As a narrative, the first parasha or section of Genesis, which we have just finished reading, is centred around the creation of the world, the first human beings and the first steps in the developing relationship between people and God as understood by the authors. The second parasha which we now begin, נח nóax or Noah, is dominated by a massive event in early world history as those authors perceived it: the destruction of the world and, along with it, survival.
The passage that narrates this cataclysm is the longest story in Genesis, unless we choose to think of the entire Joseph cycle as a single story, but they don't seem to belong to the same genre, so I don't think it's a fair comparison. The Joseph story is more like a short novel which is made up of many scenes and chapters. Within Genesis, I view it as constituting a "cycle" - the last in the book (the other cycles are those I label "The beginning", "Abraham", "Isaac" and "Jacob": see also here.
This is different. The Flood is a straight story, told in a single passage, and more in line with those we have already seen ("Creation", "Paradise lost", "First brothers"), only this one is longer, and narrated in more detail than most; it covers more than three whole chapters in the traditional chapter-verse division. Perhaps the relatively long text narrating this story is commensurate with the enormity of the event that it seeks to convey.
If things had really taken place as described here, this would have been something like what these days is sometimes called an extinction event: a disaster that is so massive and widespread that "life as we know it" is wiped out. Now in terms of the entire inhabited world, perhaps no such thing ever happened during the time that humanity has been around, but then, the people telling this story would not have had any way to know about the entire inhabited world as we understand it today. Other cultures both near and far from the domain known to the ancient Israelites also have stories about such disastrous events. There is evidence to suggest that these societies not only share memories of an event but also aspects of the "text" that narrates it.
Put another way, whether or not there was a "universal flood", there is a universal legend about a universal flood, and what we have here is the Israelite version of that story, told in the way that the Israelites told it, within their particular cultural and literary traditions, which is specific to them, no matter what elements or influences of other, older, non-Israelite traditions might be detectable in the Hebrew text that is preserved. This is the text we are going to be reading. This text is a cultural product in its own right, a specific literary composition.
Source critics have pointed out other reasons why this story is so long and drawn out. According to their theory, the text of the flood story that we have in Genesis is in origin a composite compilation of several (probably two) versions of the story, using a technique not seen, or not on this scale, in the other stories we have read so far.
As we read the story of the Flood, if we pay any attention at all we will soon start to notice that it keeps on slightly contradicting itself. Now we have seen internal contradictions before: for example, "Creation" (1:1 - 2:4b) and the first part of "Paradise lost" (the rest of ch. 2) contradict each other on certain important points about the order in which different things in the world were created. Those contradictions are "internal" on the level of the book of Genesis, but consist of differences between different stories in the book. This is different: now we are going to read a single story which contradicts itself. Such as? Well...
- God tells Noah (6:19) to take two of each animal into the ark. Then God tells him (7:2ff) to take seven of each ritually clean species (the ones which are allowed to be eaten or sacrificed).
- What caused the flood: did it just rain a lot (7:4, 7:12), or did the water well up from below the earth (7:11, 8:2)?
- If you try to follow all the statements about how long it rained for, how long before the mountain tops appeared again, how long before the land became dry, and altogether how long Noah spent in the ark, you will find it challenging because the numbers keep changing!
The differences, however, are only differences of detail; the "two complete distinct narratives" both follow the same general script. So maybe it was two of each animal, or maybe it was seven; either way, Noah took specimens of all animals into the ark. So maybe it rained, maybe the water came from under the earth; either way, it was a flood. Either way, God told Noah to build an ark to save himself, his family and all the species of animals, the whole world drowned, the ark floated, the waters subsided, and so on. The slight misfits among certain of the details mentioned are there all right, it is useless to deny it, but they do not interfere with the dramatic buildup, the intensity of the piece; in fact, the repetitions probably contribute to the effect and make it more impressive listening. They also make the story longer; they draw it out. And when at long last the ordeal is over and the ark finally rests on dry land, we all share Noah's relief and think to ourselves: Thank God that's over!
Commentators often treat 9:1-17, which contains God's covenant with Noah, as a separate passage. Now of course we may consider this a distinct genre; it consists of a monologue by God blessing (in this case) Noah, and telling him what he will do for him and his descendants, what he expects in return, and specifying the sign of the covenant he is making, which in this case is going to be the rainbow. Thus the passage is also etiological: it gives an explanation for why we may see a rainbow after it rains. Nevertheless, I think it is sufficiently obvious that this covenant forms a single piece with the flood narrative that immediately precedes it and that together they make up a literary unit. The story of the Flood doesn't end with the waters going down and Noah coming out of the ark; this is how it ends, with God's covenant. That is the whole point of the story. It is not the story of how God decided to destroy the world, so he did. It is the story of how God pressed the reset button on life in the world, because it had become too corrupt; he emptied the trash, so to speak; he turned the hose on the world and cleaned it out, and then he re-seeded it one more time, saying: "This is the last time I'm going to do this," and to reboot the world, God began by making a covenant with Noah, in representation of the new human race coming out of the ark which would now get its chance to people the earth and do what it takes, so that God might once more see "that it is very good".
