Numbers (16); on the latter, see “Korah, Datan, and Abiram: A Case Study for the Methods of Academic Biblical Studies.”
The parasha division that we have, with the new parasha starting in 6:9, makes this easy to miss.
In fact, they are introduced three times, as they first appear in 5:32. This is one of the reason that Richard Elliott Friedman (Bible with Sources Revealed, ad loc.) describes this text—virtually all of ch. 5 actually—as an editorial layer, written as part of the effort to combine J and P.
Another approach is the Supplementary hypothesis, which sees an earlier account supplemented by a later author. We hope to explore supplementary solutions to the Noah problem at a later date. For examples of this hypothesis at work for other stories, see Tzemah Yoreh’s TABS essay, “The Sacrifice of Isaac in Context: Recovering a Lost Ending of the Akedah,” and Jacob Wright’s TABS essay, “The Birth of Moses: Between Bible and Midrash”.
This ark is not mentioned earlier; perhaps the J account of its construction was deleted by the redactor.
Scholars agree, by and large, on the extent of the J and of the P texts, though they differ at the margins. The sources as delineated here reflect Zev Farber’s reconstruction.
