Noah

The air around him smelled of hot pitch and fresh-cut cypress, and the only sounds for years were the bite of the adze and the laughter of people who had come to watch. On dry ground, miles from any sea worth the name, an old man was building a wooden vessel the size of a small town. His neighbors had a word for it, and the word was madness. Noah went on measuring, sawing, sealing the seams with bitumen inside and out, because he had been told that the world was about to end and that this ungainly box was the only thing that would float when it did.

He was, the oldest text says without ornament, a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with God. That last phrase does a great deal of quiet work. In a generation the stories describe as thoroughly rotten, filled with violence until the ground itself was said to be corrupt, Noah was the exception. He was the only one worth saving. Tenth in descent from Adam, son of Lamech and grandson of the long-lived Methuselah, he arrives in the account already old, already a father, already out of step with everyone around him.

What he was told is stark. God looked at the earth, grieved that he had made humankind at all, and resolved to blot out every living thing with water. But Noah found favor, and with favor came instructions precise enough to build from: an ark of gopher wood, three hundred cubits long, fifty wide, thirty high, three decks, a single door set in the side, a roof, and pitch smeared over every surface so the water could find no way in. Into it he was to bring his wife, his three sons and their wives, and living creatures of every kind, male and female, with food enough to keep them all.

Then the sky opened. Forty days and forty nights of rain, and beneath that the fountains of the great deep bursting upward, as if the waters God had once divided at creation were being let back in to undo the world. The flood rose until it covered the mountains and everything that breathed on dry land died. For a hundred and fifty days the waters held their height, and the ark drifted over a drowned planet with its cargo of the last of everything sealed inside.

When the rain stopped and the flood began to sink, the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat, and Noah began to test the world through a window. He sent out a raven, which flew back and forth and settled nowhere. He sent a dove, and it returned because it could find no place to land. Seven days later he sent it again, and it came back at evening with a fresh olive leaf in its beak, and he knew the water was drawing off the earth. The third time, the dove did not come back at all. He drew back the covering and looked out on a washed and silent world, and the first thing he did on stepping onto solid ground was build an altar.

For that offering he received a promise. Never again would God destroy all life with a flood, and as the sign of the covenant he set his bow in the clouds, so that when rain gathered the rainbow would remind heaven and earth alike of the bargain. Noah and his sons were blessed and told to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, the same words once spoken to Adam, the human story started over from a single family.

What follows is the most human thing in the account and the least heroic. Noah planted a vineyard, made wine, drank it, and lay uncovered and senseless in his tent. His son Ham saw him and told his brothers; Shem and Japheth walked in backward with a cloak held between them to cover their father without looking, and when Noah woke and learned what had happened he laid a curse on Ham’s line. The first man to plant a vine was also the first man to be drunk. The savior of the world is last seen sleeping it off.

The sources are almost wholly uninterested in what he looked like. They tell us he was six hundred years old when the flood came and nine hundred and fifty when he died, but not the color of his hair or the set of his face. He is a figure known entirely by an act, an old man defined by obedience and endurance rather than by any feature a portrait could catch.

His story is older than the book that carries it. Long before Genesis was written down, Mesopotamia already told of a man warned by a god to build a boat against a coming flood. In the Epic of Gilgamesh he is Utnapishtim, tipped off by the god Ea, loading his vessel with the seed of all living things and later sending out a dove, a swallow, and a raven exactly as Noah sends his birds. Earlier still there are Ziusudra and Atrahasis, the same righteous survivor under different names. Noah is the Hebrew heir of a very old memory of water, and the tradition kept the flood, the boat, the animals, the birds, and the sacrifice while changing the gods who caused it into one.

Islam knows him too, as Nuh, and reckons him among the first and greatest of the messengers. There he is a preacher above all, calling his people away from their idols for the better part of a thousand years and meeting mostly mockery for it. When the flood finally came, he called to one of his own sons to come aboard, and the young man answered that he would climb a mountain and be safe from the water. The mountain was not safe. He was swept away between one wave and the next, while the ark carried the faithful to rest on the peak of al-Judi. It is a bleaker, lonelier version of the story, a father who could save strangers and animals but not the child who would not listen.

Whatever set Noah apart was not strength or cunning but a stubborn willingness to do an absurd thing on trust, and the reward for it was survival and a covenant and a world to refill. The limits are just as plain. He was mortal, and he stayed mortal; he could build the ark but could not talk his neighbors onto it, and in the harshest telling not even his own son. The vineyard makes the final point on its own. The man righteous enough to outlast the flood was still only a man, and the second humanity began, as the first had, with someone lying in the dirt having made a mistake.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Noah?

Noah is the righteous patriarch of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic tradition who was chosen to survive a world-destroying flood by building an ark. He was the tenth generation from Adam, described as blameless in a corrupt age, and became the ancestor of all humanity after the deluge. In Islam he is known as Nuh and counted among the earliest and greatest prophets.

Why did Noah build the ark?

Noah built the ark because God, grieved by human wickedness, warned him that a great flood would destroy all life and told him exactly how to construct a vessel to survive it. The ark was made of gopher wood sealed with pitch, three hundred cubits long with three decks and a single door, and it carried Noah’s family and pairs of every kind of animal. Building it took years while his neighbors mocked him.

Where did Noah’s Ark come to rest after the flood?

In the Book of Genesis the ark comes to rest on the mountains of Ararat, in the region of modern eastern Turkey and Armenia. In the Islamic account the ark instead settles on Mount al-Judi, which many scholars place in southeastern Turkey near the Syrian and Iraqi borders. From there Noah sent out birds and eventually stepped onto dry, washed land.

Is the story of Noah connected to older Mesopotamian flood myths?

Yes. The Noah narrative closely parallels much older Mesopotamian flood stories, especially the tale of Utnapishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh, along with Ziusudra and Atrahasis. In each a righteous man is warned by a god, builds a boat, loads it with animals, releases birds to find land, and offers a sacrifice afterward. Noah is widely understood as the Hebrew inheritor of this ancient flood tradition.

What happened to Noah after the flood?

After the flood Noah offered a sacrifice and received God’s covenant never again to destroy the world by water, sealed with the rainbow. He and his sons were told to repopulate the earth, making him the second father of humanity. Later he planted a vineyard, became drunk, and cursed his son Ham’s descendants after Ham saw him lying uncovered, a strikingly human coda to the story.

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Adam, Eve, Yahweh, Nephilim, Moses, Leviathan, Behemoth, Satan, Angels, Utnapishtim, Gilgamesh, Enki, Bochica