6:9 élle tol'dot nóax
This is another false start: a tol'dot list is announced but is not forthcoming, perhaps because the story of Noah has been inserted at the beginning of his genealogy. See my comments regarding tol'dot in the preceding passage notes.
b'dorotaw
The mention of Noah, then, is immediately followed by a description of him as ish tzaddiq tamim, LXX anthrôpos dikaios teleios ôn, Vulg. vir iustus atque perfectus, KJV a just man and perfect to which is added one more word (in H): b'dorotaw (en têi geneâi autou; in generationibus suis; in his generations). It is impossible, I think, to know whether that addition constituted, in the view of the author, a mere conventional formula or a slightly dubious complement, as has sometimes been intimated (Noah was the most perfect man in his generation, a generation that was totally evil). It is ambiguous, and since it is, it might possibly have been intended to be. The same qualification (this time as baddor hazze) will appear also in 7:1, and MB (p. 33) is among those who feel that this is no mere coincidence. (Perhaps the fact that the two places cited are ascribed in the documentary hypothesis to different sources - 6:9 to J, 7:1 to P - makes the coincidence all the more meaningful; either that, or it must imply a later redactor's hand!) A word might also be said here about the word dor itself. It is usually translated as 'generation'; thus b'dorotaw, in this passage, is lit. 'in his generations' (plural); the plural is respected in the glosses cited; EAS has 'in that age', JPS 'in his age.' Inconveniently, 'generation(s)' is also used as the habitual, traditional translation of another word we have already discussed, toledot, and as if to rub the awkwardness of this in our faces, the text has here put them both in the same verse! As we have seen, toledot is derived from the root y/w-l-d 'to give birth', and it thus literally corresponds to generations; dor, on the other hand, appears to be derived from a rarer verb root d-w-r meaning 'to dwell', and it refers not to the reproductive process but to the temporarily-bound existential plane: a "generation" as the people of a given time, and also, by extension, the time in which they live: hence also 'age'. So in this context at least, 'age' is clearly the better choice; as Speiser says, "the traditional rendering 'in his generations' is mechanical and obviously unsuitable." The confusion generated by using generation twice in this single verse began in the Vulg. and, not very surprisingly, is perpetuated in Latin-based translations such as SRV: Estas son las generaciones de Noé: Noé, varón justo, perfecto fué en sus generaciones... Rather, let us emulate JPS: This is the line of Noah. Noah was a righteous man; he was blameless in his age...
et ha'elohim hithallekh nóax
Cf. 5:22, 5:24. These are the only places in Genesis where such a phrase is used.
6:10 yáfet
Segolate: pausal yáfet, non-pausal yéfet.
6:11-12
Notice the poetic or at least "rhetorical" diction of these lines: the root sh-x-t which conveys the idea of corruption, ruin, spoiling is repeated three times in two verses, in addition to the phrase wattimmale ha'áretz xamas 'the earth was full of (or filled with) wrongdoing (or lawlessness).' This verbal insistence serves to emphasise the point, which will now be the reason for God's decision to bring about the Flood. The information, of course, is not new, having already been presented at the end of the previous passage, but it is recapped here, just to make sure we got it. And it has to be said that these verses remain as vague as they are insistent: it simply is not specified what exactly went wrong or what kind of evil had taken root, which is a bit disappointing and also unhelpful from a moral viewpoint, I think! But never mind, perhaps it is not pertinent to the story, and with the information given and the presentation of Noah as a character in the coming story, the action will now begin.
6:12 ki hishxit kol basar et darko ‛al ha'áretz
If we are willing to go with the extreme vagueness of content, there is nothing linguistically very daunting about the insistent statements (6:11-12): wattisshaxet ha'áretz lifne ha'elohim wattimmale ha'áretz xamas wayyar elohim et ha'áretz w'hinne nishxáta (EF) 'Now the earth had gone to ruin before God, the earth was filled with wrongdoing. / God saw the earth, and here: it had gone to ruin...', (NBIE) 'the earth had gone bad before God / full of evil was the land / God could see that the world was ruined...' On the other hand, the exact meaning of the next bit is not so clear: (EF) '...for all flesh had ruined its way upon the earth.' Two questions remain unanswered: what is the meaning of all flesh? and what is the meaning of ruined its way upon the earth? 'Flesh' (basar) is often used in BH to signify 'life, living things', and it is repeatedly used in this sense in the present passage, e.g. 6:17 (kol basar asher bo rúax xayyim) etc. Here and elsewhere in the passage basar clearly refers to all life, not just human life: so also in 6:19 umikkol haxay mikkol basar, for example. So the text seems to say here that all living things, and not just humans, had "ruined its way upon the earth": what could this possibly mean? And certainly it would look as if all living things had done something wrong, because they will all be destroyed in the flood. Or are they collateral damage, innocent victims to be sacrificed because of human wrongdoing? It doesn't say.
