Go look at the nursery aisle of any store that sells things for babies.
You will find the ark. On the wallpaper border, on the mobile, on the crib sheet, on the wooden puzzle with the little knobs. Giraffes two by two. An elephant with a trunk over the rail. A smiling old man with a white beard, and a rainbow arcing over the whole arrangement.
Noah’s ark for kids is everywhere in children’s decor, and it is a story in which nearly every person on earth drowns.
Christianity decorates its nurseries with a drowning.
I am not going to tell you to take anything down. I want to tell you what is actually on the wall, because a lot of us were never told, and because your child will work it out on her own schedule regardless of whether you are ready for the conversation.
What Actually Happens in Genesis 6 Through 9
The story is short and it is not gentle.
Genesis 6 opens with God looking at humanity and being sorry about it. The text says God regretted having made people, and grieved over it, and resolved to wipe them off the land. Not one city. Not one nation. Everyone, along with the animals, the birds, and everything that creeps.
One family is told to build a boat. In Genesis 7 the water comes, from above and from below, and it rises until the high ground is gone. Everything that breathed outside the boat dies. The text says so plainly and does not soften it.
Then in Genesis 9, after the water goes down, God makes a promise never to do it again and hangs a bow in the clouds as the sign of it.
Read that sequence as an adult and you notice something the crib sheet cannot show you. The rainbow is not decoration. It is a promise about something that already happened.
What Noah’s Ark for Kids Leaves Out
Children’s versions of this story are heavily edited, which is not a complaint. You cannot hand a four year old Genesis 7 unabridged and call it bedtime.
The revealing question is what tends to disappear. The children’s ark is a story about animals, a boat, weather, and a rainbow at the end. There is one family in it and no neighbors. The people outside the boat are not softened or explained. They are simply removed from the account, which means the child gets a story with no one in it to feel anything about.
That edit does something quiet. It can leave a child, years before she is able to examine any of it, with a story that ends well and a sense that she is on the inside of the boat.
Parents tell me they received three ark-themed gifts at the baby shower and did not think about the story once, in either direction, for four or five years. Then a kid asked where the other people went, usually in the car, usually while the parent was merging. That question is the whole subject of this post, and it tends to arrive without warning.
The Rainbow Is a Promise Not to Do It Again
My reading of this story, and I will own it as mine, is that the interesting material is at the end rather than the middle.
The flood is not the unusual part. Flood accounts turn up across the ancient Near East. The Epic of Gilgamesh has one. So does Atrahasis. Genesis came out of a cultural world in which flood traditions like those were in circulation, and scholars have been setting the biblical account alongside the Mesopotamian ones for a very long time.
What Genesis does with the ending is the part I find worth handing to a teenager. The account closes with a divine commitment to restraint. Whatever else is going on in those chapters, the story ends with God bound by a promise rather than free to start over again at will.
That does not make Genesis 7 comfortable. It is not supposed to be. But it does mean the story is doing something other than reassuring a child that everything works out, which is the only job the nursery version has ever been given.
What to Say When She Asks Where the Other People Went
The question will come. Answer the question she asked, at the size she asked it.
Ages 3 to 6. Keep it short and do not volunteer the rest. It is a very old story about a big flood and a family who built a boat. If she asks about the other people, do not lie and do not elaborate. A lot of people did not make it, and that part of the story is sad, and people have argued about it for a very long time. Then let her change the subject, which she probably will.
Ages 7 to 12. This age can take the whole shape, and telling her now means she does not discover it later and feel that she was managed. Give her Genesis 6 through 9 as it stands, including the part the puzzle left out. Then hand her the question rather than the answer. What do you make of that? Children this age are often better at sitting with a difficult text than the adults reading it to them, provided nobody is asking them to approve of it.
Ages 13 and up. Give a teenager the full picture. The chapters as written, the other ancient flood accounts, and the fact that people have read this story as history, as argument, and as a story about mercy at the end, sometimes all at once. Then let the verdict be genuinely theirs. Week 27 goes further into how to handle the violent passages in general, and Week 25 covers the larger skill this all sits inside, which is teaching a child what a text says without teaching her that she has to obey it.
You Do Not Have to Strip the Nursery
Nothing here requires you to peel the border off the wall or throw out the wooden puzzle. The ark is a good toy. Two of every animal is genuinely fun for a toddler and it is not doing harm on its own.
What is worth changing is smaller and it is mostly about honesty later. When she is old enough to ask, tell her the story is bigger and stranger than the version on her wall. Tell her the edited one was for a two year old and she is not two anymore. Most kids take that promotion well. What tends to land badly is finding out at fourteen that the sanitized version was the only one that was ever going to be offered.
The whole practice of this year runs through that one move. She gets the real thing at the size she can hold, and she gets more of it as she grows, and nobody is protecting her from the material by pretending it says something else.
Next week we go to summer camp, and to what five days of songs and a Thursday night altar call actually does to a nine year old who is tired and a long way from home.
About Pastor Brad Jagger
Pastor Brad Jagger is Senior Pastor of Windermere Union Church (UCC) in Windermere, Florida, a community committed to Love Above All. He writes about faith, doubt, deconstruction, belonging, and raising children who never have to be afraid of God.
If you are raising kids after leaving the faith you grew up in, and you want a church where questions are welcome, people are affirmed, and nobody has to pretend to have it all figured out, learn more at windermereunion.org.
Pastor Brad Jagger | Windermere Union Church | Love Above All