I'll ask you to allow your imagination some freedom here....A flood took place, as is common....The work of the Gods or nature?
Nature of course. Floods, both large and small, were, and are, common. 'God' or 'The Gods' don't enter into it.
In those times there was no distinction between the 2.....
Mesopotamian religion, where the Great Flood myth originated, certainly involved the worship of forces of nature, at least early on. But by the third millennium BC these objects of worship become personified and became a large cast of divinities with particular functions. The God of Water, the God of Thunder (which was the original function of Yahweh/Jehovah/God) and so on. Eventually the Mesopotamians introduced greater emphasis on personal religion and structured the gods into a hierarchy with the national god being the head of the pantheon. Then some cultures adopted that god as their one personal god...to become the only god.
That's my point...the story is so obviously a myth, and while it clearly based as it is on a localised, regional flood, it is as an event nothing particularly remarkable, despite its' prominence in the Book of Genesis, most likely compiled in the 6th century BC.
It is you who are casting a modern, literal, atheist interpretation.
Interpretation? What interpretation should I be adopting?
Learn to both grasp & allow for historical 'mind-sets' when you critique a work & drop this contemporary, one-dimensional, flat-earth perspective.....Along with it's pretense at 'objectivism'.
'Objectivism'? My point was, and is, that a global flood obviously did not occur and the Noah myth story is based on what is a relatively unremarkable flood event. Of course Genesis shouldn't be taken literally.