6:13 wayyómer elohim l'nóax
As the next step in the development of the action, God communicates his intention to Noah and gives him instructions. First comes the information: I will destroy the world.
qetz kol basar ba l'fanay
First, though, God explains to Noah the reason for what he is about to tell him. Basically this is a brief summary of what we have just been reading, for Noah's benefit. Notice once again the use of kol basar (cf. 6:12).
w'hin'ni mashxitam
Now the causative binyan (hiphil) of the sh-x-t verb root (see 6:11-12) is used to describe God's action, in what looks like word play perhaps. If we gloss the root as 'ruin', it is as if God is now saying, ironically: So, the world has gone to ruin, very well, let me ruin the world then. Actually the H is more dramatic still: hin'ni mashxitam means something like 'Here I am, ruining (destroying) them'! The them goes back to kol basar 'all flesh': (JPS) 'I have decided to put an end to all flesh (kol basar), for the earth is filled with lawlessness because of them (mipp'nehem, i.e. because of all flesh): I am about to destroy them (mashxitam, i.e. destroy all flesh) with the earth.' Although grammatically inelegant, its meaning is clear.
6:14 ‛ase l'kha teva...
The instructions begin. This first verse of the instructions part seems like an executive summary: you're going to have to build a wooden ark with rooms in it and waterproof it with tar. In the subsequent verses this is repeated in much finer detail (except for the tar), but first Noah (and the story's audience) is put in the picture: I'm going to destroy everything; so you're going to need to make yourself an ark. The H word traditionally translated as ark in English is teva (LXX kibôtos, Vulg. arca). This word is also used for the recipient the baby Moses is placed in to float in the river, but it is not the name of the sacred receptacle mentioned elsewhere in the Torah, known as the ark of the covenant: that is called aron in Hebrew (in LXX, Vulg. and KJV also called kibôtos, arca and ark respectively). Actually, the word teva seems to mean a sort of box. Acc. to EK it could be a borrowing from Egyptian. One difference between the teva and a boat or ship is that there is no provision of any navigation equipment; it is only designed to float and drift, so it is not properly a vehicle.
‛atze gófer
We don't know what kind of wood "gopher wood" was. It has been suggested that it may have been cypress.
qinnim
We also don't know the meaning of qinnim, with which Noah was told to make the ark. Traditionally it is interpreted as 'compartments', i.e. cubicles, room, living spaces, but some (EF, EH) think it may instead have meant 'reeds'. Maybe there were two traditions, one in which the ark was built of wood and another in which it was made of reeds. But Speiser rejects the suggestion that qinnim = 'reeds', which leaves us back with 'compartments.'
6:15 sh'losh meot amma
The root meaning of amma is 'forearm', and by extension it is a unit of measure (LXX pêkhus, Vulg. cubitum, KJV cubit). The length of the cubit has varied, but for an approximation may be calculated as 45 cm. (1 ft. 6 in.).
6:16 tzóhar
Meaning uncertain, the common conjectures being either 'roof' or 'window, skylight'.
6:17 wa'ani hin'ni mevi et hammabbul máyim ‛al ha'áretz...
God explains to Noah that he is going to make a flood. Cf. w'hin'ni mashxitam et ha'áretz in 6:13, which uses the same sentence type: w'hin'ni + participle. But this is the first time God (or the author) mentions a flood specifically, and it is the first occurrence of the word mabbul which uniquely designated not just any flood but The Flood specifically; the word is of unknown origin and it is uncertain what exactly it referred to. The construction of this sentence is worth noting: 'I will now (hin'ni) bring the mabbul, water on the earth.' The fact that it referred to from the start as hammabul 'the mabbul' is taken to mean that either this was something whose existence was presupposed (such as the sky, the moon etc.), or else "The Flood" itself was already so well known to readers as a legendary event that it could be referenced in this way. EH suggests the mabbul 'probably refers to the upper part of the original cosmic ocean that is about to fall upon the earth.' The word mabbul itself is suspected of having a Mesopotamian origin. The words that follow it, máyim ‛al ha'áretz 'water upon the earth', stand in an appositional relationship (as in the LXX and the Vulg.); it isn't 'a [sic] flood of waters' as in KJV or 'un [sic] diluvio de aguas' as in RV because the H, with ha- in the first noun, does not admit that interpretation; notice that both translations also conveniently ignore the definite article!
