Who was Noah?
When they lived In the opening chapters of Genesis, before the patriarchal history
In short
Noah is the flood character in Genesis. The text presents him as a just man among corrupted contemporaries, charged with building an enormous vessel, a survivor of the catastrophe with his family and the animals, the recipient of a covenant with a sign in the sky — and, afterwards, drunk inside his own tent.
- Written by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 7 min read
Noah’s story takes up four chapters and is probably the biblical passage most reproduced in nurseries. That has a curious effect: almost everybody thinks they know it, and almost nobody has read the four chapters through.
What is there is considerably stranger and considerably harder than the version with smiling giraffes. The account opens with a regret attributed to God, passes through a destruction of total scale, and ends with a scene of family humiliation inside a tent. None of that is an addition by critical reading: it is in the text, in that order.
The world that goes bad
Before Noah appears, Genesis describes a steady degradation since the garden: the first killing, a song of vengeance, and a short obscure passage about sons of God and daughters of men that produces giants. Then comes the assessment: wickedness was great and human thinking turned continually toward evil.
The sentence that follows is one of the most uncomfortable in the Bible, and translations do not soften it: the text says God regretted having made humankind, and that it grieved him inwardly. This is not a cold decision; it is presented as pain.
That is where Noah comes in, with a line that separates him from the rest on two counts: he found grace, and he is called just in relation to his own generation.
5Then God, seeing that the wickedness of men was great upon the earth and that every thought of their heart was intent upon evil at all times,
6repented that he had made man on the earth. And being touched inwardly with a sorrow of heart,
The diagnosis and the reaction. Read the two verses together and notice that the second does not describe anger but sorrow — which changes the tone in which the rest of the section reads.
The ark, and how many animals went into it
The instructions are specific enough to read like a plan: timber, compartments, pitch inside and out, three hundred cubits long by fifty wide by thirty high, a window, a door in the side and three levels.
And here is the detail most often lost. Chapter 6 says to bring a pair of each kind. Chapter 7 specifies: of clean animals, seven; of birds, seven; and of animals that are not clean, two. So the famous formula is the instruction from the first chapter, and the second chapter is the more detailed one.
This distinction is not trivia. At the end of the account, Noah offers a sacrifice of clean animals — which is only possible because more than one pair of them was aboard. The text is internally coherent on this point, and that coherence disappears when only the abridged version is read.
19And from every living thing of all that is flesh, you shall lead pairs into the ark, so that they may survive with you: from the male sex and the female,
20from birds, according to their kind, and from beasts, in their kind, and from among all animals on earth, according to their kind; pairs from each shall enter with you, so that they may be able to live.
The general instruction: a pair of each. It is the one everybody knows, and it is the first of the two.
2From all the clean animals, take seven and seven, the male and the female. Yet truly, from animals that are unclean, take two and two, the male and the female.
3But also from the birds of the air, take seven and seven, the male and the female, so that offspring may be saved upon the face of the whole earth.
The detailed instruction, one chapter later, which distinguishes clean animals from unclean ones and changes the numbers. Read the two in sequence: it is the same account specifying what the first instruction left unspecified.
The flood, and the waiting
The catastrophe is described as a reversal of creation: the waters come back from above and below, and the separation that had organised the world comes undone. The text puts Noah at six hundred years of age.
The longest part, though, is not the water rising — it is waiting for it to drop. The vessel grounds in a mountainous region, and then come weeks of attempts to find out whether it is possible to go out yet. Noah releases a raven. Then a dove, which comes back with nothing. Seven days later the same dove comes back with an olive leaf. Seven days after that, she goes out and does not come back — and it is that silence, not the leaf, that signals the end.
4And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, upon the mountains of Armenia.
The grounding. Note the plural: the text speaks of mountains and names a whole region, never a specific peak. This edition, following the Latin, names the region Armenia where Hebrew-based translations read Ararat.
The covenant and the bow
After the sacrifice comes a one-sided commitment: there will be no further destruction of this kind. And there comes a sign, which is the most quoted part of the section and the least carefully read.
The text does not say rainbow. It speaks of God’s bow, set in the clouds — and the Hebrew word is the same one used for a war bow. The image is of a weapon hung up, pointed away from the earth, and the reading that takes this as a gesture of disarmament is old and widely held among commentators.
