Genesis - Parashath Noach.

 PARASHATH NOACH

ALIYAH 1 [6:9 - 6:22] - MAN IS JUDGED.

The story is familiar to us in English as "Noah and the Flood".  While the inundation of the earth is certainly the main feature of this cataclysm, the Hebrew word for "flood" occurs nowhere in this narrative; the event is instead called [ הַמַּבּ֥וּל | ha-mabul], meaning "destruction" or "confusion".  It is an undoing of the work of the Creation.

There's a famous debate as to whether the phrase "righteous in his generations" (6:9) should be interpreted as enhancing Noah's status (because he resisted the evil influences of his time) or limiting it (because he only appeared "righteous" by a very low standard).  However this may be, Noah, like every one of us, was born into a particular place and time; and like all of us, he was judged by G-d according to his actions in the world he lived in.

ALIYAH 2 [7:1 - 7:16] - NOAH IS COMMANDED TO PREPARE.

Tradition teaches that the men and the women entered separately (based on 7:7), and abstained from marital relations while in the Ark, because the world was in a state of distress.  This would also ensure that no children would be conceived aboard the Ark.  (But see 7:13.)

ALIYAH 3 [7:17 - 8:14] - THE FLOOD.

The Hebrew word used for the cataclysm of Noah's time does not actually mean "flood" but rather "confusion".  In fact, the event is a systematic undoing of the original work of creation.  Grumet on 7:23:  "Notice what is being erased and the order in which it is happening:  human, animal, crawling creatures, and birds."

It's also noteworthy that the text refers to the pairs of animals as [ish v'ishto] (7:3) - generally translated as "each with its mate", but it literally means "man and wife", echoing Adam and Eve.  In no other place in the Bible is the phrase "ish v'ishto" used in reference to animals.

One thing that's striking about the Flood narrative is the amount of detail, in the measurements of the Ark and especially in the chronology of the Flood itself.  Here we get the first usage of calendrical dates in the Bible (7:11, 8:4, 8:13-14).  And in fact, this is the ONLY instance of calendar dates in the Book of Genesis:  not in the journeys of the Patriarchs, not in the chronicle of Joseph's sojourn in Egypt, but here, in the story the Flood, where human history has come to a standstill and literally nothing happens.  

"Ironically it is G-d, for Whom time is meaningless, Who keeps track of time in the absence of the functioning of the luminaries."  (Grumet)




ALIYAH 4 [8:15 - 9:7] - LEAVING THE ARK.

Many elements of the Flood narrative echo the earlier Creation story; here Noah offers sacrifices to G-d (8:20), recalling the first appearance of sacrifices in the Cain and Abel story.  

And, again harking back to the Creation, G-d blesses Noah and his sons with the same phrase:  "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth" (9:1 - 4), but with some important differences.  Man is not only given dominion over all living things, but now "there will be a fear and dread of you" [ וּמוֹרַֽאֲכֶ֤ם וְחִתְּכֶם֙ | u-morakhem v'chitkhem], perhaps as a safeguard against a second rebellion from a jealous animal kingdom as with the Serpent.  "Every moving creature will be yours to eat," further clarifying that animals as well as plants are now permitted as food.  However, man is not to consume the blood, a hint at the prohibition against cruelty to animals in the Seven Laws of Noah as understood by Jewish tradition.

G-d forbids the shedding of innocent human blood (9:5 - 6), pointedly referring to "the hand of a man who is his brother".  The famous verse "who sheds the blood of man, by man's blood shall his blood be shed" explicitly calls for crime to be met with punishment - perhaps a response to the lawless violence that consumed the world in the generations following Cain.  It appears that the Creator is determined not to repeat the experience of Cain, who was shielded from human retribution, and who in the end served to inspire later generations such as Lemekh to violence.

ALIYAH 5 [9:8 - 9:17] - THE PROMISE.

The Creator promises to Noah that He will never again destroy the world.  All of the reported speech in this passage is G-d's, but as Robert Alter notes, "and G-d said ..." is repeated three times, as if to suggest a significant silence or absence of response, perhaps indicating doubt:  "The flood-battered Noah evidently needs further assurance ..." (p. 33).

ALIYAH 6 [9:18 - 10:32] - NOAH'S DRUNKENNESS, HAM'S SIN.

In Eden, man sinned through the forbidden fruit; here, it is Noah's excessive indulgence in wine that leads to an indecent incident involving Ham.  Again echoing the Creation, there are themes of appetite and shame.  Noah curses Ham and his son Canaan and their descendants.

Here we see a common theme in the Hebrew Bible:  the descendants may be punished for the sins of the fathers.  What you do today affects those who will come after you tomorrow.  Reward or punishment of future generations is the main incentive mechanism in Scripture.  On a national level, this focus is what helped the Jewish people survive for generations in exile and oppression.  On an individual level, this incentive works by appealing to man's highest motives:  the search for meaning, and the drive to create something that will live on after one's own death.