6:18 wahaqimoti et b'riti itakh
Enter a key theme of Genesis: God's covenants. This is of long-term importance to the larger plot of Genesis: God makes impositions on humankind but also makes promises through "covenants" (the H word is b'rit; LXX diathêkê, Vulg. foedus, LXX covenant). Speiser defines it as 'a solemn agreement between two parties providing sanctions in the event of non-compliance.' Notice the explicit and salient way in which it is announced too (both by God to Noah, and by the author to the audience): 'I shall establish my b'rit with you.' Having thus marked the beginning of this "covenant speech", God starts laying down its terms: this is what you must do... However, in this particular instance I wonder whether the covenant that God is now announcing is not actually the same one that will be concluded in 9:8 ff.
6:20 l'minéhu etc.
We recall this expression from ch. 1 where it was also used to describe the different kinds of animals and plants in the "Creation" story. See my note on 1:11.
6:21 mikkol ma'akhal asher ye'akhel
As a curiosity: Speiser points out, quite rightly, that on logical grounds this is not to be translated 'all food that can be eaten' (cf. Vulg. ex omnibus escis quae mandi possunt) since, and I quote, "the inedible kind would not be called food." Therefore, the other grammatically possible meaning is the only pragmatically possible one: 'all food that is to be eaten.'
6:22 wayyá‛as nóax
As the cantillation marks indicate, these two words seem to constitute a clause, and the following k'khol asher tziwwa oto elohim would go with the following clause (ken 'asa), since this facilitates a more coherent syntax; otherwise, one clause seems to be redundant. So we get: (NBIE) 'and Noah did so / exactly what God ordered him, that's what he did' rather than ??'and Noah did exactly what God ordered him, that's what he did.' But as we shall see, 7:5 militates against this: it is practically a replica of 6:22 without the final clause!
7:1
Here are some of the questions an attentive reader might ask when reading this verse in the context of what has gone before; questions which led scholars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the conclusion that here separate sources must have been stitched together:
- Why are we being told that YHWH orders Noah to get into the ark with his family all over again? Didn't God already tell him once, and didn't Noah already do everything he was told (see 6:22)?
- Why is YHWH telling him the reason when we already know this (see 6:9)?
- Why is he YHWH all of a sudden when he's just been called God so far in the story (e.g. 6:22)?
7:2
There are surely some things in this verse that don't tally with the "P account" we just read:
- Seven of each animal?? Wasn't it two?
- So now we're differentiating between animals that are T'hora, ritually clean, and those that were not? That's new.
- Notice that in "Creation", when male and female humans are created, they are referred to as zakhar un'qeva. Did you notice that precisely that same expression has occurred in ch. 6:19, when God tells Noah to bring a male and a female of every animal into the ark? Well, here Noah is also told to do that (another repetition), but this time without using the words zakhar and n'queva; instead it says, twice, ish w'ishto lit. 'man and his wife', and now we notice that these words, ish 'man' and issha 'woman' (and also ishto 'his wife') are all usual in the J stories we have read (however, in 7:3 there is a counter-example). So, two different styles are starting to emerge.
7:4
Now YHWH tells Noah what he is going to do to the world (again??). Some of the wording is different from what we read in ch. 6, too:
- (anokhi) mamTir 'I will cause it to rain' - we didn't have that before, there God said he was going to bring hammabbul
- arba‛im yom w'arba‛im láyla 'forty days and forty nights' - this is the first time we hear this phrase
- umaxiti et kol hay'qum (JPS) 'I will blot out... all existence' contains this verb and this noun for the first time
'And Noah did just as the Lord commanded him' (JPS). Again?
7:6 ff.
Verses 1-5 of this ch. were from J (acc. to the documentary hypothesis), whereas in the next few lines the theory suggests that there are some bits taken from P's account (which we were following in ch. 6) mixed with some stuff that can't have been P. In verse 6, at least, we seem to be back to P, because the story is talking about hammabbul again (as opposed to rain). In the description of Noah going into the ark (again???) and bringing in the animals, the latter are back to coming two by two, although the waters are muddied by a further reference to the ritual cleanliness of some animals as opposed to others.
