Abstract
The Genesis Flood Narrative teaches us that in spite of human sin and violence, God is committed to the world and the unconditional covenant of the rainbow is a sign of that selfbinding. The story of the Flood is therefore anffirmation of the story of creation, and speaks ultimately not of divine punishment but of God's faithfulness to creation and the pathos by which God's grief has now become the pathway by which God is identified with the human condition. Within a Girardian reading of the story we can see this as evidence of an emerging picture of God's character that has begun the process of desacralizing of violence. As such, the pathos of God testified to by this story becomes the foundation for building an understanding of God which finds “a new way” to expunge human violence other than via a scapegoating system.