Journal: Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal
Volume: DBSJ 30:1 (NA 2025)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

DBSJ 30 (2025) p. 181

Book Reviews

Judgment & Salvation: A Rhetorical-Critical Reading of Noah’s Flood in Genesis, by Dustin G. Burlet. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2022. xxxv + 268 pp. $40.00.

As a corollary to debates about the age of the earth, discussions about Noah’s flood have tended to divide interpreters into rival camps. Conservative interpreters, exemplified by Answers in Genesis and the Institute for Creation Research, generally conclude that the flood was global and catastrophic. A growing segment of evangelicals, usually those who contend for an old earth, counter that a local flood comports better with the scientific evidence. One example of the latter approach is Gavin Ortlund’s popular vlog addressing the question “Was Noah’s Flood Local?” (available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rq5tUg4SWzs, accessed 28 April 2025).

Burlet’s study of Noah’s flood does not seek to answer questions concerning the extent of the flood so much as to ascertain the intent of the flood narrative’s author. His rhetorical-critical analysis aims to fill a gap in the literature, which often focuses on Genesis as a whole or on prominent characters within its storyline (xxviii). He contends that the flood narrative underscores deliverance and salvation more than judgment and destruction and that the text focuses on God’s redemptive disposition toward his creation. God’s purposes are not thwarted in the flood; rather, God commits himself to the outworking of his intention for creation, to bless his image-bearers and to uphold the sanctity and flourishing of human life. The flood thus serves as a “re-creation event” and even as a “flood of grace” (4).

The work divides into six main chapters with a concluding seventh chapter. In the first chapter Burlet sets the background for his study, focusing on previous scholarly approaches to the flood account and its background in Genesis generally. He orients the reader to rhetorical criticism, which assesses the persuasive strategy of a text. He adapts more specifically Kennedy’s model, which evaluates the rhetorical shape and strategy of texts through five steps, determining the rhetorical boundaries, situation, form, strategy, and effectiveness (10). He then addresses interpretive questions arising from the flood account, such as the meaning of Yahweh’s response to Noah’s sacrifice after Noah emerged from the ark. He assesses also matters of literary structure, concluding that the narrative’s literary structure tells against diachronic redaction criticism and favors an integrative, synchronic reading.

Chapter two presents Burlet’s methodology. The first part assesses different tools used by scholars to identify rhetorical features in Scripture.

DBSJ 30 (2025) p...