by C. A. Gray
Beside me, Shem whooped. “Finally! Let’s get out of here!”
Aya appeared beside us and murmured doubtfully, “It’s not flooded anymore, but it still looks like a soupy mess down there.”
All of us could see what she meant, though we didn’t want to see it. But we took a vote—once we left the ark, to return to it again would be intolerable. So instead, we waited one more month, which felt longer than all the other months put together. Even the animals seemed to sleep less and pace, whinny, moo, and roar more than they had before. Fortunately, and miraculously, none of the baby predators seemed to have grown noticeably in the last year, or I’d have been more concerned.
As I gazed out at the now dry and sprouting earth down below one day, the Lord at last spoke to me again. It was audible, I thought, but sounded less like the thunder than it had at first, and more as though it were coming from inside my own head.
“Go out of the ark,” He said, “you and your wife, and your sons and your sons’ wives with you. Bring out with you every living thing of all flesh that is with you: birds and cattle and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, so that they may abound on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply on the earth.”
“What?” demanded Judith who was beside me. Her quizzical expression confirmed that she had not heard what I had heard; she just felt me stiffen.
I turned to her, beaming through the long, thick, unkempt beard that I had not bothered to trim since we had boarded the ark.
“It’s time,” I announced to her, my words thick with relief.
With the help of my sons, we managed to get the door to the ark un-stuck; the pitch had congealed in its cracks. The lever system creaked as we operated it to lower the door to the ground: much more efficient in this direction than in the other. We then decided to release all the birds at once first. I reserved one of every clean bird, but we released all the rest. No sooner had we opened their compartments, every one of them took wing and flew away with restless energy, squawking and chirping and dropping feathers as they went. I raised my hand against the bright sun, so much brighter than it had seemed to me before the flood, and waved goodbye.
“Be fruitful and multiply,” I whispered to them, long after they were gone.
Next, after reserving one of every clean animal, we made the rounds to release first the herbivores out the door of the ark, from smallest to largest, so that none would get trampled on the way out. We gave them a good head start before releasing the predators after them—though they were but babies still, I suspected releasing the Tyrannosaurus Rex and the deer at the same time would not have been conducive to multiplication of the latter.
This process took the better part of a day. Though Aya and Ham had grown less wearisome than they had been before the year plus of confinement, they were the most vocal about their desire to be gone sooner rather than later.
“What are we waiting for?” Aya complained.
Judith gave her a sharp look. “Noah intends to sacrifice to the Lord, to thank Him for saving us from worldwide destruction.”
Aya snorted, and Ham muttered, “That makes sense. Let’s thank Him for this year of absolute misery, while everything we know was destroyed.” He said this under his breath, loudly enough that all of us could hear him, but quietly enough that no one felt obligated to respond.
I had seen what the earth looked like from inside the ark, yet when I finally set my foot upon the mountaintop it still gave me pause. The beginnings of new life were stirring in the soil, but for the most part, the earth was desolate. All I had known before had been verdant and lush; this was a barren wasteland, with rocks aplenty rather than trees, vines, grass, and bushes. I took a deep breath, and began to collect the rocks, piling them into a rectangular altar. Quietly, Ham and Japheth helped me, while the rest of my family brought me the docile clean animals one by one. Judith looked away, as did my daughters-in-law, not wanting to see the moment of the kill. I could not blame them. When I had sacrificed to the Lord before the flood, I had not known the animals as intimately as I did now. These had grown domestic under my hand, and had learned to trust me to feed and care for them. What I was about to do felt like betrayal. And yet, I understood from the story of our forefathers, Cain and Abel, that what God required was a blood sacrifice for sin. I also thought I understood the character of the Lord well enough to know that He did not delight in the death of any of His creatures, despite what had just happened in the flood. I did not fully understand why the wages of sin was death, nor how God could count the death of an innocent creature as a substitutionary sacrifice for myself or my family. But I did know this was what He required, and that some kind of spiritual transaction took place in the process. So I looked away as I slit the throats of one creature after another, piling their bodies upon the altar until the stones ran with blood. Judith and Dafna quietly wept in the background.