In the tale of Noah, we have seen many parallels with Adam and Eve, but we also see some key differences.  For Noah and the generations after him, death is an inexorable reality - and one that will grow closer as the extraordinary lifespans reported by the text continue to shrink towards the Divinely ordained limit of 120 years (see 6:3).  Noah and his family witnessed the death of the old world; for them, and for the generations after them, the urgent question of mortal life is:  What will live on after me, when I am gone?  What will I leave behind?


ALIYAH 7 [11:1 - 11:32] - THE CITY OF BABEL.

So far, the story of mankind told in Genesis is a story of displacements:  the exile from Eden, Cain's banishment, the Flood.  Now - narrated in just nine verses - we find the dispersion of mankind from Babel.

We know the story as "the Tower of Babel" in English, just as we know the story of Noah as "the Flood" (even though the Hebrew word for "flood" never appears there).  Here, as Grumet points out, the word "tower" occurs twice, but "city" appears three times, suggesting that "God's primary concern is about the city, and only secondarily about the tower".  Prager (citing Gunther Plaut, among others) agrees.

Grumet elaborates:  "The city is a means to concentrate people geographically, and the tower provides a vantage point for control of those people."

Hazony:  "In these verses we get to see the biblical suspicion of the state in its distilled form."

Steinsaltz:  "This generation expressed the very human desire to gather in large urban centers that hold all their power, control, and technology.  Their unity enabled them to build these huge centers.  Such centers however, are designed for preservation rather than progress. ...  In a homogeneous technological society, nothing new will grow."

Prager goes on to observe:  "City dwellers are far more capable of anonymity than people who live in small towns and rural areas.  And when people are anonymous, they feel less moral obligation to their neighbors - who are also likely to be anonymous.  When both the individual and his neighbors are anonymous, people inevitably feel much less connected to one another.  And they often act worse ...".

From the foregoing, we may see two possible causes for concern in the growth of Babel:  (1) the centralized mechanisms of control, represented by the tower; and (2) the erosion of personal identity in the face of the anonymous crowd, and with it the loss of a sense of personal responsibility.  Taken together, these forces form the same destructive combination that we see in our world today:  the weakening of family and of human society, which are then supplanted and displaced by the impersonal state.

And given this state of affairs, the Creator's recourse seems almost inevitable:  to shatter the Leviathan-state of Babel, returning a sense of locality and community to the human population.  This is reflected in the fragmentation of language, just as the fall of the Roman Empire brought with it the disappearance of Latin as a living language and the rise of its Romance descendants.

I want to come back to the theme of wandering and exploration.  The text tells us that "The entire earth was of one language and one speech" and that "they traveled from the east."  This seems to indicate that the entire human population migrated together (although Steinsaltz maintains that "they" refers only to "a large group of people" - which, in turn, would imply that some other portion remained unaffected by the Dispersion).  "From the east" is ambiguous:  it's [mi-qedem] in Hebrew, but the word could also mean "from ancient times" - and we've run into that word before, referring to the Garden of Eden (2:8).

They settled in a plain (Steinsaltz and Alter explain that [biq'a] means a plain, and not "valley" as in later Hebrew) in Shin'ar - that's the name Sumer in English, and Sinjar in Arabic.  And it seems like they got tired of wandering.

Although the episode is just nine verses long, the text takes the time to point out that the people made bricks from clay (the first architectural detail in the Bible) "which were for them as stone" suggesting that they had improvised and adapted to their new envitonment.  But, having grown comfortable there, they didn't want to leave.

"Lest we be scattered" - this is fascinating.  What were they afraid of?  Who or what did they think was going to scatter them?  And yet, in the end, scattered they were, and scattered they must be.  

Adam was exiled from Eden, to work the land from which he was taken.  Cain was condemned to wander the earth, and so to give up his own settled lifestyle and re-create the nomadic existence of his murdered brother.  

And the people of Babel were scattered "upon the face of all the earth". They were cast out from the stultifying order of the city-state to the terror of the wilderness.

In each case, it is not just a change of place, but a change of habits and lifestyle.  It is the biblical "hero's journey".  It is a summons to mend oneself, and to grow, by encountering the danger and the chaos of the unexplored world outside.

The early history of man closes with a list of the generations after Noah (or more precisely, the descendants of Shem) through the sons of Terach.  The three sons of Terach are Avram (also spelled Abram), Nachor, and Haran.  Like the three sons of Noah, they all appear to be born in the same year, when Terach is 70 years of age.

The chronology of the ten postdiluvian generations (11:10 - 26) resembles that of the sons of Seth (5:6 - 32) but with one noticeable difference:  the checksums for the ages ("he lived X years, he begot ..., he lived Y more years, he begot sons and daughters, all his days were X+Y years, and he died") are missing here.  I think it is because in the first series, an exception existed to the "... and he died" pattern (Enoch who "walked with God" in 5:24); whereas in the second series, all of the people died in the usual fashion, so it was not necessary for Scripture to tell you in each case that "he died".

Terach died in Charan, enroute with his family to Canaan - the land that the Hebrews would come to call Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel.  (The place name Charan is sometimes also spelled Haran in English translations, but it should not be confused with Abram's brother Haran.)  The story of this journey is told in the next reading.  [2041]