Noah

Noah's Ark, by Französischer Meister, c.1675.

English Noah (Hebrew: נוֹחַ, Noach ; Arabic: نوح, Nūḥ ; "Rest") was the tenth and last of the antediluvian Patriarchs. His story is contained in the Hebrew Bible, in the Book of Genesis, chapters 5-9. The accounts of Noah's Ark and the Great Flood are among the best-known stories of the Bible. Noah is also portrayed as "the first tiller of the soil" and the inventor of wine.

According the Genesis, Noah labored faithfully to build the Ark—no doubt the largest vessel yet constructed—at God's command, ultimately saving not only his own family, but mankind itself and all land animals, from extincition during the Flood. Afterward, God made a covenant with him, blessed him, and promised never again to destroy all the earth's creatures. The idyllic scene did not last, however, as Noah became drunk and ended up cursing his grandson Canaan to be slave.

Despite portraying the death of nearly the whole of mankind as well as all animal life on earth, Noah's story is one of world's favorite tales for children because of the zoo-like quality of Noah's Ark and the "happy ending" of God blessing Noah's family under a heavenly rainbow of hope. The actual end of the story, with Noah cursing his own descendants to be slaves, has the subject of much elaboration in the later Abrahamic traditions, and is immensely influential in Western culture.

The story of Noah

The Deluge, Gustave Doré, 1832-1883. From the Dore Illustrated Bible, 1865.

The story of Noah is related in the Book of Genesis, chapters 5-9. Noah was the son of Lamech in the tenth generation after Adam. Genesis describes the patriarchs before the Flood as living for more than half a millennium. Thus, when Noah was 500 years old, he became the father of his three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth.

God, however, became saddened because of the wickedness of mankind and decided to send a great flood to destroy all living things. Noah was the one exception: He was "a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with God." (Gen. 6:9) God warned Noah of the impending flood and commanded him to build an huge ark, a boat with neither sails, not oars, nor rudder, in order to save his family. The dimensions of Noah's Ark were 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high. Noah was also instructed to bring enough living animals onto the ark to re-populate the earth. And so the Great Flood came, and all life on land was extinguished, except for Noah, his wife, his sons, their families, and the various animals that Noah had collected. It rained steadily for 40 days, rivers overflowed, and underground springs added to the deluge. Even the highest mountains were covered by the Flood. "The waters prevailed upon the earth for 150 days." (Genesis 7:24)

File:Noah-Dove.jpg

The dove returns to Noah with an olive branch.

Finally, the waters began to recede, and the Ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat in today's Turkey. Noah sent for a raven from the Ark, and then a dove. Two times the dove returned to him, but on the third flight, she came back with an olive branch in her beak, showing that the waters had receded far enough for trees to reappear and grow leaves.

Disembarking from the Ark, Noah built an altar to God, the first altar mentioned in the Bible, and made an offering.

"And when the Lord smelled the pleasing odor, 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'."(Genesis8:20-22)

Then God made a covenant with Noah: 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." God forbade murder, and renewed the blessing he had earlier given to Adam and Eve: "Be fruitful and multiply, bring forth abundantly on the earth and multiply in it." To confirm this new beginning, God set a rainbow in the sky, "the sign of the covenant which I have established between me and all flesh that is upon the earth." (Genesis 9:1-17)

The Drunkenness of Noah by Michelangelo Buonarroti, from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo shows Noah drunk before his sons, and simultaneously, in the background, Noah planting his vineyard.

The story of Noah concludes, however, on a less happy note. "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 to 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." (Genesis 9:20-27)

Noah died 350 years after the Flood, at the age of 950, the last of the immensely long-lived antediluvian Patriarchs. The maximum human lifespan, as depicted by the Bible, diminished rapidly thereafter, from as much as 900 years to 120 years within a few generations. If the biblical chronology is takenly literally, Noah was still alive at the time of Abrhaham, although he is not mentioned in the stories of the Hebrew partiarchs.

Jewish perspectives

File:Noah-rainbow.jpg

Noah's sacrifice and God's blessing

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 rabbis that his perfection was only relative. For example, Noah did not pray to God on behalf of those about to be destroyed, as Abraham prayed for the wicked of Sodom and Gomorrah. Other sages, such as the medieval commentator Rashi, held on the contrary that Noah did preach to his contempories, and that the building of the Ark was stretched over 120 years, deliberately in order to give sinners time to repent.

Other Talmudic traditions hold that Noah sinned by becoming drunk with wine after leaving the Ark. Nevertheless, he is named by the prophet Ezekiel as being a truly righteous man, along with Job and Danel, in the days of the Exile (Ezek. 14: 14-20).

The Talmud also contains several speculations about the nature of Ham's sin, which was so serious as to deserve Noah's curse. In one version Ham actually castrated his father. According to another opinion, Ham defiled his father sexually. (Sanh. 70a; Gen. R. 36:4). Still another rabbinical opinion declares that the mutilation of Noah was committed by Canaan, but was caused by Ham in telling brothers of his father's nakedness in Canaan's presence (Ex. R. 30:5).

Christian perspectives

Noah is called a "preacher of righteousness" in 2 Peter 2:5, and the First Epistle of Peter equates the saving power of baptism with the Ark saving those who were in it. In later Christian thought, the Ark came to be equated with the Church: salvation was to be found only within its walls. St Augustine of Hippo (354-430), arguing allegorically in The City of God stated that the dimensions of the Ark correspond to the dimensions of the human body, an thus to the body of Christ, which is analogous 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 baptized.

