1.

The Flood of Noah: All flesh died that moved upon the earth

God's first killing is hard to beat. He killed everything. Here's how he described it:

The LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them. Genesis 6:7

Behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die. 6:17

Every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth. 7:4

And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man: All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died. And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark. 7.21-23

So the killing contest is over. God, in his very first killing, wins the prize. The guy who killed everything "on the face of the earth" is the world's top killer. He beats Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Ghengis Khan. All those guys. Maybe not in terms of the number killed, but certainly in percentage. You just can't beat 100%.

Of course, God had his reasons. God always has his reasons.

God saw that humans were wicked, they had bad thoughts, and he regretted making them. 6:5-6

The whole earth was corrupt and filled with violence. 6:1

God said to Noah, "I'm going to destroy the earth because the earth is filled with violence." 6:13

Humans were wicked, they had bad thoughts, and the whole earth was violent and corrupt. So what's a good God to do?

Well, you might think he'd start a school to teach people how to behave, have them go to counseling, get them interested in other stuff -- like baseball or something. Anything to get their minds off their bad thoughts.

But no. God decided to drown them all. It was the best he could think of at the time. The whole earth was filled with violence, so God killed everything on earth.

But still, I don't quite get it. Did God drown the animals because they were too violent? Didn't he make them that way in the first place -- either at creation or after the fall of Adam?

But here is the excuse that I like the best:

God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the LORD that he had made man. 6:5-6

And here's what God says after he finishes the job and smells the burning flesh of Noah's sacrifice:

The LORD smelled a sweet savour; and the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done. 8:21

God regrets making humans because they have bad thoughts. So he kills them all. Then he regrets killing them because they (still) have bad thoughts. (At least he fixed the problem!)

The mind of God is a frightening thing.

OK, so God drowned every person on earth except for Noah and his family. How many would that be?

Well, the flood was supposed to have happened about 2400 BCE,¹ and the human population was somewhere around 20 million at the time.²

Not a bad start for a serial killer.

Notes

1. From the list of begats in Genesis 5, along with Noah's age at the time of the flood (600, Genesis 7:6), it's easy to compute the number of years from creation to the flood (1656). Using this value and Bishop Ussher's date of creation (4004 BCE), Answers in Genesis comes up with 2348 BCE as the date of the flood. Timeline for the Flood.
2. Colin McEvedy and Richard M. Jones, Atlas of World Population History (Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1978), 344.