One of the dearest friends of this channel, one of its most faithful and generous supporters, is an Old Testament scholar above my paygrade who wrote a good and useful dissertation that I want to review for the Bible nerds who watch Ward on Words.
His name is Dustin Burlet, and his book is Judgment and Salvation: A Rhetorical-Critical Reading of Noah’s Flood in Genesis. Dustin has real linguistic skill and a diligent ability to read reams of literature on given topics. He’s also a hoot, I happen to know. I met him on a trip down the Grand Canyon, and he had everybody in stitches.
But his book has a serious point. And I want to share that point with you to edify you—and to acquaint you with a few Bible study ideas that I myself learned from Dustin’s work on the flood. Dr. Burlet writes,
As will be demonstrated throughout this book: “God’s mercy exceeds his wrath.”
Does that feel counterintuitive to you? The flood is about God killing almost every human being on the planet, and almost every animal, because of the extreme wickedness of mankind. And yet, Dustin says,
The text of the Genesis Flood categorically underscores what God did to “preserve” life in spite of the disaster.
Dustin even quotes another scholar who calls this a “flood of grace.” And another, John Goldingay, who draws a parallel between Genesis 8 and Song of Songs 8: “Floods of waters have not quenched love.”
This book is rigorous and detailed; some of my favorite points actually came among the minute linguistic and exegetical observations Dr. Burlet made. But it has an edifying point, because the flood narrative does. Dustin says,
The arc of salvation in the Flood narrative can be broken down into two main ideas. First, God’s intention for creation is not thwarted and, secondly, God commits himself to his intentions of creation.
The rhetorical-critical method
Dustin goes about arguing this with a set of tools called “rhetorical criticism.” I wasn’t 100% with him when I first read him saying that “rhetorical criticism captures the persuasive intent of the text far more effectively than the literary critical method.” But I understand better what he meant now. Literary methods tend to focus on describing something other than the persuasive purpose of a given text. I’m still not 100% with Dustin on this, because I don’t cut a hard line between the two sets of tools, as we’ll see. But I have to say that before I read this book I was almost all the way on the other side, seeing little if any value in rhetorical criticism.
Before I read this book I defaulted mainly to literary-critical tools. What does that mean? It means establishing a genre. It means looking for plot, character, and setting. It means finding the theme, the thought flow. It means naming the imagery and, especially, the literary devices used by various writers. It means slowing down, label-maker in hand, to print out the labels for those literary devices and stick them on the phrases and clauses where you see them in Scripture. It means patient, slow reading.
I had not previously done a deep dive into rhetorical criticism. To me, that set of tools meant technical labels, apparently very ancient ones, applied to texts written by authors who maybe weren’t thinking in these categories. Rhetorical analyses I have encountered led me to see the field as dry and inconclusive when applied to Scripture. I obviously once saw less value in rhetorical criticism than I do now, after reading this book. Dustin showed me that you can look for tools of rhetoric, which are simply tools of persuasion, in a careful way that yields results. He showed that rhetorical-critical tools are another means of careful Bible reading, a complement to literary criticism rather than a competitor to it.
In fact, I might observe that Dustin’s “close examination of: (1) persons of verbs, (2) the uses of waw [the Hebrew word “and,” which begins countless biblical clause], (3) and verbal forms” is just what literary scholars do. I simply don’t see literary criticism and rhetorical criticism as enemies, but as different shaped screwdrivers right next to each other on the rack on the outside wall of my office in my garage.
Dustin does have a whole chapter devoted to methodology, and he does use technical labels from rhetorical criticism such as “exigence,” which means “any problem, obstacle, or conflict that requires a solution.” “Exigence” is not a word I’ve seen in literary critical study of the Bible; there I might see instead “conflict.” And yet surely the Bible contains exigences. Dustin quoted another scholar who pointed out that “the text [of Scripture] derives much of its significance from its ability to speak persuasively to audiences in situations far removed from its original exigence.”
I like that. That’s true; it’s part of the genius of the Bible. This is one reason that Dustin can call the biblical text “worldview formative rhetoric.” Dustin is a diligent quoter, and I found myself highlighting a fair number of his quotes. (I read the book in Logos and bought it with my own money.) One of those quotes came from a favorite of mine, Kevin Vanhoozer, who said,
a narrative displays a worldview, an interpreted world. In addition to relating a series of events, authors take up an attitude towards it . . . narratives are powerful instruments for shaping the way we see, imagine and think about the world.