7:11 nivq‛u kol ma‛y'not t'hom rabba wa'arubbot hasshamáyim niftáxu
Up to here the inundation of the earth has been described in two ways: in ch. 6 we read that God was going to bring hammabbul down on the earth (that passage is ascribed to P), whereas at the beginning of ch. 7, in a part ascribed to J, God said he would mamTir 'cause it to rain.' What we have now is yet another different version, and the most dramatic of the three: (JPS) 'All the fountains of the great deep (t'hom rabba) burst apart, / And the floodgates of the sky broke open.' The commentaries tell us that it is clear here that what we are talking about is no ordinary flood just caused by too much rain (and see also my note on 9:11 below). The reference to t'hom 'the deep' is crucial: in the ancient cosmovision this meant the great water below the ground which God, during creation, separated from the rest of the great water above the firmament. He had caused dry land to appear by having the water under the firmament gather to one place, but now that is being undone, and the waters of t'hom are once again bursting through to overrun dry land, by God's command of course. And at the same time, arubbot hasshamáyim niftáxu 'the floodgates of the sky broke open': this also doesn't mean that it rained, but rather that the other water, which was described in ch. 1 as being contained above the firmament, now breaks through the floodgates, which have been opened. What this is talking about is none other than a return to the primaeval chaos of the Beginning: back to b'reshit. God must have been serious when he said he repented over his creation! All the concepts referred to here are present in the Creation story of ch. 1, a story ascribed to P, and so some think it must have been P who penned the awe-inspiring (read: scary) description in the present verse, but there is another suggestion (Cassuto, quoted by EF, p. 37): these words are in a poetic form, and the suggestion is that they might possibly be a fragment conserved from a very ancient Israelite epic poem which predates the composition of the story that we are reading (NBIE):
nivq‛u kol ma‛y'not t'hom rabba
wa'arubbot hasshamáyim niftáxu
every spring of the great deep broke loose7:12 way'hi haggéshem ‛al ha'áretz arba‛im yom w'arba‛im láyla
and the gates of the sky opened up
This is assumed by source criticism to be another cut-and-paste from the J document. Everything it says repeats conceptually what the last fragment of J said, although the word géshem 'heavy rain' (acc. to Speiser) is new: (JPS) 'The rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.' Cf. note on 7:4.
7:13
Noah and his family hurriedly get into the ark. (Again? Yes, again.)
7:14-6
So do the animals. This is a rehash of what we already know, in P's style: two by two, and repeating much of the way the animals were described in the Creation account in ch. 1, while referring to God as elohim.
7:16 wayyisgor YHWH ba‛ado
Until we come to this: 'The Lord shut the door behind them.' This is considered to be an anthropomorphic image of God physically closing the door of the ark once everybody is safely inside. It is J (the author of the Eden story) who is fond of such images, and it is also J who calls God YHWH, as here. These words, then, must have been stuck in from J's version of the story. Now that they are safely inside, and the door is shut, at last there can be no more getting into the ark and we can concentrate on the progress of the Flood itself.
7:17 ff.
In the next few verses, what we seem to have is a harmonization of parallel accounts of the way the Flood developed, with some things seemingly said twice because both sources are quoted in succession. Take vv. 17 and 18, for example (JPS):
[17] The Flood continued forty days on the earth, and the waters increased and raised the ark so that it rose above the earth.V. 17 is ascribed to J, with the repetition of its forty-day meme (although it mentions hammabbul which I thought was one of P's words); v. 18 is ascribed to P. Another doublet might be constituted by vv. 21 and 22, in reverse order of sources (first P the author of "Creation", then J, the author of "Paradise Lost"):
[18] The waters swelled and increased greatly upon the earth, and the ark drifted upon the waters.
[21] And all flesh that stirred on earth perished - birds, cattle, beasts, and all the things that swarmed upon the earth, and all mankind.But no matter what complex ingredients have gone into it, as it stands this text is still a masterpiece. The repetitions or paraphrases do not detract from the effect of escalating devastation and growing dramatic tension, or the horror and anguish. The extra words give us more time to think about what was happening and visualize the scene of destruction and desolation, all the way up to verse 23 when our attention swings back to those who survived: 'All existence on earth was blotted out - man, cattle, creeping things, and birds of the sky, they were blotted out from the earth.' wayyissha'er akh nóax wa'asher itto batteva 'Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark.'
[22] All in whose nostrils was the merest breath of life, all that was on dry land, died.
8:1 wayyizkor elohim et nóax
And now God also remembers Noah (not that he had forgotten him, of course)....
wayya‛aver elohim rúax‛al ha'áretz wayyashókku hammáyim
(NBIE) 'and God had a wind cross the earth / and the waters stilled.' Not a harsh, violent gale but a rúax, perhaps reminiscent of that other rúax of 1:2 which preceded creation: w'rúax elohim m'raxéfet al p'ne hammáyim 'wind of God fluttering / on the face of the water.'
8:2-4
As in the description of the preparations for the Flood and the period of the rising waters, here too source critics perceive that the extant text originates from an amalgamation of the same two sources. Just in this small block of text describing how the inundation stopped, we find a mixture of P and J fragments. Commentaries agree that v. 2a (wayyissakh'ru ma‛y'not t'hom wa'arubbot hasshamáyim, NBIE: 'the springs of the deep and the gates of the sky closed up') is clearly P, as it plainly represents a mirror image of 'every spring of the great deep broke loose / and the gates of the sky opened up' in 7:11, also ascribed to P. On the other hand, v. 2b-3a (wayyikkale haggéshem min hasshamáyim [3] wayyashúvu hammáyim me‛al ha'áretz halokh washov 'and the rain stopped falling / the water started going back on the land') is J's work, with its reference to géshem again, cf. 7:12 'the rain (géshem) fell upon the land / for forty days and forty nights.' But the rest of v.3 and the whole of v.4 are attributed to P, who is a stickler for exact numbers, dates and detailed factoids, such as even locating the ark's landing place on the map.