When we had killed the last of the creatures reserved for this purpose, Japheth, the most skilled at creating fire from flint, struck two stones together at precisely the right angle to create a spark. Within minutes, the flames spread, creeping up to consume the carcasses. I stepped back from the sudden heat, my arms covered in blood to my elbows.
I looked up to the blue sky above, spangled with white clouds. I imagined the Lord enthroned in heaven, smelling the smoke that ascended from the altar. He did not speak to me, but I had a sense that He had pulled back the veil of Heaven to allow me to see Him as He inhaled the aroma, and even allowed me to hear His thoughts.
I will never again curse the ground for man’s sake, although the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; nor will I again destroy every living thing as I have done. While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, and day and night shall not cease .
I raised my hands in worship at this vision, and fell to my knees. Then I heard the Lord speak to me, though this time I knew the words were in my mind, and only for me.
“Be fruitful and multiply,” He said, “and fill the earth. And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be on every beast of the earth, on every bird of the air, on all that move on the earth, and on all the fish of the sea. They are given into your hand. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. I have given you all things, even as the green herbs. But you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood. Surely for your lifeblood I will demand a reckoning; from the hand of every beast I will require it, and from the hand of man. From the hand of every man’s brother I will require the life of man. Whoever sheds man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed. For in the image of God He made man. And as for you, be fruitful and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth and multiply in it.”
As the Lord spoke this to me, visions of the creatures we had just released into the wild filled my imagination. They would run from me from now on, and I should kill and eat them. What a strange, almost grotesque concept that seemed to me now!
I also thought of God’s promise to protect Cain even after he had slain his brother Abel. The rampant murder and bloodshed had gone unpunished before the flood, but no more. That was one of the things that had appalled me the most about my former home: my soul had burned with the rampant injustice all around me. But the Lord had never made any covenant with man before now that included punishment of any kind. In a flash of insight, I understood: the pre-flood world had shown mankind, for all generations, the end result of such unchecked, unpunished sin. He did not want to wipe out the earth, but the only way He could ensure that the world would never again become corrupt to such a degree that His plan of bringing the promised Seed through Eve would be in jeopardy would be if He checked individual sins with the threat of individual punishment.
This was good, I realized. It was righteous. It was the only way.
I looked back at my family, and saw that they too seemed struck with fear. All of them were on their knees, faces pressed to the ground. I
did not think they had heard the Lord speak in the way I did, but they clearly heard something.
God went on, “And as for Me, behold, I establish My covenant with you and with your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you: the birds, the cattle, and every beast of the earth with you, of all that go out of the ark, every beast of the earth. Thus I establish My covenant with you: Never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of the flood; never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth. This is the sign of the covenant which I make between Me and you, and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: I set My rainbow in the cloud, and it shall be for the sign of the covenant between Me and the earth.” I peeked up at the sky as He said this, and my mouth fell open in wonder. From one end of the horizon to the other, an enormous ephemeral vision arced across the sky, reflecting every color I had ever seen in the old world before the flood: reds, oranges, and yellows of the myriad flowers and sunrises. The green of the forest. Blues and purples of twilight. All the shades that I thought had been gone forever from the desolate place. Tears sprung to my eyes at its devastating and unexpected beauty.
“It shall be,” God went on, “when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the rainbow shall be seen in the cloud; and I will remember My covenant which is between Me and you and every living creature of all flesh; the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. The rainbow shall be in the cloud, and I will look on it to remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.”
“What… is that?” asked Japheth hoarsely. All of them were staring at the marvelous apparition in the sky.
“It’s called a rainbow,” I whispered. “It’s God’s promise to us that He will never again destroy the earth with water.” It was a symbol of hope and a future.
