Noah

I haven’t watching the Noah movie yet.  I’ll probably end up watching it on Netflix in the next month or two, but I already know the true story of Noah.  When I was taking a Hebrew class in seminary, one of the topics we discussed was the debate about how many authors wrote the book of Genesis.  The traditional theory is that Moses, inspired by God, wrote Genesis.  Another theory called the JEDP theory, proposes that multiple authors wrote the book of Genesis.  It claims that the different authors called God by different names.  So, one author is said to have written all the sections where God is called Yahweh, another author supposedly wrote the sections where God is called Elohim, and so on.  However, this theory does not take into account the chiasm in Genesis 6:10-9:19.  A chiasm, also known as ring composition, is a Hebrew style of writing where the main point of the story is located at the center rather than the end.  The sections around the center parallel each other.  In the center of the story about Noah we read Gen 8:1 “But God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the cattle that were with him in the ark…”  Follow this link to see the chiasm about Noah and the flood.