Noah
Noah or
Noach (
Hebrew:
× ×•Ö¹×—Ö· or
× Ö¹×—Ö·,
Standard Tiberian ;
Arabic:
نوØ, ; "Rest") was the tenth and last of the
antediluvian Patriarchs, best known for the
Deluge which came in his time. His story is contained in the Hebrew
Bible's book of
Genesis, chapters 5-9.
While the Deluge and
Noah's Ark are the best-known element of the story of Noah, he is also mentioned as the "first husbandman" and the inventor of
wine, as well as in connection with the somewhat mysterious episode of his drunkenness and the subsequent
Curse of Ham. Some analyses of the text of the story have suggested that its present form combines two originally separate sources, possibly relating to two separate stories, and that it contains elements of earlier
Mesopotamian mythology, although both of these points are disputed and controversial.
The story of Noah was the subject of much elaboration in the later Abrahamic traditions, and was immensely influential in Western culture.
|
The Deluge, by Michelangelo |
This is the story of Noah according to chapters 5–9 of the book of Genesis.
Noah was the son of
Lamech, and the tenth generation after
Adam. "And [Lamech] called his name Noah, saying, "Out of the ground which the Lord has cursed this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the toil of our hands." From Noah's sons,
Shem,
Japheth and
Ham, all the peoples of the world would be descended.
When Noah was six hundred years old, God decided to send a great flood to destroy all life, for He was angered at the wickedness of man. But He saw that Noah was a righteous man, and warned him to build a
vessel for himself and his family, "And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female."
And so the Flood came, and all life was extinguished, except for those who were with Noah, "and the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days."
"But God remembered Noah," the waters receded, and the Ark came to rest on the
mountains of Ararat.
There Noah built an altar to God (the first altar mentioned in the Bible) and made an offering. "And when the Lord smelled the pleasing odour, the Lord said in his heart, 'I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done. While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease'."
Then God made a
covenant: Noah and his descendants would henceforth be free to eat meat ("every moving thing that lives shall be food for you, and as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything"), and the animals would fear man; and in return, man would be forbidden to eat "flesh with its life, that is, its blood." And God forbade murder, and gave a commandment: "Be fruitful and multiply, bring forth abundantly on the earth and multiply in it." And as a sign of His covenant, He set the rainbow in the sky, "the sign of the covenant which I have established between me and all flesh that is upon the earth."
The story of Noah concludes: "Noah was the first tiller of the soil. He planted a vineyard; and he drank of the wine, and became drunk, and lay uncovered in his tent." Noah's son Ham saw his father naked and informed his brothers, who covered Noah while averting their eyes. Noah awoke and cursed Ham's son
Canaan with eternal slavery, while giving his blessing to Shem and Japheth: "Blessed by the Lord my God be Shem; and let Canaan be his slave. God enlarge Japheth, and let him dwell in the tents of Shem; and let Canaan be his slave."
Noah died 350 years after the Flood, at the age of 950,
the last of the immensely long-lived
antediluvian Patriarchs. The longevities of humans rapidly diminishes from generation to generation after this flood. Longevities before the flood are often as much as 900 years. Longevities afterwards approach the about 100 years within just a few generations.
Documentary hypothesis
According to the
documentary hypothesis, the first five books of the Bible, including Genesis, were collated during the 5th century BC from four main sources, which themselves date from no earlier than the 8th century BC. Two of these four, the
Jahwist, composed in the 8th century BC, and the
Priestly source, from the late 7th century BC, make up the bulk of those chapters of Genesis which concern Noah. Genesis 5, termed the
Book of Generations, is independent of these major sources. The attempt by the 5th century editor to accommodate two independent and sometimes conflicting sources accounts for the confusion over such matters as how many pairs of animals Noah took, and how long the flood lasted.
(See Noah's Ark for a more detailed description of the documentary hypothesis as it relates to the Ark story).
More broadly, Genesis may be seen to contain two accounts concerning Noah, the first making him the hero of the Flood, the second representing him as the first husbandman. The apparent discrepancy has led some scholars to believe that Noah was originally the inventor of wine, in keeping with the statement at that Lamech "called his name Noah, saying, 'Out of the ground which the Lord has cursed this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the toil of our hands.'" It has been suggested that the Flood story may originally have belonged to
Enoch, Noah's grandfather according to Genesis 5. In Hebrew the names of Noah (× ×•Ö¹×—Ö·) and Enoch () are somewhat similar, sharing three letters.
Mythological connections
Many ancient flood stories share similarities to the one above:
*Hebrew:
Noah's Ark*Egyptian
Naunet*Hindu:
Manu*China:
Nuwa*Sumerian:
Atra-Hasis*Babylonian:
Utnapishtim,
Xisuthrus*Greek:
Deucalion*Toltec toptlipetlocali
However, none of the other stories cite occurrences of flood waters from sources quite so supernatural.
