Some folks would rather do elliptical exercises than speak in public. Not me. I enjoy teaching and I enjoy Torah and I had a blast recently when I was able to deliver my first-ever full-length sermon. The topic was Noach and the flood. Here’s part 1 of that sermon.

Shabbat Shalom.

Well, here we are, in the week of Noach. This is probably my second-favorite parashah of the entire Torah year. It’s a favorite because, when it’s properly understood, it explains so much about world history, as well as about God, and yet it is so often either misunderstood, or dismissed as a fictional parable. So I thought rather than trying to fit all my thoughts about Noach and the flood into my commentary tomorrow, that I would be better off teaching about that tonight, when we have more time and space to really dig in and study.

So tonight, we’re going to try and cover three main points. First, who was Noach? Second, what can we take away from the flood narrative? And third, what was the aftermath of this experience on Noach?

The reason I think it’s so important to really understand Noach and the flood is because, perhaps more than any portion of the Torah, aside from B’resheet – Genesis, this is a parashah that has been cited as a reason for unbelief. The origins of man, and the flood of Noach have long been a focal point for the sciences to attack and discredit the Bible, and to foster unbelief. Now, it may require faith to believe these early chapters of Genesis, but I hope, by the end of tonight, you’ll agree that it doesn’t have to be a blind faith.

So, who was Noach?

Well, let’s start with what the Torah says explicitly at the beginning of the parashah.

Genesis 6:9
Here is the history of Noach. In his generation, Noach was a man righteous and wholehearted; Noach walked with God.

That’s not much, is it? In fact, after saying here’s his history, we get all of 14 words. The rest of the passage defines Noach not by his history, but by his actions – specifically, how he responds to Adonai. Is this all we know of the man, Noach? Not at all.

In this picture we see the most popularly-accepted image of Noach. There he is, standing on the deck of the ark, releasing a dove. He’s old and wearing robes and looking a bit like a cross between a first-century high priest and a first-century citizen of Rome. In fact, some might suggest he bears a striking resemblance to Socrates or Plato.

Now, there are many things wrong with this image, and we’ll get to several of them tonight. But is that all we can know about Noach? Not yet. We have this, courtesy of the Jewish Dictionary:

JewishDictionary.org
Noah: Son of Lamech and the ninth in descent from Adam. In the midst of abounding corruption he alone was “righteous and blameless in his generations” and “walked with God” (Gen. 6:9). Hence, when all his contemporaries were doomed to perish by the divine judgment in punishment for their sins, he “found grace in the eyes of the Lord” (Gen. 6:8).

We also know that Noach’s grandfather was Methuselah, from the genealogy given earlier in B’resheet. Methuselah was the son of Enoch (or, Hanokh, according to the Complete Jewish Bible). And this is important to understand.

Here is what the Bible says about Noach’s great-grandfather, Enoch:

Genesis 5:21-25
Enoch lived sixty-five years and fathered Methuselah. After Methuselah was born, Enoch walked with God 300 years and had sons and daughters. In all, Enoch lived 365 years. Enoch walked with God, and then he wasn’t there, because God took him.

Enoch, to whom the book of Enoch is attributed, we are told that he walked with God, and then he wasn’t there because God took him. Can you imagine living so perfectly within God’s will, trusting in him so completely, that he would spare you from tasting death? Only two figures in the Tenakh are given this privilege: one is Enoch, and the other is the prophet Elijah.

So, while Noach was the only one righteous left on the Earth in his generation, we can see that walking with God was something that ran in his family line. A Jewish tradition about Methuselah says that Methuselah prayed for Adonai to bless his father, Enoch, and it was in part because of Methuselah’s selfless and righteous prayer that Enoch escaped death.

Let’s take a closer look at Noach’s family tree. Who among them did Noach know? Well, not Enoch. By the time of Noah’s birth, Enoch had been transmitted to paradise by Adonai for 69 years. So he didn’t know his great-grandfather.

Noach did, however, know his righteous grandfather, Methuselah. In fact, according to Jewish tradition, it was for Methuselah’s sake that the flood was delayed by Adonai until Noach reached his 600th year, and after Methuselah passed, there was a week of mourning allowed for his passing, and then the flood waters began to rise. If you look at the ages given for all of this, it works out. Methuselah did indeed die in the year of the flood.

What about Noach’s father, Lemekh? Well, Lemekh wasn’t around for any of it. He had Noach when he was 182 and lived for only 413 more years. Lemekh had been gone for 87 years when Noach was called by God to build the ark, and gone 187 years by the time the flood waters came upon the earth.

So from this, we learn that the line of the Messiah, from Adam to Noah, at this point is in trouble. By the time Noach is called by God the last righteous man on Earth, we can see that his father, Lemekh, is no longer alive and his grandfather, Methuselah, is a man of advanced years and, at the age of 869, is probably well beyond the task of repopulating the Earth.

Noach waited until nearly midlife to have his three sons at the age of 498, just before he was called by Adonai. With Noach being the only person in the line of Messiah of an age to father children, and the only righteous man left upon the Earth except perhaps for the aged Methuselah, who would not live to see the flood itself, Noach was indeed fit for the description the Torah gives him as “a man righteous and wholehearted.” Yet what is the true extent of Noach’s righteousness? Was Noach a man who could compare to Moshe or David? Or was he simply, “the best of a bad crop,” so to speak? This has been a topic of debate for generation upon generation of rabbis and Bible teachers, and opinions do vary.

Let’s take a look at what Louis Ginsberg had to say in his major work, The Legends of the Jews:

Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, vol. 1
It was by the grace of God, not on account of his merits, that Noah found shelter in the ark before the overwhelming force of the waters. Although he was better than his contemporaries, he was yet not worthy of having wonders done for his sake. He had so little faith that he did not enter the ark until the waters had risen to his knees.