Dustin rightly argues that all stories are shaped rhetorically, therefore, and they contain efforts to argue and persuade. Dustin asks: what are the rhetorical purposes of the Genesis flood narrative? What is it trying to persuade readers to do or be or love or think? Moses had reasons for writing this story to the original audience, which, as Dustin points out, were the Israelites “who survived the wilderness wanderings and crossed the Jordan River under Joshua’s leadership.” But the text was clearly written with persuasive purposes that go beyond that audience—and, believers like Dustin and me will say, extends to modern-day Christians in far-off America and Canada.
The persuasive purposes of Moses
Dustin very carefully lays out the rhetorical units in the flood texts, finding the seams that separate different portions of the narrative and make different persuasive points. He works to describe the persuasive portrait being drawn by the author, Moses, of the facts of history. Each of Dustin’s chapters focuses on a successive “rhetorical unit” in the flood story.
Dustin’s chapters get pretty technical, especially when they are doing their rhetorical labeling thing. But the purpose is not mere description; it’s like a whale pushing hard to swim a straight line under the surface, pushing arduously against the current, who then bursts out of the water into the air. The bursting wouldn’t be special if the underwater swimming didn’t earn the photogenic moments.
I just want to share some of those moments with you.
Initial exigence
Dustin describes the rhetorical situation Moses sets up initially in Genesis 6:5–8:
The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the LORD regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the LORD said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.” But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD.
Dustin points out that, from what rhetorical critics call “the git-go,”
Yahweh’s awareness of sin does not just lead to judgment (Gen 6:5–7) but also to salvation (Gen 6:8). Gen 6:8 is the first of many evidences providing the foundation for my assertion God ultimately desires life—not death—for all of his creation.
Parallels to the experience of the original readers
We Bible readers are not wrong to look for the contemporary relevance of the biblical texts. That relevance is present. God’s Spirit put it there for us to find, all these years later. We tell each other, though, and rightly so, that we have to make a stop in our time machine before we can bring out contemporary relevance. We have to put ourselves in the sandals of the original readers of these texts.
That’s kinda hard to do. We don’t know those people. They’re very, very dead. We have to make some educated guessing. Dustin observes helpfully in his book that is kind of guessing
is often required of different canonical texts since it cannot generally be determined how the primary audience responded to them in their initial setting and environment, aside from the fact that the texts are well-preserved and included in the collection of writings which eventually came to be known as Scripture.
And ain’t that true? The mere fact that these texts were collected says something about how they were regarded by the people—the nation—featured in them. Dustin says that his “discussion of rhetorical effectiveness” in the book
align[s] with the hermeneutics of affirmation, i.e., reading the text in such a way that the interpreter can experience the text’s persuasive authority.
Yeah; that’s just charity—listening to the text the way you wish others would listen to you. And in Dustin’s case, he paid special attention to listening to the text with the ears of the true original hearers.
I found it helpful that Dustin really asked himself, hard, what we can know about the “exigences” of Moses’ original readers, and how their situation might help explain what Moses intended to do with his various writings.
While the fate of those outside the ark is inevitable and terrible, the fate of those inside is not enviable. Since the ark has no rudder, they have no control over their destination and all they can do is wait and hope. Exiled Israelites probably saw themselves in a similar situation to those in the ark. Both shared that most debilitating sense of uncertainty combined with an inability to control their own destiny.
Dustin used a nice little hedge, a “probably,” because we can’t know this with certainty. But putting oneself in the shoes of others is hard and helpful work when done well, and Dustin did it well.
Textual cohesion
Dustin mentions the common practice of looking underneath the stories of the Pentateuch for their supposed sources. He doesn’t do this kind of work; his work demonstrates why that kind of work is—and these are my words, not Dustin’s—that kind of work is silly and pointless. It’s really rather simple. Dustin says that his work “lends support to theories of the rhetorical cohesion of the text.” This is the straightforward, scholarly way to say such things. One must be modest. But he’s my friend, and I don’t have to hew to all the academic niceties, so I wish to add, “Boo-yah.” Like, no duh. The story holds together. I share Jesus’ opinion that it was written by one man, Moses, with the authority of God’s Spirit. Of course it holds together.