When the Lord said nothing more to me, at last I rose to my feet and looked at my family. They rose too, and I gestured at the valley below us.
“Well,” I said, “Shall we?”
Afterword
It was harder to write this retelling than I expected it to be. The story in Genesis spans only three and a half chapters, and yet so much happens!
In Genesis 6, we’re told the “sons of God” saw the “daughters of men” and took wives for themselves. Many commentaries say that “sons of God” refers to the lineage of Seth, Adam and Eve’s third son, while the “daughters of men” refer to the ungodly line of Cain. I don’t agree. The Hebrew term for “sons of God,” when used in context in the book of Job (1:6, 2:1, and 38:7) refers to angels, and Jude 1:6-7 describes angels who “kept not their first estate,” but “left their habitation,” and “went after strange flesh.” According to Genesis 6, this produced “giants,” according to the NKJV, or the Nephilim according to other translations. These were “mighty men of old, men of renown” (Genesis 6:4).
According to commentary from enduringword.com , the suggestion seems to be that demons and humans had offspring, polluting the bloodline of Adam and producing these evil superhumans. Noah, according to Genesis 6:9, was a man “perfect in his generations.” This could have just meant that he was righteous before God, and it does tell us that he walked with God. But could “perfect in his generations” also mean that his bloodline was purely human, unlike many or most of the rest of the earth? Is it possible that Satan’s strategy was to pollute the gene pool of Adam, so that God could not send the promised Seed from the curse in the garden to redeem mankind from the fall (Genesis 3:15)?
Remember that by this point, God had not yet given the law. While mankind always must have had some kind of inherent understanding of morality, there was not yet any official restraint upon evil (Romans 5:13). This might have been the reason why, only 1,656 years from the time of creation (calculated from the genealogies in Genesis 5), the world was so corrupt as to render mankind almost irredeemable. I suspect God waited to give the law, so that mankind could see, through the written records at least, what it would become without the restraint of the law, if man was left entirely to his own inclinations. God already knew the end result, but we didn’t.
It seems incredibly harsh to wipe out every living thing on the earth, unless we consider unchecked sin upon the earth in the same light that we might view a cancer in a body: unrestrained, the cancer destroys the body. It may be painful to cut it out, irradiate or poison it, and there very likely will be collateral damage, but it’s better than the alternative. In the same way, God’s only way to redeem mankind was through a purely human bloodline. He couldn’t just sovereignly send Jesus and violate the Adamic covenant in which He gave the earth to men, or He Himself would be unjust. He had to work through those who gave Him permission to do so. Jesus came in the fullness of time (Galatians 4:4-7): in other words, though God wanted to send Him after the fall, He had to work within constraints of human free will, and the faith and partnership of man: the laws He set up from the very beginning. Satan was trying to pollute the bloodline so that He could not do this, and had very nearly succeeded. God responded in the only way He could.
There is no implication that even Noah’s family was righteous; it seems God saved them for Noah’s sake, though presumably at least Noah’s daughters-in-law did not have Nephilim blood either, or else the subsequent line would be equally contaminated. (There is an implication that at least some of the Nephilim returned even after the flood, as giants had taken over the Promised Land in Numbers 13:33. Goliath, one of the Philistines in the Promised Land, was over nine feet tall, according to 1 Samuel 17:4. He was one of the inhabitants of the Promised Land, and may well have had Nephilim blood in him.)
When God said man’s “days shall be one hundred twenty years,” this could have meant that after the flood, God would set the average human lifespan at 120 years, as opposed to pre-flood, when people lived many centuries. Many creation scientists speculate that this was due to the protective canopy of water around the earth, slowing the aging process from the sun’s free radicals and increasing the atmospheric pressure. If this was God’s meaning, Moses later modified it in Psalm 90:10, to say that the length would be 70 to 80 years on average, though in context the Psalm suggests that this was part of the curse of disobedience. He himself did live to exactly 120 years of age (Deuteronomy 34:7). There are a few post-flood instances of people living past 120 years, but they seemed to be concentrated in the latter part of Genesis, so perhaps the earth was still adjusting to the change. Regardless, perhaps Psalm 90:10 and this mention of 120 years might be considered the lower and an upper limits of an expected human life span—anything less would be considered a curse.