The vineyard
The story does not end at the bow. It ends with Noah planting a vineyard, drinking the wine, becoming drunk and lying uncovered inside his tent. One of his sons sees and tells his brothers; the other two walk in backwards to cover their father without looking.
On waking, Noah curses — and the curse does not land on the son who saw, but on a grandson, Canaan. This passage has a deplorable history of use: it was invoked for centuries to justify enslavement, and that application is today repudiated by every major Christian tradition. The text itself mentions no race whatsoever, and the racial reading was constructed a very long time afterwards.
What is worth recording is the shape of the ending. The man described as just among his own does not come out of the catastrophe transformed. Genesis leaves him exactly as it left the characters in the garden: with a consequence inside his own household.
What the text does not say
Biblical figures gather layers of tradition that Scripture does not support. Telling the two apart does not diminish the story — it gives back what is actually written.
What is commonly said
The animals went into the ark two by two.
What Scripture says
That is the first of two instructions. Chapter 6 says to take a pair of each kind; chapter 7 specifies seven of each clean animal and seven of each bird, and two of each animal that is not clean. The difference does work inside the narrative: at the end, Noah sacrifices clean animals, which requires more than one pair of them to have been aboard.
What is commonly said
The ark came to rest on Mount Ararat.
What Scripture says
The text uses the plural and names a mountainous region, not a peak. No summit is identified, no altitude is given, and the account shows no interest in pinpointing the spot. The association with one specific mountain in eastern Turkey is later than the text, and it is what the modern expeditions searching for wreckage were built on.
What is commonly said
The dove came back with the olive branch, and then they went out.
What Scripture says
The first bird sent out is a raven. Then comes the dove, and she goes out three times: the first time she returns with nothing, having found nowhere to land; seven days later she brings the olive leaf; and seven days after that she goes out and does not return. It is the third flight, the one with no pretty picture attached, that reports the ground was dry.
What is commonly said
God created the rainbow at that moment, as a promise.
What Scripture says
The text says God sets his bow in the clouds as the sign of the covenant. The word is the same one used for a war bow, and the text neither narrates the invention of the phenomenon nor claims it had never occurred before. What it establishes is the meaning: from then on it counts as a reminder of a commitment.
Where this person appears
8Yet truly, Noah found grace before the Lord.
9These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a just man, and yet he was predominate among his generations, for he walked with God.
The introduction of Noah, on two counts: he found grace, and he is called just with a comparison to his own generation attached. This edition renders that comparison unusually, where Hebrew-based translations read that he was blameless among his contemporaries.
6And when forty days had passed, Noah, opening the window that he had made in the ark, sent forth a raven,
7which went forth and did not return, until the waters were dried up across the earth.
8Likewise, he sent forth a dove after him, in order to see if the waters had now ceased upon the face of the earth.
9But when she did not find a place where her foot might rest, she returned to him in the ark. For the waters were upon the whole earth. And he extended his hand and caught her, and he brought her into the ark.
10And then, having waited a further seven days, he again sent forth the dove out of the ark.
11And she came to him in the evening, carrying in her mouth an olive branch with green leaves. Noah then understood that the waters had ceased upon the earth.
The raven and the dove’s first two flights. It is the most delicate stretch of the account: a man in a sealed vessel trying to find out, by means of birds, whether the world outside exists again. Note that editions differ on the raven — this one has it not returning, while Hebrew-based translations have it going back and forth.
12And God said: “This is the sign of the pact that I grant between me and you, and to every living soul that is with you, for perpetual generations.
13I will place my arc in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the pact between myself and the earth.
The sign of the covenant. Notice that the commitment is one-sided: nothing is required in return from Noah or anyone else, which is rare among biblical covenants and is why this one gets quoted on its own.
20And Noah, a good farmer, began to cultivate the land, and he planted a vineyard.
21And by drinking its wine, he became inebriated and was naked in his tent.
22Because of this, when Ham, the father of Canaan, had indeed seen the privates of his father to be naked, he reported it to his two brothers outside.
The scene almost no children’s version includes, and it comes immediately after the bow. Genesis puts no transition between the two: the covenant and the drunkenness are in the same chapter.
28And after the great flood, Noah lived for three hundred and fifty years.
29And all his days were completed in nine hundred and fifty years, and then he died.
The close, in the format of the genealogies at the start of Genesis: total years and the word "died". After an entire flood, the character gets the same final line as everyone else.