Genesis 5:29 - 9:19: the full story of the Flood.
Genesis 9:20-29: the rather odd story of how No'ach became a "husbandman" and his sons found him naked and Kena'an (כְנָעַן - Canaan) ended up cursed because he covered him up: a tale of immense mythological mystery that needs a good deal of explaining, and is very probably the same story as the one that finds Lot's daughters getting him drunk and using him to get pregnant in the tale of the recreation of their world after the destruction of the Cities of the Plain (Genesis 19). Click here to read TheBibleNet commentary.
Genesis 5:29 tells us that No'ach was a son of Lamech, and that his name was given "to comfort us concerning our work, and the toil of our hands, because of the ground which YHVH has cursed." LAN'UACH is the verb for "resting", which links him with the Ark doing that on Mount Ararat at the end of the tale; but in the Pi'el form the same root yields LENACHEM, meaning "to comfort" (the resting of the soul), which then becomes the common Jewish name Menachem. But why the curse, and why the need for comfort?
Genesis 9:20-29: the rather odd story of how No'ach became a "husbandman" and his sons found him naked and Kena'an (כְנָעַן - Canaan) ended up cursed because he covered him up: a tale of immense mythological mystery that needs a good deal of explaining, and is very probably the same story as the one that finds Lot's daughters getting him drunk and using him to get pregnant in the tale of the recreation of their world after the destruction of the Cities of the Plain (Genesis 19). Click here to read TheBibleNet commentary.
Genesis 5:29 tells us that No'ach was a son of Lamech, and that his name was given "to comfort us concerning our work, and the toil of our hands, because of the ground which YHVH has cursed." LAN'UACH is the verb for "resting", which links him with the Ark doing that on Mount Ararat at the end of the tale; but in the Pi'el form the same root yields LENACHEM, meaning "to comfort" (the resting of the soul), which then becomes the common Jewish name Menachem. But why the curse, and why the need for comfort?
The answer to that lies in Genesis 4:23, and especially in verse 24, where Lamech tells his family that "I have slain a man for wounding me, and a young man for bruising me... If Kayin shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold"? Which takes us to the Number Seven, and especially to the Jubilee laws. My note to Leviticus 5:29 picks up the New Year atonement rituals, which take place in the seventh month of the seventh year, and point out from Genesis 5:28 that Lamech was 128 years old when he fathered No'ach, and from Genesis 5:30 that "Lamech lived after he begat No'ach five hundred and ninety-five years, and begat sons and daughters"; if we add those two numbers together, we get... 777, which calculation verse 31 actually does for us, so we know it must have been significant or the author wouldn't have made sure in this way that we didn't miss it.
Genesis 10:1 ff names his descendants.
Ezekiel 14:14 and 20 describe No'ach, alongside Dani-El and Iyov (Job), as paradigms of righteousness. This is worth investigating, because it brings together a most unlikely threesome, and supposedly in a work which was written at a time that should not include these three. Ezekiel, or properly Yechezke-El (יְחֶזְקֵאל), was born in Anatot (the Christian Bethany), probably in 622 BCE, the son of Buzi ben Itamar, a Kohen, and was among the three thousand Beney Yehudah exiled to Babylon in 598 BCE, after the defeat of King Yahu-Yachin (Jehoiachin) by Nebuchadnezzar II; his book of prophetic oracles and sermons belongs to that period.
The story of Dani-El, likewise found among the Yisra-Eli Prophets, takes place in Bav-El (Babylon) at more or less the same period, from 605 BCE to about 530 BCE; but these dates suggest that Yechezke-El would have been young enough to know the early parts of the Dani-El story, but did not live long enough to know the important later part, the legend of the lion's den. And that is before we take into account the absolute conviction of modern scholars, that the Book of Dani-El was written as an allegorical tale, not a historical one, in the 2nd century BCE; which Yechezke-El obviously could not have known, unless his book too was also a much later fabrication or re-write; and this too is the conviction of many scholars, including the most religious among the orthodox Jews, who insist that a Prophet may not prophesy or have his prophecies written down, outside Yisra-El.