‛al hare araraT
Not 'on Mt. Ararat' but 'on the montains of Ararat' (hare is a construct plural of har 'mountain'). Thus araraT is not the name of the mountain. Rather, it is equivalent to the Akk. Uriartu, the ancient name of the country known in later times as Armenia. Hence the Vulg. super montes armeniae 'on the mountains of Armenia' is exactly correct, more so than the LXX epi ta orê ta ararat 'on the Ararat mountains.' There is only this single mention of araraT in Gen. but it occurs occasionally in the rest of the Tanakh, always preceded by either éretz 'the land of araraT' (twice) or maml'khot 'the kingdoms of araraT' (once). There is a mountain (the highest in the region) now called Mount Ararat, but the denomination arose in later times and is based on Christian traditions influenced by the Bible story (not vice-versa). There was actually an older local tradition which considered a different mountain to have been the one where the ark was grounded, which is referred to in Onk. by the Aramaic name of ture qardo. The most appropriate translation of hare araraT is thus either 'the mountains of Ararat' or 'the mountains of Armenia', despite any popular beliefs to the contrary!
8:5-6
The usual thing in this story: once more we have the juxtaposition of a statement by P and another by J, each telling their version of the story. P's version focuses on dating to the day the reappearance of the mountain tops. J sticks by his story, repeating simply that "forty days passed", after which, it says quaintly and much more humanly, 'Noah opened the window.' The word for 'window' used here (but not earlier), xalon, is the regular word for a window in H; it will occur in just one other place in Gen., in the story of Isaac and Rebekah in Gerar, when King Abimelech looks b'‛ad haxalon 'through the window' and accidentally (JPS) 'saw Isaac fondling his wife Rebekah.'
8:7 ff.
The story of the sending out of the birds to see if the earth was dry yet bears the stamp of J all over it, in the cozy poignancy of the simple scene portrayed and the careful attention to little human (or in this case, avian, rather) details. The economy of words used to achieve it conceals magnificent story-telling skills that still shine today, and the result is a vivid sequence that everyone always remembers. The use of the birds to see if there is any dry land to be found has us visualising the ark still floating on the water. Better not to ask what happened to the mountains of Ararat, the tops of which have already appeared in P's account! Just enjoy the story...
8:11 Taraf
The dictionaries gloss this as 'fresh-plucked'; the translations of the verse hesitate between 'plucked' and 'fresh.'
8:13-14
P butts in to provide the dates.
8:16 atta w'isht'kha uvanékha un'she vanékha ittakh
These words ('you and your wife and your sons and your sons' wives with you') echo 6:18, only differing in the relative order of the wife and the sons. There the command was to enter the ark, now it is to come out of it. The same formula, with the logical changes for person and with the order found in 6:18, is repeated in 8:18 too, thus almost becoming a refrain.
8:17
Similarly, this verse about the animals is reminiscent of the way they are listed in 6:19-20; and again, this will be repeated in 6:19. The difference between ch. 6 and here is that there the animals were to be brought into the ark l'haxayot 'to keep [them] alive'; now they are to be let out in order to w'shar'tzu va'áretz ufaru w'ravu ‛al ha'áretz '[let them] swarm on the earth and let them give their fruit and become many in the world' (cf. the p'ru ur'vu... blessings, usually in the second-person plural imperative, here in the jussive plural). Both of these passages are unequivocally ascribed to P, the author of the Creation story where all these phrases first appeared.
8:18-19
The text painstakingly narrates the performance of the commands God just gave in the two preceding verses, with much repetition of words, phrases and concepts. The full effect is very reminiscent of the Creation story where this is the pattern followed throughout the six days of creation: (1:3, KJV) wayyómer elohim y'hi or way'hi or 'And God said, Let there be light (God's command): and there was light (performance of the command)' etc.
8:20 wayyíven nóax mizbéax lYHWH
The flood is over. Noah, his family and the rescued animals are on dry land at last. The very first act of Noah of which we hear is one that will become familiar as we read on in Genesis: he builds an altar. This is also the sign that we have just switched back to the J source (besides the use of YHWH): J loves altars and sacrifices! In case you're wondering: in P, Noah took two of every animal into the ark, but in J he took seven each of the clean (Tahor) animals: these were the ones that could be eaten, but also which could be sacrificed. Even if P had wanted to, only J could have had Noah sacrifice animals as soon as they were out of the ark!! On the anachronism of J's distinction between ritually clean and unclean, see note on 7:2.
wayyá‛al ‛olot
The construction is like that I noted in 1:11: the same root ‛-l-h gives the verb and the noun. The meaning of this root is 'go up'. The meaning of wayyá‛al ‛olot is 'offered burnt offerings.' It seems that the reason for calling such sacrifices ‛olot is that what is offered to God is the smoke, which "goes up to heaven." EH explains the term more fully: 'It refers to sacrifices that, except for the hide, must be consumed entirely by fire on the altar. No part of them may be eaten by the worshipper, whereas both priest and worshipper partake of the sacrifices known as z'vaxim' (I have substituted my transcription). The word for 'altar', mizbéax, contains the same root (z-b-x) as this word z'vaxim.