Humorous and technical observations
A little aside here before I conclude. Dustin, as I said, is a rather humorous individual. I can’t say that dissertations, as a literary genre, are generally known for their humor. It’s hard to slip that in past one’s supervisor. But Dustin managed it. I laughed out loud when I read this:
Given the unique terminology shared by the Bible and the ANE Flood texts, it is thought-provoking to consider [and here Dustin quotes another scholar, which is one of the only ways you can get away with humor in dissertations] “there is no evidence to suggest that the ark in Genesis recapitulates sacred space. The rectangular dimensions suggest instead that it recapitulates the standard shape of boats.”
I loved that.
I also loved the love lavished on linguistics in Dustin’s book. Somebody needs to do the hard work of comparing Hebrew to other ancient languages so that we can sharpen up our understanding of various obscure terms.
For example, have you ever wondered what “gopher wood” is? That’s what the KJV and ESV and many other translations have God telling Noah to make the ark out of. Until I read Dustin’s book, I assumed it was some specific tree species in the Middle East that I hadn’t heard of. Dustin clarifies:
A transliteration of the Hebrew term גפר yields “gopher” hence the rendering of “gopher wood” in many EVV (KJV, NKJV NAB, NASB, ESV, BBE, CSB, RSV). The exact nature of the wood is uncertain.
This means that what most translators have done in English for a long time is just transliterate the Hebrew word. They don’t even guess. The Geneva Bible translators did guess: they said “pine.” Jerome in the Latin Vulgate went with “smooth wood,” for reasons I don’t know.
Ok, so I really like these little tidbits that Dustin discusses. He talks very carefully through the dimensions of the ark, the specific Hebrew word for “flood,” and many other tiny points of interest that would make for good color in an expository sermon series on Genesis.
Conclusion
Dustin repeats his purposes multiple times in the book:
This book contends the text of the Noachian deluge narrative categorically underscores all God did to preserve life in spite of the disaster. Despite the picture of devastation that the narrative depicts, the prominent emphasis of the text is on deliverance and redemption i.e., salvation, not judgment. The focus of the Genesis Flood is acutely bent towards God’s salvific rather than punitive purposes.
He writes,
By means of the covenant God implemented with Noah, his sons, and all of creation, including representatives of the entire animal kingdom within their kinds, the text communicates how all life is precious to God. Though judgment for sin is certain and the penalty for disobedience is grave, whatever befalls the earth, it will always teem with life for God is gracious and merciful.
This is the God of the Bible: he takes sin seriously, deadly seriously. And he is full of mercy. I’m grateful to my friend Dustin for rigorously reminding me of these truths from the text of the Genesis flood story.
Extra tidbits for newsletter subscribers
So what’s been happening is I post my videos, and then a few days later I post the script online, including in the newsletter to email subscribers. This means I get to hear from commenters before I post the script. And this means I have more thoughts.
One commenter was critical in a constructive way of my comments about source criticism. I was very dismissive. I said it’s silly and pointless. Regular viewers and readers will know that I don’t usually reach for such insulting adjectives.
This commenter said,
Commenting on source criticism you say “no duh the story holds together.” Sure, but all source critical scholars think this. Every single one argues that there were later editors that took multiple sources, stitched them together, and then edited further, sometimes in multiple stages at different times by different people. So to see a unified narrative is not a surprise and isn’t much evidence that there weren’t multiple prior sources.
I do think I was misleading and unclear in my statement. I replied:
I disagree with the implication that source critics can discern seams in the Pentateuchal texts that can reveal their sources. I have J, E, D, and P in mind, of course. I don’t usually call what intelligent people do “silly and pointless,” even if I disagree with them. I try to see where they’re coming from. But in this case I’ve gotten to a point of frustration: I follow C. S. Lewis’ skepticism that modern day readers can discern sources in ancient documents. And, in my experience, source critics posit multiple sources in order to reveal hidden differences of emphasis or opinion among them. Luke tells us he used sources; Moses does not.
There really are whdole swaths of biblical studies that I don’t pay attention to. That’s in part because I simply do not have the time as a busy tentmaker. That’s also because I find it so dry. So frequently, when people don’t believe that the Bible is God’s word, or when they feel some academic necessity to pretend they don’t believe, their work lacks the spark that makes it interesting to me. I am far from saying that I can get no benefit from the writings of unbelievers about Scripture. I am saying that the writers I appreciate don’t hide behind academic hedging. They don’t pretend to be fully objective.