Old Testament

Week 6: Noah & the Great Flood

Moses 8; Genesis 6–11

16 October 2025

Notes, slides & video will be posted after the class has been held.

On understanding the scope and scale of the Great Flood and how to contextualize the Biblical account:

• Clayton M. White and Mark D. Thomas, “On Balancing Faith in Mormonism with Traditional Biblical Stories: The Noachian Flood Story,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 40, no. 3 (2007): 85–110.

• Duane E. Jeffery, “Noah’s Flood: Modern Scholarship and Mormon Traditions,” Sunstone 134 (October 2004): 27–39, 42–45.

• Paul Seely, “The Flood: Not Global, Barely Local, Mostly Theological,” BioLogos, 26 January–5 February 2010 (3-part series).

• Robert B. Chisholm Jr., “Does God Change His Mind’?,” Bibliotheca Sacra 152 (October–December 1995): 387–99. Chisholm explores the meaning and theological implications of Old Testament passages that indicate God relented from or regretted (ᴋᴊᴠ “repented”) his course of action, as he did in Genesis 6:6–7.

• Paul Y. Hoskisson and Stephen O. Smoot, “Was Noah's Flood the Baptism of the Earth?”, in Let Us Reason Together: Essays in Honor of the Life’s Work of Robert L. Millet, eds. J. Spencer Fluhman and Brent L. Top (Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center at Brigham Young University / Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2016), 163–88.

• Stirling Adams, reviews of The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery, BYU Studies 44, no. 1 (2005): 157–69. The story of the cursing of Canaan (Genesis 9:20–27) was used to justify slavery in Antebellum America; it was similarly used by early Latter-day Saints to explain the ban on ordaining men of African ancestry to the priesthood. Adams reviews a recent book on the history of “the curse of Ham.”

• Paul H. Seely, “The Date of the Tower of Babel and Some Theological Implications,” Westminster Theological Journal 63 (2001): 15–38. Using internal and external evidence, Seely attempts to date the story of the tower of Babel and explain how it fits into our broader understanding of human history.