8:21 wayyárax YHWH et réax hannixóax
'Our Lord smelt the aromatic fragrance' (namely, of Noah's ‛olot). This anthropomorphic image of God smelling the smoke from a sacrifice and enjoying the aroma has J written all over it! Notice the doubling up of the root again (r-w-x) in wayyárax 'he smelt' and réax 'smell.'
wayyómer YHWH el libbo
Lit. 'The Lord said to his heart': this (or ...b'libbo '...in his heart') is a BH idiom which can be translated as 'to think (to oneself)', at least it can in languages that have a verb meaning 'to think.' In Nawat, the best translation is parallel to the H: inak tik iyulu 'said in his/her heart.' Another example of the H idiom occurs in Genesis when Abraham wonders whether he and Sarah are really going to have a son at their age (17:17, JPS): wayyippol avraham ‛al panaw wayyitzxaq wayyómer b'libbo... 'Abraham threw himself on his face and laughed, as he said to himself...' What is striking in this verse, though, is that it is God who is depicted as the subject of this construction - something we might only expect of J! In this context perhaps we can also gloss the construction as 'to decide.'
minn'‛uraw
'From his youth'; the nominal root, n-‛-r, is the one seen in ná‛ár 'young man, boy' and na‛ara 'young woman, girl.' But the question here is whether this is saying that each man has bad thoughts from the time he starts to grow up or that mankind collectively has had bad thoughts from early on in its history ("its youth"), and the fact is that both readings are possible (EAS); that ambiguity in the original is something to be borne in mind when we translate it.
8:22 NOTE TO SELF:
By an oversight, the draft translation posted in Nawat and English lacks verse 8:22, and part of 8:21 is wrongly labelled as 8:22!
9:1 ff.
The earth is rebooted and set going with God's first covenant. Everything starts (9:1, NBIE) with exactly the same blessing for the new first family (way'várekh elohim et nóax w'et banaw 'God blessed Noah and his sons') that God had given Adam and Eve back in ch. 1: p'ru ur'vu umil'u et ha'áretz 'bear fruit / proliferate / fill the earth.' Needless to say, this is P; this whole part of the story up to the end, i.e. the covenant text, bears the stamp of the author of the Creation story.
9:2 umora'akhem w'xitt'khem yihye ‛al kol xayat ha'áretz
The blessing continues with a syntactically slightly different formulation than before: (JPS) 'The fear and the dread of you (lit. the fear of you and the dread of you - ARK) shall be upon all the beasts of the earth.' It is not the end of the world if the target language doesn't have separate words for mora 'fear' and xat 'dread'! This repetition of the same idea using synonyms (a kind of hendiadys) is not meant to signify that there are two distinct things involved, one of which will be mora and the other of which will be xat. The intention is to intensify, to draw attention and to give dramatic weight to the point. If the target language lends itself to doing that using the same stylistic device, all well and good, but if not, the translator ought to read through the words and deal with the sense: it is enough to say that the animals will be very afraid of humans.
b'yedkhem nittánu
'In your hands they are placed' is not actually the same thing as 'I give (them) to you' (even though the same H verb, n-t-n, serves to express both notions); it emphasises the dimension of human resonsibility. Without wishing to over-project, this does seem to hint at a doctrine of human stewardship over nature. The form nittánu (pausal; otherwise, nitt'nu) is the plural (-u) of nittan (< *ni-ntan) which is the Niphal (medio-passive) binyan of the verb: '(they) are given/put.'
9:3 kol rémes asher hu xay lakhem yihye l'okhla
However, God now instructs man that he is allowed to eat meat. It is widely held that God's blessing of humans in ch. 1 implies that their diet consisted only of fruit and vegetables because he only "gives" them the products of plants and trees (1:29); if so, then now he tells them that they may eat the meat of animals, and vegetables too (yéreq ‛ésev).
9:4 akh basar b'nafsho damo lo tokhélu
Then as now, blood was a metaphor for life: cf. common expressions in our own language which imply the same equivalence, such as bloodshed, lifeblood and so on. This may have come from an early belief that blood, the physical substance, actually constitutes life; and since God gave life, it is holy and belongs to God, so nobody and nothing has the right to shed blood. Even when animals are slaughtered, as they habitually are for food, there is a religious prohibition on consuming the parts of the animal which "belong to God", and here it is established that this includes the animal's blood. From a culinary perspective this may be taken to mean that meat must be drained of its blood before it is cooked and eaten (this of course is common practice everywhere; this passage can thus be seen as an etiology, a legendary explanation for the custom, tying it in with a system of beliefs and the narrative here associated with them). From an ancient cultic perspective, it is also true that the sacrifice of animals was a religious act where humans were only entitled to eat the parts assigned to them and were obliged to offer up ritually God's part - and that included the animal's blood (representing its life, which was God-given). The command not to eat meat with its lifeblood in it is ambiguous, meaning either (or both) that the blood must first be removed, and/or that the animal must be killed first (since blood = life).