The mysterious figure of Enoch is the beginning of a fascinating but inconclusive web of correspondences and similarites between the story of Noah and older
Mesopotamian myths. According to , at the end of his 365 years Enoch "walked with God, and was not, for God took him" - the only one of the ten pre-Flood Patriarchs not reported to have died. Where did Enoch go when God took him? In a late Rabbinic tradition, Methuselah is reported to have visited Enoch at the end of the Earth, where he dwelt with the angels, immortal. The details bring to mind
Utnapishtim, a figure from the Mesopotamian
Epic of Gilgamesh - the hero Gilgamesh, after long and arduous travel, finds Utnapishtim living in the paradise of
Dilmun at the end of the Earth, where he has been granted eternal life by the gods. (Gilgamesh's reason for seeking out Utnapishtim, incidentally, is to learn the secret of immortality - like Methuselah, he comes close to the gift but fails to achieve it). Utnapishtim then tells how he survived a great flood, and how he was afterwards granted immortality by the gods. The story has remarkable similarities with the account in Genesis.
Lamech's statement that Noah will be named "rest" because "out of the ground which the Lord has cursed this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the toil of our hands," has another faint parallel in Babylonian mythology: the gods grew tired of working, digging the channels of the rivers, and so the god
Enki created man from clay and blood and spit to do the work for them. Enki fell in love with his creation, and later warned Utnapishtim that the other gods planned to send a flood to destroy all life, and advised him on how to construct his ark.
Curse of Ham
The
curse of Ham (more properly a curse of Canaan) remains mysterious. The general scholarly consensus is that it represents an attempt by the authors of Genesis to provide religious justification for Jewish aggression against "Canaanites", a term meaning not so much the genuine Canaanites of the late Iron Age, but the non-Jewish peoples inhabiting historic
Judah and
Samaria (Israel) at the time of the return of the Babylonian exiles in the mid-5th century BC - a return which would have provided much opportunity for disputes over land ownership. The offense which caused the curse is more mysterious still: says that Ham "saw the nakedness of his father," but what does that mean, and why should it result in a curse on Ham's son instead of on Ham? A similar phrase in Leviticus 20:11, "The man that lieth with his father's wife hath uncovered his father's nakedness," has led some scholars to suggest that this might have been Ham's misdeed, and the explanation of the curse falling on his son (i.e., by Noah's wife), rather than on himself. The explanation, however, seems to raise as many questions as it answers.
In Rabbinic tradition
(Material in this section is by permission of the Jewish Encyclopedia |
The Sacrifice of Noah, Jacopo Bassano (c.1515-1592), Staatliche Schlösser und Gärten, Potsdam-Sanssouci, c. 1574. |
According to a Jewish apocryphal legend, Noah was born with a body white like snow and hair white as wool (an albino); light shone forth from the newborn baby's eyes the moment he opened them and illuminated the entire house, and he immediately stood and addressed a prayer to God. His grandfather
Methuselah, afraid of what this might mean, journeyed to the end of the earth to consult
Enoch, who gave the child the name Noah and foretold that in his days the earth would be destroyed.
The righteousness of Noah is the subject of much discussion among the rabbis. The description of Noah as "perfect in his generation" implied to some that his perfection was only relative: In his generation of wicked people, he could be considered righteous, but in the generation of a
tzaddik like
Abraham, he would not be considered so righteous. They point out that Noah did not pray to God on behalf of those about to be destroyed, as Abraham prayed for the wicked of
Sodom and Gomorrah. This led such commentators to offer the figure of Noah as "the man in a fur coat," who ensured his own comfort while ignoring his neighbour. Others, such as the medieval commentator
Rashi, held on the contrary that the building of the Ark was stretched over 120 years, deliberately in order to give sinners time to repent.
The planting of a vineyard and his drunkenness caused Noah to lose much if not all of his former merit. He was one of the three worthless men that were eager for agricultural pursuits; he was the first to plant, to become drunken, to curse, and to introduce slavery. God blamed Noah for his intemperance, saying that he ought to have been warned by Adam, upon whom so much evil came through wine. The vine had been cast out with Adam from paradise, and it was Noah who took it into the Ark. According to several midrash, Satan assisted in the planting of the first vineyard, first sacrificing a sheep, a lion, an ape, and a hog, for after drinking the first cup of wine, one is mild like a sheep; after the second, courageous like a lion; after the third, like an ape; and after the fourth, like a hog who wallows in mud.