And then there is Iyov (Job), which completes this very Babylonian trilogy. And here too we have a dating problem, because the 6th century BCE is the earliest date that scholars will accept for the work, which gives it the same problem as the Dani-El; and actually most scholars prefer a later date, even as late as the 4th century BCE - was it perhaps one of the texts brought to Yisra-El by the Shomronim, the "Samaritans" of northern Mesopotamia, when they were exiled there at the time that the Yehudim were exiled to Bav-El?
None of this however has anything to do with No'ach, except that the three names happen to get connected on this one occasion.
Isaiah 54:9 is theologically rather more important, because this is Yesha-Yahu (Isaiah), in the midst of yet another of his interminable sermons of destruction, remembering that YHVH cut a brit, which is to say signed a covenant with his rainbow-signature, promising, or perhaps he was only pledging, never to bring such terminal destruction again.
The story of Utnapishtim in the "Epic of Gilgamesh" seems to be the source. No'ach means "to come to rest", which is a logical name in the circumstances. I have conjectured elsewhere that the word Utnapishtim is a Chaldean version of Yehudit's Hitpa'el or relexive form, in conjugation of the root NAPHASH, which means "spirit" or "soul", and suggests "renewal of the spirit". Deucalion's Flood also bears comparison, and the legend of Ziusudra, which also tells a Babylonian version of the Flood, may well be the early source from which Gilgamesh, and its sister-epic of Atraharsis, were derived.
1 Chronicles 8:2 does not give No'ach as a son of Bin-Yamin, though this is how many translations along the years have rendered it. The name there is Nochah (נוֹחָה), the feminine version of the name, as Dinah to Dan, Asherah to Asher et cetera. The error is probably a result of the texts normally giving son-names, and even stating that the progeny were sons, daughters being excluded; but on this occasion the text tells us that Bin-Yamin begat... and then a list of names, gender unstated.
While TheBibleNet is open-minded to all manner of strange hypotheses and speculations, even the distantly negligible possibility that there may after all be a God, a Heaven and Hell, a Messiah and an Afterlife, no space is being offered, beyond this paragraph, to the conviction of many relic-seekers and tourist-site opportunists, that the remains of No'ach's Ark have actually been found, on Mount Ararat, in Armenia. If you want to follow that line of enquiry, you can do the research on your own.
Isaiah 54:9 is theologically rather more important, because this is Yesha-Yahu (Isaiah), in the midst of yet another of his interminable sermons of destruction, remembering that YHVH cut a brit, which is to say signed a covenant with his rainbow-signature, promising, or perhaps he was only pledging, never to bring such terminal destruction again.
The story of Utnapishtim in the "Epic of Gilgamesh" seems to be the source. No'ach means "to come to rest", which is a logical name in the circumstances. I have conjectured elsewhere that the word Utnapishtim is a Chaldean version of Yehudit's Hitpa'el or relexive form, in conjugation of the root NAPHASH, which means "spirit" or "soul", and suggests "renewal of the spirit". Deucalion's Flood also bears comparison, and the legend of Ziusudra, which also tells a Babylonian version of the Flood, may well be the early source from which Gilgamesh, and its sister-epic of Atraharsis, were derived.
1 Chronicles 8:2 does not give No'ach as a son of Bin-Yamin, though this is how many translations along the years have rendered it. The name there is Nochah (נוֹחָה), the feminine version of the name, as Dinah to Dan, Asherah to Asher et cetera. The error is probably a result of the texts normally giving son-names, and even stating that the progeny were sons, daughters being excluded; but on this occasion the text tells us that Bin-Yamin begat... and then a list of names, gender unstated.
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| Mount Ararat - photo courtesy of National Geographic |
However, it is worth pointing out that the stories in the first eight books of the Bible, like the tales of the Aboriginal Dreamtime and the Homeric Odes, are not really history at all, and therefore cannot be demonstrated as having taken place; they are mythology, in the strictest sense of that word, which is the creation of anthropomorphic tales - metaphors, allegories, analogies - to explain the workings of the Cosmos in a world that does not yet have the language of Physics, Chemistry or Biology available.
So, with the story of No'ach, as with those of Phaeton and Helios in the Greek, we have a child's simple question: why is the sun at one end of the sky in the morning, but at the other end of the sky in the evening, and how does it get there, and how does it get back? Add an explanation of rain, floods and rainbows, and the story of No'ach is the consequence.
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