Noah

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Noah (1)

nō´a (נח, nōaḥ, “rest”; Septuagint Νῶε, Nṓe; Josephus, Νῶχος, Nṓchos):

The grandson of Methuselah (Genesis 5:25-29), who was for two hundred and fifty years contemporary with Adam, and the son of Lamech, who was about fifty years old at the time of Adam's death. This patriarch is rightly regarded as the connecting link between the old and the new world. He is the second great progenitor of the human family.

The 10th in descent from Adam in the line of Seth (Genesis 5:28, Genesis 5:29). Lamech here seems to derive the word from the root נחם, nāḥam, “to comfort,” but this is probably a mere play upon the name by Noah's father. The words of his father Lamech at his birth (Genesis 5:29) have been regarded as in a sense prophetical, designating Noah as a type of Him who is the true “rest and comfort” of men under the burden of life (Matthew 11:28). The times in which Noah was born were degenerate, and this finds pathetic expression in Lamech's saying at the birth of Noah, “This same shall comfort us in our work and in the toil of our hands, which cometh because of the ground which Yahweh hath cursed.”

Noah lived five hundred years, and then there were born unto him three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth (Genesis 5:32). He was a “just man and perfect in his generation,” and “walked with God” (Compare Ezekiel 14:14, Ezekiel 14:20). But now the descendants of Cain and of Seth began to intermarry, and then there sprang up a race distinguished for their ungodliness. Men became more and more corrupt, and God determined to sweep the earth of its wicked population (Genesis 6:7). But with Noah God entered into a covenant, with a promise of deliverance from the threatened deluge (Genesis 6:18). He was accordingly commanded to build an ark (Genesis 6:14-16) for the saving of himself and his house. An interval of one hundred and twenty years elapsed while the ark was being built (Genesis 6:3), during which Noah bore constant testimony against the unbelief and wickedness of that generation (1 Peter 3:18-20; 2 Peter 2:5).

When the ark of “gopher-wood” (mentioned only here) was at length completed according to the command of the Lord, the living creatures that were to be preserved entered into it; and then Noah and his wife and sons and daughters-in-law entered it, and the “Lord shut him in” (Genesis 7:16). The judgment-threatened now fell on the guilty world, “the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished” (2 Peter 3:6). The ark floated on the waters for one hundred and fifty days, and then rested on the mountains of Ararat (Genesis 8:3, Genesis 8:4); but not for a considerable time after this was divine permission given him to leave the ark, so that he and his family were a whole year shut up within it (Genesis 8:6-14).

On leaving the ark Noah's first act was to erect an altar, the first of which there is any mention, and offer the sacrifices of adoring thanks and praise to God, who entered into a covenant with him, the first covenant between God and man, granting him possession of the earth by a new and special charter, which remains in force to the present time (Genesis 8:21 - 9:17). As a sign and witness of this covenant, the rainbow was adopted and set apart by God, as a sure pledge that never again would the earth be destroyed by a flood.

But, alas! Noah after this fell into grievous sin (Genesis 9:21); and the conduct of Ham on this sad occasion led to the memorable prediction regarding his three sons and their descendants. Noah “lived after the flood three hundred and fifty years, and he died” (Genesis 9:28-29).

Concerning theory that Noah is the name of a dynasty, like Pharaoh or Caesar, rather than of a single individual, see Antediluvians. In his 600th year the degenerate races of mankind were cut off by the Deluge. But 120 years previously (Genesis 6:3) he had been warned of the catastrophe, and according to 1 Peter 3:20 had been preparing for the event by building the ark (see Ark; Deluge). In the cuneiform inscriptions Noah corresponds to “H̬asisadra” (Xisuthrus). After the flood Noah celebrated his deliverance by building an altar and offering sacrifices to Yahweh (Genesis 8:20), and was sent forth with God's blessing to be “fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth” (Genesis 9:1), as Adam had been sent forth at the beginning (Genesis 1:28). In token of the certainty of God's covenant not to destroy the race again by flood, a rainbow spanned the sky whose reappearance was ever after to be a token of peace. But Noah was not above temptation. In the prosperity which followed, he became drunken from the fruit of the vineyard he had planted. His son Ham irreverently exposed the nakedness of his father, while Shem and Japheth covered it from view (Genesis 9:22, Genesis 9:23). The curse upon Canaan the son of Ham was literally fulfilled in subsequent history when Israel took possession of Palestine, when Tyre fell before the arms of Alexander, and Carthage surrendered to Rome.