According to
Sefer Noaḥ and the
Book of Jubilees (considered
deuterocanonical in Eastern-rite and
apocryphal in Western-rite churches), Noah was taught by the
archangel Raphael how to cure the diseases sent to punish his grandchildren for their sins. He recorded in a book all the herbs and plants the use of which he had been taught by Raphael; and this book was transmitted from one generation to another. Later it was translated into many languages, copies of it coming into the hands of the most famous physicians of India and Greece, who derived therefrom their medical knowledge.
Yalkut Hadash tells that Noah should have lived 1,000 years; but that he gave Moses fifty years, which, together with the seventy taken from Adam's life, constituted Moses' hundred and twenty years. According to
Jubilees, Noah was buried on Mount Lubar, where he had settled after the Flood. But
Ibn Yaḥya records that Noah after the Deluge emigrated to
Italy, where he became
Janus, deriving the name from the Hebrew
yayin (wine). Others identify Noah with Melchizedek, and declare that he founded Jerusalem.
Noah's wife is not named in Genesis. Some traditions identify her as Aretitia, from the Hebrew
ereáº" (earth), on account of her being the mother of every living thing; after her death she was called "Vesta" (ie, "Eshta", from
esh, "fire"), on account of her ascension to heaven. A separate tradition in
Jubilees gives her name as Emzara, while later Midrashic writings and the
Book of Jasher give it as
Naamah.
In Christian tradition
|
The Drunkenness of Noah, Michelangelo Buonarroti, ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the Vatican, Rome, 1509. Michelangelo shows Noah drunk before his sons, and simultaneously, in the background, Noah planting his vineyard. |
The
New Testament treats Noah as a righteous man in the same category as
Abraham and
Jacob, one who had absolute faith in God. The
Gospel of Matthew, for example, reads: "For the coming of the Son of Man will be just like the days of Noah; for as in those days which were before the flood they were eating and drinking, they were marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark" (Matt 24:37-38). According to the
First Epistle of Peter 3:18â€"20 and the
Second Epistle of Peter 2:5, an interval of 120 years elapsed while the ark was being built, during which Noah tried to convince the people to repent so they could avoid the wrath of God. In later Christian thought, the Ark came to be equated with the Church: salvation was to be found only within its walls. (See, for example,
St Augustine of Hippo (354-430), who demonstrated in
The City of God that the dimensions of the Ark corresponded to the dimensions of the human body, which is the body of Christ, which is the Church. The equation of Ark and Church is still found in the
Anglican rite of baptism, which asks God, "who of thy great mercy didst save Noah," to receive into the Church the infant about to be baptised).
Noah's three sons were generally interpreted in medieval Christianity as the founders of the populations of the three known continents, Japheth/Europe, Shem/Asia, and Ham/Africa, although a rarer variation held that they represented the three classes of medieval society - the priests (Shem), the warriors (Japheth), and the peasants (Ham). At the same time, some European thinkers proposed that Ham's sons in general had been literally "blackened" by sin. In the 18th and 19th centuries, this view merged with the
Protestant interpretation of the
curse of Ham to provide a quasi-religious justification for
slavery. As late as 1964, Senator
Robert Byrd of West Virginia read the text of the Noah story into the Congressional Record as part of a
filibuster against the
Civil Rights Act of 1964, saying, "Noah saw fit to discriminate against Ham's descendants."
In Islamic tradition
|
Noah Cursing Canaan, Gustave Doré (1832-1883), from the Dore Illustrated Bible (1865). The Bible's account of Noah's curse upon Canaan was used in the 19th century as a justification for slavery. |
Noah is a
prophet in the
Qur'an. References to
Ù†ÙˆØ Nūḥ, the
Arabic form of Noah, are scattered throughout the Qur'an, but no single narrative account of the entire Deluge is given. The references in the Qur'an are consistent with
Genesis, and Islamic tradition generally follows the Genesis account, emphasizing Noah's preaching of the
monotheism of God, and the ridicule heaped on him by
idolators.
Particularly::We sent Noah to his people: He said, "O my people! worship God! Ye have no other god but Him. Will ye not fear (Him)?" :The chiefs of the Unbelievers among his people said: "He is no more than a man like yourselves: his wish is to assert his superiority over you: if God had wished (to send messengers), He could have sent down angels; never did we hear such a thing (as he says), among our ancestors of old." :(And some said): "He is only a man possessed: wait (and have patience) with him for a time." :(Noah) said: "O my Lord! help me: for that they accuse me of falsehood!"
God later instructed Noah to build the ark::Build the ship under Our eyes and by Our inspiration, and speak not unto Me on behalf of those who do wrong. Lo! they will be drowned.