Meanwhile, Adam Clarke’s commentary and the Living Bible translation assume that 120 years was the length of time between when God spoke to Noah and when the flood waters came. I took this interpretation also, though I think it means both.
The ark that God described to Noah was not so much a boat, meant to aerodynamically travel from point A to point B; it was more like a chest for preservation. The biblical description is the equivalent of a structure that is 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high—about the size of the Titanic. During the time that Noah built the ark, the Genesis account doesn’t indicate that he did anything else—but 2 Peter 2:5 says that Noah was also a “preacher of righteousness.” Hebrews 11:7 says Noah “condemned the world” by preparing the ark. Taken together with 2 Peter 2:5, this suggests that Noah must have preached repentance to the world, and that anyone who accepted it could have had a place on the ark as well. Yet no one did.
Despite this, and despite the fact that presumably the earth had never before seen rain (as Genesis 2:5-6 indicates), Noah persisted in following God’s instructions to build an enormous barge on dry land. Imagine how his contemporaries must have ridiculed him! No wonder he is listed as an example of righteousness in company with Job and Daniel (Ezekiel 14:14), and in the Hebrews 11 faith Hall of Fame. I also imagine that th
e ridicule of the vocal hecklers may have dissuaded those who might have otherwise heeded Noah’s call to repentance, due to peer pressure. (I’m thinking of Nicodemus, one of the leaders of the synagogue who came to Jesus by night, so that none of his peers would see him, John 2-3).
Those who heckled for 120 years, though, surely must have grown a bit nervous when they saw all the animals of the earth coming to Noah of their own accord, two by two (Genesis 6:20), along with seven of each clean animal so that he would have extras for sacrifice after the flood waters receded (Genesis 8:20). When the flood waters finally came, not only did it rain forty days and forty nights, unleashing the canopy of water that God had originally placed outside the atmosphere of the earth (Genesis 1:7), but the water that had previously been sequestered under the surface of the earth (Genesis 2:6) broke forth as the “fountains of the deep” (Genesis 8:2, Proverbs 3:20). For both of these reasons, I suspect that the face of the earth in Noah’s day looked much different than it does now. Probably far more of the earth was land than it is at present, and the same canopy that provided protection from the sun’s harsh rays and presumably allowed man to live for centuries also likely provided a climate more like that of a greenhouse: the earth was probably far more temperate and lush than it is today. Perhaps what evolutionists consider continental drift over a period of millions or billions of years happened in a very short period of time, when the fountains of the deep were broken up. The tectonic plates may have shifted as a result of this (or perhaps they were created due to the rupture of the fountains of the deep), and the great mountains of the earth also could have been created at the same time.
Adding up the time that the flood waters persisted upon the earth and then receded, Noah and his family were on the ark for one year and ten days, though they were only adrift for five months, before the ark came to rest on Mount Ararat, now in Turkey. The Bible is specific on where it landed, telling historians exactly where they should look. Babylonian historian Berosus wrote in 275 BC, “But of this ship that grounded in Armenia some part still remains in the mountains… and some get pitch from the ship by scraping it off.” Josephus wrote in 75 AD, “However, the Armenians call this place (Apobaterion) The Place of Descent; for the ark being saved in that place, its remains are shown there by the inhabitants to this day.” Theophilus of Antioch wrote in 180 AD, “the remains [of the ark] are to this day to be seen… in the mountains.” According to enduringword.com , in 1876 a British statesman named Viscount Bryce climbed Mount Ararat and reported finding a fragment of hand-tooled wood.