Now, this is not a universally-held view of Noach by the rabbis. The Jewish Encyclopedia offers a wider variety of opinions.

JewishEncyclopedia.org
Although Noah is styled “a just man and perfect in his generations,” the degree of his righteousness is, nevertheless, much discussed by the Rabbis. Some of the latter think that Noah was a just man only in comparison with his generation, which was very wicked, but that he could not be compared with any of the other righteous men mentioned in the Bible. These same rabbis go still further and assert that Noah himself was included in the divine decree of destruction, but that he found grace in the eyes of the Lord for the sake of his descendants. Other rabbis, on the contrary, extol Noah’s righteousness, saying that his generation had no influence on him, and that had he lived in another generation, his righteousness would have been still more strongly marked (Sanh. 108a; Gen. R. xxx. 10) … Still, it is generally acknowledged that before the Flood, Noah was, by comparison with his contemporaries, a really upright man and a prophet.

So where do I come down in this debate? Well, my opinion is formed not from the arguments of various Rabbis and other Bible teachers, but from the actual words used in the text of the Torah.
In the case of both Noach and his great-grandfather Enoch, the same words are used. In English, they both are said to have “walked with God.”

This holds true in the Hebrew as well, as this entry from Strong’s will show:

01980 halak haw-lak’
1) to go, walk, come
1a) (Qal)
1a1) to go, walk, come, depart, proceed, move, go away
1a2) to die, to live, the manner of one’s life (fig.)
1c) (Hithpael)
1c1) to traverse
1c2) to walk about

I believe the wording here is intentional by Adonai. The same wording that was used to describe the life of Enoch, who walked so closely with God that he was spared physical death, is also used to describe Noach. Therefore, at least in the way he led his life before the flood, I do not believe that Noach’s righteousness was second-class in any regard. No one short of Yeshua could be said to have walked as closely with Adonai as did Enoch, and that’s who Noach is compared to here. That’s not second-class, only-by-comparison-to-his-generation righteousness. That’s the genuine article!

I also think this is borne out by Noah’s actions that follow in the rest of this parashah. For, as we read in:

Genesis 6:22
This is what Noach did; he did all that God ordered him to do.

And again in:

Genesis 7:5
Noach did all that ADONAI ordered him to do.

In fact, if Noach’s faith were so inferior, I doubt the author of the book of Hebrews would have honored him in the Faith Hall of Fame passage. As it is written:

Hebrews 11:7 (CJB)
By trusting, Noach, after receiving divine warning about things as yet unseen, was filled with holy fear and built an ark to save his household. Through this trusting, he put the world under condemnation and received the righteousness that comes from trusting.

Where the Stern edition uses the word trust, most traditional translations use the word “faith.” So at best, I think the more skeptical Rabbis have it half-right. Noach was indeed saved by faith, though the grace of Adonai; but this does not make his righteousness second-rate or lesser than other Biblical figures. For, as it is written:

Ephesians 2:8-9 (CJB)
For you have been delivered by grace through trusting, and even this is not your accomplishment but God’s gift. You were not delivered by your own actions; therefore no one should boast.

Therefore, Noach’s faith, his trust, are not that different from our own; where he differed is in the level of his obedience to Adonai’s directions. We can trust that these things were as true in Noach’s day as they are today, or in Yeshua’s time, for, as it is written:

Hebrews 13:8 (CJB)
Yeshua the Messiah is the same yesterday, today and forever.

One final thing we ought to know about Noach, before the flood. I mentioned it briefly earlier, and it is that Noach waited until midlife before having his children. Jewish tradition gives us a clue as to why:

Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, vol. 1
Noah had not married until he was four hundred and ninety-eight years old. Then the Lord had bidden him to take a wife unto himself. He had not desired to bring children into the world, seeing that they would all have to perish in the flood, and he had only three sons, born unto him shortly before the deluge came. God had given him so small a number of offspring that he might be spared the necessity of building the ark on an overlarge scale in case they turned out to be pious. And if not, if they, too, were depraved like the rest of their generation, [Noah’s] sorrow over their destruction would but be increased in proportion to their number.

As for who he married, the Jewish Encyclopedia sheds this light upon that topic:

JewishEncyclopedia.org
The “Sefer ha-Yashar” (l.c.) and Gen. R. (xxii. 4) both agree that Noah’s wife was called Naamah. According to the latter, she was the sister of Tubal-Cain (Gen. iv. 21); according to the former, she was a daughter of Enoch, and Noah married her when he was 498 years old. In the Book of Jubilees (Hebr. transl. by Rubin, iv. 46-47) Noah’s wife is referred to as “Emzara, daughter of Raki’el.” Emzara was his niece, and two years after their marriage bore him Shem.

Now, although Na’amah is the more widely accepted theory on who Noach’s wife was, I see potential problems with this identification. We must remember that Enoch, Noach’s great-grandfather, had been transmitted to heaven 69 years before Noach’s birth. Assuming the most optimistic circumstance – that Enoch and his wife had Na’amah just prior to his transmission to heaven – at best that means that Na’amah would have been 567 years old at the time Noach married her at the age of 498.
And that’s at best! In all likelihood, Na’amah would have been closer to 100 years older than Noach, and potentially nearing the end of her child-bearing years.

The book of Jubilees’ identification of a niece, Emzara, as his wife, may be a better fit, but in the end, the Torah simply does not identify her by name, so we cannot know who Noah’s wife might have been with any certainty.

Now that we understand who Noah was a bit better, let’s move on to the subject of the flood. Now, even Biblical minimalists are willing to concede that there MAY have been a man named Noach in history, but surely, they assert, the Bible has it wrong about the flood.

Tags: elliptical, flood, Noach, Torah