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'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 eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this view merged with the Protestant interpretation of the curse of Ham to provide a religious justification for both racism and 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." Similar arguments were used by white rulers in South Africa and Rhodesia to justify apartheid and minority rule by whites.

Noah is commemorated as a prophet in the Calendar of Saints of the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod on November 29.

In the gnostic tradition, Apocryphon of John reports that the chief archon—not God Himself—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, in this version, 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."

In the tradition of the Latter-day Saints, Joseph Smith taught that Noah is the same person 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.)

Islamic perspectives

Noah is a prophet in the Qur'an. References to Nūh, 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, with two important exceptions: 1) in the Qur'an, the Flood is a regional event, affecting only the "people of Noah," and 2) in the Islamic account, Noah does not become a vintner or get drunk on his wine, nor does he fall asleep naked or curse his grandson Canaan to be a slave to his brothers.

The Qur'an emphasizes Noah's preaching of the monotheism of God, and the ridicule heaped on him by idolators. One tradition holds that 72 persons outside of Noah's family were saved in the Ark—people who had been converted by Noah's preaching. However, they did not have children after leaving the ark, and thus all mankind descended from Noah's three sons. Another detail from Islamic tradition not included in the Biblical account is a reference to another son who chose not to enter the Ark.

Contemporary academic perspectives

Documentary hypothesis

File:Noah-ham.jpg

Noah curses Canaan.

According to the documentary hypothesis, Genesis seems to contain two or more accounts concerning Noah, the first making him primarily the hero of the Flood, the second emphasizing him as a husbandman who planted a vineyard. As with many such parallel accounts in Genesis, one uses the term Yahweh for God, while the other uses the word Elohim. The theory of parallel accounts also explains why the story seems to "begin" more than once, as well as such possible conflicts regarding the time periods mentioned and details as why one verse says that Noah brought "seven pairs" of "clean" animals into the Ark, (Genesis 7:2) while a subsequent verse speaks of only one pair (7:8) of both clean and unclean animals.

The "curse of Ham" has also given rise to much discussion. Many scholars believe Canaan's curse is primarily a religious justification for Israel's conquering and enslavement of the people of Canaan. Other add that may express a hope on the part of the the sixth century B.C.E. compilers of the Torah that the Medes (Japhet) would join with the the Jews (Shem) in restoring Jewish rule in the land of Canaan: "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."

Another issue is whether the Flood should be considered historical or not. Some archaelogical evidence indeed exists indicating large floods in the Tigris-Euphrates valley. However, few scholars agree with the literal interpretation of Genesis' version, in which a single Great Flood covered the entire earth and killed all mankind and all land creatures except those on Noah's Ark.

Mythological connections

Nevertheless, many ancient flood stories share similarities to the one above:

• Egyptian: Nun/Naunet
• Hindu: Manu
• China: Nüwa
• Sumerian: Ziusudra
• Babylonian: Atra-Hasis, Utnapishtim, Xisuthrus
• Greek: Deucalion
• Toltec: Toptlipetlocali

A direct connection to the story of Noah and his Flood is seen by many scholars in the figure of Utnapishtim, a character from the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh. Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh how he survived a great flood, and how he was afterwards granted immortality by the gods. Utnapishtim's account, though cast in a polytheistic background, shares many details with the story of Noah, including a warning from a god about the impending deluge, the building of a boat on which to save his family and animals, the sending forth of the raven and the dove, and a sacrifice to the gods after disemabarking on dry ground.

Notes and references

• Bailey, Lloyd R. (1989). Noah, the Person and the Story. South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 0-87249-637-6. 
• Best, Robert M. (1999). Noah's Ark and the Ziusudra Epic. Fort Myers, Florida: Enlil Press. ISBN 0-9667840-1-4. 

External links

• Jewish Encyclopedia: Noah from the 1901-1906 Jewish Encyclopedia
• Catholic Encyclopedia article
• The site Tanakh Profiles provides a chronology of the flood (Hebrew/English)

Hebrew Bible Genealogy from Adam to David

Creation to Flood

Adam

Seth

Enos

Kenan

Mahalalel

Jared

Enoch

Methuselah

Lamech

Noah

Shem

Origin of the Patriarchs

Arpachshad

Shelah

Eber

Peleg

Reu

Serug

Nahor

Terah

Abraham

Isaac

Jacob

Nationhood to Kingship

Judah

Pharez

Hezron

Ram

Amminadab

Nahshon

Salmon

Boaz

Obed

Jesse

David

Prophets of Islam in the Qur'an
Adam	Idris	Nuh	Hud	Saleh	Ibrahim	Lut	Ismail	Is'haq	Yaqub	Yusuf	Ayub
آدم	ادريس	نوح	هود	صالح	إبراهيم	لوط	اسماعيل	اسحاق	يعقوب	يوسف	أيوب
Adam	Enoch	Noah	Eber	Shelah	Abraham	Lot	Ishmael	Isaac	Jacob	Joseph	Job
Shoaib	Musa	Harun	Dhul-Kifl	Daud	Sulayman	Ilyas	Al-Yasa	Yunus	Zakariya	Yahya	Isa	Muhammad
شعيب	موسى	هارون	ذو الكفل	داود	سليمان	إلياس	اليسع	يونس	زكريا	يحيى	عيسى	محمد
Jethro	Moses	Aaron	Ezekiel	David	Solomon	Elijah	Elisha	Jonah	Zechariah	John	Jesus	Paraclete

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