Dennis Prager explains the Biblical story:
Next week, the film “Noah” opens.
Having taught the Torah (the Five Books of Moses) from the Hebrew for more than 40 years (hundreds of hours are available by download through my website), I consider the biblical flood story one of the world’s most profound moral teachings. As I will show, it means that God cares about goodness more than anything else.
Let me explain by answering the most frequent challenges to the story.
Q: Why did God destroy the world?
A: Because “The Lord saw how great was man’s wickedness on earth. … And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth and His heart was saddened” (Genesis 6:5-6).
When God created the world, He announced after each day’s creations, “It was good.” But only after His final creation — the human being — on the sixth day, did God say, “It was very good.” God was particularly pleased with, and had the highest hopes for, this creation, the only one created “in His image.” This is not about man having God’s physical attributes (God is not physical). It is about humans being infinitely more precious than all other creations; and only man, like God, has moral knowledge and therefore moral free will.
When God saw how cruelly human beings treated one another, He decided that He would start over. Once people reach a certain level of widespread evil, life is pointless.
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Given the unprecedented ignorance of the Bible in contemporary America, it is likely that more young Americans will only know the Noah of “Noah.” We can only hope that the film offers even a fraction of the wisdom of the original.
