To understand the Jewish interpretation of the flood story and how it differs from Christianity’s overarching doctrine of Original Sin (beginning with Genesis), three components help piece together the Jewish interpretation puzzle: the sources used to build the narrative about sin, the challenges with defining sin in the Jewish sense versus the Christian understanding, and the Scripture authors’ apparent motive to separate early Hebrew and post-Exile Scripture from pagan myths and the supposed parallels between them. This post will explore each component.
Beginning with sources – as sources help define beginnings – four primary sources are used to understand how Scripture was compiled over time and have corroborated Jewish theology: Yahwist (also known as “J”), Elohist (E), Priestly (P), and Deuteronomist (D) (Boadt et al. 74, 75).
The narrative of humans disobeying God and falling into sin appears to draw mostly from J (Boadt et al. 96) — though because, for example, J and P have similar accounts of the flood story, P essentially supplements the J narrative by showing how God, through Covenants and persistent compassion, ultimately wants humans to be in accord with Him. Therefore, God recognizes that people will continue to sin, but that His mercy and forgiveness continues as well (Boadt et al. 99, 100).
Yet a narrative may not be fully explained without also exploring how Jews define and distinguish the word “sin.” For instance, modern theology has defined three types of sin found in Hebrew Scripture: feeling guilt from committing an act, committing a blatant wrongdoing, and the underlying urge to sin (Lam 5).
In addition, knowing whether a sin is based on breaking cultural traditions versus stories of directly disobeying God’s will, and how to understand the rationale behind the sin, makes the topic of “sin” more multi-faceted (Lam 6, 7) than simply starting with the Christian doctrine Original Sin, and then all other sins branching out from that. Overall, Jews view sin as an ongoing obstacle because of the human proclivity to fall into it (Boadt et al. 97).
Lastly, while not directly related to sin, it is apparent that Hebrew Scripture was built on the authors’ push to explain a monotheistic theology that may have some early, loose parallels to pagan traditions, yet cannot be called “myth” in the same way pagan traditions are understood (Lam 106).
From this, and when considering the combination of J and P sources, Scripture reveals God as the source of goodness and blessings, while also recognizing his creation is fully capable of sinning. This leads God to establish Covenants with the Hebrews, and their recognizing that sin is not only a part of human nature, but is also ongoing battle with obeying God’s will (Boadt et al. 105, 106).
Works Cited
Boadt, Lawrence, et al. Reading the Old Testament : An Introduction.
New York, Paulist Press, 2012.
Lam, Joseph. “The Concept of Sin in the Hebrew Bible.” Religion Compass,
vol. 12, no. 3-4, 19 Feb. 2018, p. e12260,10.1111/rec3.12260.