Question: Why did animals have to die in the great flood?

Gen 1:24-25 writes: And God said, "Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind." And it was so. God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. (NIV)

Gen 2:19-20 writes: Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field.

Gen 3:17 writes: "Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat of it
all the days of your life.

Even if true it would have been an act of barbarism unsurpassed by anything in human imaginings

Gen 5:1 writes:When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God.

jar writes:The two Biblical Flood myths serve a purpose, of a God that regrets creating life and so purges it saving only the select few; the Chosen Ones; a who then later swears to never repeat that act of wanton destruction. It's a very human God, similar to all other rulers, capricious and destructive but then returning to rationality. And it allowed a people to claim preference and superiority; from the God they created if not from the rest of the world, the universe and reality.

Larni writes:To believe in the God of the Bible (rather than cherry picking the bits of his character that fit with one's own expectations) is to take the rough with the smooth.

Diomedes writes:The stories of Gilgamesh were passed down through the centuries, along with stories and myths from other sources and eventually morphed into the biblical stories.

compellingtruth.org writes:The biblical flood story, found in Genesis 6-9, has many similarities. In both cases, it was a global flood sent by God or gods to control people. God or gods contacted the hero and told him to build an ark of wood covered in pitch. The ark was very large and contained specimens of all animals. The hero determined the end of the ordeal by sending out birds. When the inhabitants of the ark were released, the hero sacrificed to God/the gods, who blessed him.There are differences, as well. Of course, the Genesis story speaks of God, while the Akkadian mentions several gods. The Akkadian ark was square, while the biblical ark was rectangular. The Akkadian hero saved not only his family, but craftsmen who worked on the ark as well. The biblical rains lasted forty days and nights, while the Akkadian version says six. And the arks landed on different mountains.What is the relationship between the Akkadian flood myths and the biblical account? Scholars aren't exactly sure. Secular scholars claim that because remnants of the Akkadian account pre-date the writing of Genesis, Moses (or another author) copied from the Akkadian story. But biblical scholars point out that there is no record of a complete flood myth until 650 BC, long after Genesis was written. Other scholars claim that the Akkadian myth copied Genesis, but this is highly unlikely. Genesis was written by 1400 BC while the first Gilgamesh story that references the global flood was apparently from 2100 BC. It's much more probable that both stories derived from the same sourcean actual global flood.

For those of us that are non-believers, I simply look at these as stories. Either completely made up or derived from actual events and then exaggerated or modified to fit the current narrative.

jar writes:So far the evidence is that most of the Bible stories are folk tales. The Flood never happened, Exodus never happened, the Conquest of Canaan never happened, there was no Garden of Eden, but that does not mean there is not things to be learned from the stories.