Noah

Do we have responsibilities to nature?

Background

According to Genesis, Noah was the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson of Adam. Here is a section from the family tree:

He is most famous for being the survivor of a great flood.

Like with the earlier stories, we’re not too sure where Noah lived, but many people believe that he was an ancient Sumerian king of some sort. The Sumerian civilisation existed from 4500 BC to 1900BC in what is nowadays Iraq. The map below shows the main cities of Sumer.

Summary

God was angry with all the people on the earth except Noah
He told Noah to build an Ark because he was going to flood the world
He told Noah that every animal would come to him to be safe on the Ark
God flooded the world
Eventually it stopped raining and the Ark came to rest on a mountain
God put a Rainbow in the sky and made a new agreement with Noah

The story of Noah

When human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, 2 the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. 3 Then the Lord said, “My Spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal; their days will be a hundred and twenty years.”

4 The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.

5 The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. 6 The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. 7 So the Lord said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.” 8 But Noah found favour in the eyes of the Lord.

Noah and the Flood

9 This is the account of Noah and his family.

Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked faithfully with God. 10 Noah had three sons: Shem, Ham and Japheth.

…God said to Noah, “I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth. 14 So make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out. 15 This is how you are to build it: The ark is to be three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide and thirty cubits high. 16 Make a roof for it, leaving below the roof an opening one cubit high all around. Put a door in the side of the ark and make lower, middle and upper decks. 17 I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish. 18 But I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter the ark—you and your sons and your wife and your sons’ wives with you. 19 You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you. 20 Two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of every kind of creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept alive. 21 You are to take every kind of food that is to be eaten and store it away as food for you and for them.”

22 Noah did everything just as God commanded him.

…

11 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. 12 And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.

…

17 For forty days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the earth. …

Every living thing that moved on land perished—birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind. 22 Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. 23 Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; people and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark.

24 The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days.

…

6 After forty days Noah opened a window he had made in the ark 7 and sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth. 8 Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground. 9 But the dove could find nowhere to perch because there was water over all the surface of the earth; so it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark. 10 He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. 11 When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth. 12 He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him.

13 By the first day of the first month of Noah’s six hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth. Noah then removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was dry. 14 By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was completely dry.

15 Then God said to Noah, 16 “Come out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and their wives. 17 Bring out every kind of living creature that is with you—the birds, the animals, and all the creatures that move along the ground—so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number on it.”

18 So Noah came out, together with his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives. 19 All the animals and all the creatures that move along the ground and all the birds—everything that moves on land—came out of the ark, one kind after another.

20 Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it. 21 The Lord smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: “Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done.

“As long as the earth endures,

seedtime and harvest,

cold and heat,

summer and winter,

day and night

will never cease.”

God’s Covenant With Noah

9 Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth. 2 The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea; they are given into your hands. 3 Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.

4 “But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it. 5 And for your lifeblood I will surely demand an accounting. I will demand an accounting from every animal. And from each human being, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of another human being.

6 “Whoever sheds human blood,

by humans shall their blood be shed;

for in the image of God

has God made mankind.

7 As for you, be fruitful and increase in number; multiply on the earth and increase upon it.”

8 Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him: 9 “I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you 10 and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth. 11 I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

12 And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: 13 I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 14 Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, 15 I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. 16 Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.”

17 So God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant I have established between me and all life on the earth.”

—Genesis chapter 6-9https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%209&version=NIV

Life and death of animals

As a part of the Covenant or agreement that God made with Noah, he told them that they ‘must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it’. The Ancient Jewish people believed that an animal was still alive if it still had blood in it and the new law was to stop people from eating animals whilst they were still alive. (Nowadays, we have different definitions of death - no heartbeat, no activity in the brainstem, for example.) Jewish and Muslim people still follow the same rules now about meat - the blood must be drained from the animal before it is eaten.

This is also one of the earliest mentions of a law forbidding murder. God says, ‘I will demand an accounting for the life of another human being’, and demands that anyone who kills another be killed as a punishment.

Discussion

The story of Noah is not the only ancient flood story.

Another story from around the same time and place is from the Epic of Gilgamesh. According to this poem, Gilgamesh was a Sumerian king who reigned for 126 years. After his friend Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh becomes afraid of death and goes off in search of immortality. He goes to meet an immortal man named Utnapishtim, whose story is very much like the story of Noah.

Utnapishtim, who was a king of a city called Shuruppak, had been granted immortality after building a ship called Preserver of Life and surviving the “great flood.” Like Noah, he was given very strict instructions as to how to build the boat, although his boat was about half the size of Noah’s. Again, however, Utnapishtim brought all of his relatives and all species of creatures aboard his ark.

There is another very similar flood story from Ancient Greece: Zeus, the king of the Gods, was very angry with humans. Zeus told Deucalion, the son of Prometheus, to build an ark for himself and his wife, Pyrrha. After nine days of flooding, the world was destroyed, and the ark rested on top of Mount Parnassus. When the waters receded, Deucalion and his cousin-wife offered a sacrifice to Zeus to learn how to repopulate the earth.

Do you think the fact that there are these other, very similar, flood stories, makes the story of Noah less believable or more? Less important or more?

Tagged on to the end of the story of the flood is a strange tale in which Noah invents wine, gets drunk and passes out naked in his tent. Ham his youngest son walked in on him and saw him naked and went to tell his elder brothers, Shem and Japheth. His elder brothers, in an attempt to show their father a bit of respect, walked into the tent backwards and covered up their dad’s naked body. When Noah woke up, he was pretty annoyed with Ham and cursed his eldest son, Canaan, as a punishment.

The Jewish story continues through Shem - hence why Jewish people are often called Semitic (and people who are racist against Jews are called anti-semitic).

Tasks

Briefly, tell the story of Noah and the Flood in your own words.
What do you think this story says about human beings and their relationship with animals and nature? Do you think that our responsibilities to nature are more or less than those Noah felt - do you think we have a responsibility to save animals? To treat them kindly? Noah was told by God that he was allowed to eat animals so long as they were dead - do you think that’s right?

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