Noah #8

Noah is introduced as “a just man and perfect in his generations,” who “walked with God” (Genesis 6:9) in an age the Bible describes as thoroughly corrupt: “The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them” (Genesis 6:13). Instructed to build a massive ark of “gopher wood” (Genesis 6:14), he preserves his family and pairs of every kind of animal through a catastrophic flood sent to judge the earth.

The Flood

The flood begins abruptly: “all the fountains of the great deep [are] broken up, and the windows of heaven [are] opened,” and “the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights” (Genesis 7:11-12). Genesis describes waters covering the earth for over a year before they recede enough for Noah’s household and the ark’s occupants alone to disembark and repopulate the earth. Once out, “Noah builded an altar unto the LORD… and offered burnt offerings,” and “the LORD smelled a sweet savour” and resolved in his heart never again to curse the ground or destroy every living thing as he had done (Genesis 8:20-21), promising that “seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease” (Genesis 8:22).

Covenant and Aftermath

God then establishes a covenant with Noah and “every living creature,” setting his “bow in the cloud” as “a token of a covenant between me and the earth” (Genesis 9:12-13) — the first covenant in the Bible extended to all of creation rather than to a single people, and a pattern of divine covenant-making that recurs with Abraham, Israel, and ultimately in the New Testament. Noah’s story then ends on a troubled note: after planting a vineyard, he becomes drunk and is found “uncovered within his tent” by his son Ham, whose conduct provokes Noah to pronounce a curse on Ham’s son Canaan, while his other two sons are commended for covering their father with respect (Genesis 9:20-25). The episode is one of the Bible’s more difficult passages and has been read in widely differing ways across the centuries.

Legacy

Noah is remembered both as a model of righteous obedience amid widespread corruption and as the recipient of humanity’s first recorded covenant after Eden, a covenant later biblical writers cite as a pattern of judgment and preserved remnant; the New Testament likewise holds up Noah’s flood as an example of both divine patience and sudden judgment.