(Surah Hud: 37) (Surat al-Mumenoon: 23-26) The Qur'anic account contains a detail not included in the Biblical account: a reference to another son who chose not to enter the ark::And it sailed with them amid waves like mountains, and Noah cried unto his son - and he was standing aloof - O my son! Come ride with us, and be not with the disbelievers.:He said: I shall betake me to some mountain that will save me from the water. (Noah) said: This day there is none that saveth from the commandment of God save him on whom He hath had mercy. And the wave came in between them, so he was among the drowned.
(Surah Hud: 42-43) The Qur'anic account does not include several details of the Genesis account, including the account of Noah's nakedness and the resultant cursing of his grandson Canaan.
Some Muslim scholars in the west assert that the flood during Noah's time was a local event, in contrast to the Biblical account which asserts that it was global. Most Muslims (including ulema and adepts), however, hold that the flood was indeed global.
See also Similarities between the Bible and the Qur'an.The
Apocryphon of John reports that the chief
archon caused the flood because he desired to destroy the world he had made, but the
First Thought informed Noah of the chief archon's plans, and Noah informed the remainder of humanity. Unlike the account of Genesis, not only are Noah's family saved, but many others also heed Noah's call. There is no ark in this account; instead Noah and the others hide in a "luminous cloud".
Joseph Smith taught that Noah is the same as the angel
Gabriel: "The Priesthood was first given to Adam; ... He is Michael the Archangel, spoken of in the Scriptures. Then to Noah, who is Gabriel: he stands next in authority to Adam in the Priesthood" (
Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 157). Noah is also the name of a
king in the
Book of Mormon.
Brigham Young was a vocal advocate of the doctrine that people of African ancestry were under the
curse of Ham, and that this curse was a rationalization for slavery and societal bans on
interracial marriage. He believed this curse remained in people with even a single black ancestor, and that even
Ethiopian and
Yemeni Jews were denied the blessings of Jewish heritage due to their own Black-African ancestry. In 1978 the church announced a revelation renouncing its policy of excluding blacks from the priesthood.
* In 1998 a made-for-tv movie entitled
Noah depicted a carpenter who is visited by an angel and told to build another ark so he may survive another world flood.
* Two books in the
Dr. Doolittle series by
Hugh Lofting feature Mudface, a giant turtle and acquaintance of the Doctor who lived through the Great Flood aboard Noah's Ark. The story portrays Noah as a grumpy curmudgeon and suppresses the religious aspects of the Flood, focusing mainly instead on the fates of the various animals involved in the aftermath.
*
Shane Johnson's 2002 novel
Ice portrays Noah in a manner consistent with the Christian tradition: as the head of a household consisting of the only kind-hearted persons on the planet, a man on a mission from God, and a leader who sometimes had to make hard, not-quite-pleasant decisions. In one memorable scene, Noahorders a man left behind, not because he didn't deserve to be taken aboard the Ark, but because God's orders were that only eight peopleboard the Ark.
* American composer and recording artist
Daniel Decker has achieved critical acclaim for his song "Noah's Prayer" , which is a collaboration with
Armenian composer Ara Gevorgian. "Noah's Prayer" chronicles Noah's journey on the ark to Mount Ararat. In the shadow of
Ararat, the song was debuted in 2002 in
Sardarpat,
Armenia to celebrate
Armenian Independence day. In attendance were
Armenian President
Robert Kocharian, His Holiness Karekin II, Supreme Patriarch and
Catholicos of All Armenians (head of the
Armenian Apostolic Church), as well as ambassadors from countries around the world. The concert, which was broadcast live on
Armenian television, and via satellite to over 30 nations, has catapulted Decker to celebrity status in Armenia. "Noah's Prayer" is featured on the recording "My Offering" by
Daniel Decker.
*
Antediluvian*
Dating the Bible*
Deluge (mythology)*
Deluge (prehistoric)*
Patriarchal Age*
Epic of Gilgamesh*
Gilgamesh flood story*
Noah's Ark*
Noahide Law*
Sons of Noah*
Not Wanted on the Voyage, a
1984 novel by
Timothy Findley which presents a humorous reinterpretation of the Noah's Ark story.
*
Pro Wrestling NOAH*
MyJewishLearning.com's text studies and commentaties on Noah, Genesis 6:9 - 11:32
*
Noah's Ark on the Web, comprehensive guide to Noah and the Deluge in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, art and culture
*
Path of Abraham - Biblical Monotheistic Faith for Gentiles
*
Jewish Encyclopedia: Noah from the 1901-1906
Jewish Encyclopedia*
Manly Palmer Hall: ''
Noah and His Wonderful Ark*
Answers In Creation Noah's Flood Articles (anti YEC)*
Answers In Genesis Noah's Flood Q&A Page (YEC)*
References to Nuh (Noah) in the Qur'an
For references to Noah in the
Qur'an, see
Nuh.
