The story of Noah and the flood is an interesting insight into the mind of God and the early historians who wrote that part of the Bible. There is God frustrated with the evil of man. He is driven to such a point as to do a complete 'formatting' of his creation.
What is interesting is that due to the evil of the human beings, even the rest of creation is wiped out! The animals, and birds, and reptiles did no wrong. They did not sin. It was basically the humans who fell out with God and his initial plans. So why destroy them? The humans deserved punishment and only they should have been eliminated.
I think there is a parallel for this in the new testament when Jesus speaks of the parable of the wheat and the darnel. The farmer realising that uprooting the weed would actually harm the wheat, lets them all grown and at harvest, everything is cut up. There is no selective elimination. God even if he wanted couldn't have wiped out the human race alone, without in some way affecting the rest of creation.
The present ecological crisis of climate change that we are coming to terms with offers another perspective of the OT narrative. Perhaps it is not God who risked the lives of all the other creatures. Perhaps it was actually the greed and sin of human beings that caused the extinction of the rest of creation. God only tried to salvage what could be. For one who created the world, from nothing in the first instance, it would not have been a great challenge to do it again. But in spite of what humanity did to the rest of creation, God was keen to preserve as much as possible - two or seven pairs of creatures, not just one like that of the humankind! God didn't destroy the rest of creation - human beings had already done it by that point!
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