The biblical story of the Great Flood deals with many aspects of guilt and punishment in the relationship between God and humankind. However, throughout the literary and scholarly reception it has been considered disturbing that God punished people with total annihilation without giving them the opportunity to repent and to improve. This has always been a great challenge for theologians, thinkers and poets. On the one hand, God’s purification of the world was, as cleansings are always, deadly and destructive. On the other hand, ‘Genesis’ tells us that Noah also saved the ›unclean‹ animals in the ark, not only the ›pure‹ ones. Should this mean that guilty people were justified as well?