9:5 w'akh et dimkhem l'nafshotekhem edrosh etc.
Now the subject changes to the shedding of human blood, which is forbidden both to animals (miyyad kol xayya) and humans (umiyyad adam). The verb d-r-sh, which occurs three times in this sentence, means (among other things) 'demand' or 'call to account, pedir cuentas', and what this says is that God will require compensation for human blood that is shed (i.e. the taking of human life), whether by animals or by humans, adding miyyad ish axiw edrosh (NBIE) 'I will demand [compensation] (edrosh) of one (miyyad ish) for his brother (axiw)', where ish 'man' is a virtual indefinite pronoun (= 'a person, one, anyone') and axiw need not be understood to mean a blood relation but rather probably signifies 'fellow human.' The meaning, then, is 'Murderers must be punished for their crime.' This stipulation may have a bearing with regard to the things that had gone so badly wrong with the world prior to the Flood; such a connection, however, is nowhere made explicit in the text.
9:6 shofekh dam ha'adam ba'adam damo yisshafekh
This reads like a proverbial saying and might easily have originated as one: (JPS) 'Whoever sheds the blood of man, / By man shall his blood be shed' (except that adam should be understood as 'man' generically (= 'human'), so that a gender-neutral rendering would be even better, if one can be found. The H sentence showcases the language's capacity for conciseness and elegance of expression: it takes English thirteen words here to accomplish what Hebrew does effortlessly with just six, using a beautiful chiasmus structure in the form A B C C B A. The traditional Greek and Latin translations lose the poetry in their reformulations: both omit ba'adam 'by man', thereby altering the strict meaning, and the Vulg. doesn't even have the original's mirror structure: ho ekkheôn haima anthrôpou anti tou haimatos autou ekkhutêsetai (A B C B A); quicumque effuderit humanum sanguinem fundetur sanguinis illius (A B C A B). This dictum (in the H version) has been said to sanction capital punishment, but that is only if it is taken as a command (and yisshafekh is read as a jussive: 'let his blood be shed by man'), not if it is merely a proverb (and yisshafekh is a gnomic present or consuetudinal future: 'his blood is/will be shed by man'); the ekkhutêsetai of the LXX and the fundetur of the Vulg. imply the latter, since they are future indicative, while the shall of most English translations is prudently ambiguous! In Genesis the verb sh-p-k 'spill, shed' only occurs in this verse and once more (37:22), always in association with dam 'blood' and as a metaphor for 'kill.'
ki b'tzélem elohim ‛asa et ha'adam
The same idea was expressed in 1:27: wayyivra elohim et ha'adam b'tzalmo b'tzélem elohim bara oto. The context, however, is different: now, the fact that God created humans in his own image is given as the reason why God will not let anyone shed a person's blood with impunity.
9:7 w'attem p'ru ur'vu etc.
This part concludes with a recap of the opening blessing-cum-command to be fruitful and multiply. Speiser suggests that the second r'vu here could be a copying error, the original perhaps having been r'du 'subdue, rule over', which would make good sense and avoid the pointless and inelegant repetition (multiplying once is enough!); furthermore, cf. the blessing in 1:28, which goes p'ru ur'vu umil'u et ha'áretz v'khivshúha ur'du bidgat hayyam etc. (NBIE) 'bear fruit, proliferate / fill the earth / become its masters / rule over the fishes etc.'
9:8
So much for the preliminaries; now comes the covenant proper in which God states the terms of his new agreement with Noah. "This," he tells him, "is what I will do for you..." See my note on 6:18.
9:9 wa'ani hin'ni
The emphatic beginning of this sentence, 'I hereby...', probably has a performative value (in the sense of speech act theory) and signals the initiation of the real covenant declaration per se.
9:10 w'et kol néfesh haxayya asher itt'khem...
The covenant is announced to Noah and is primarily with Noah and his progeny, one assumes, not with all the animals as well, but they are included as beneficiaries!
9:11 w'lo yihye ‛od mabbul
'There will not be another mabbul.' These words, more than any others, make me think that perhaps there should be a clear understanding that a mabbul is something different from a flood. The Mesopotamians and the Israelites alike would have had experience of floods and other natural disasters, enough of them to understand, I am sure, that they can happen at any time and you can't just go saying there won't be any more. This is different, a one-off event of cataclysmic proportions. And that is what it is called in the LXX, a cataclysm: ouk estai eti kataklusmos hudatos. Hence the descriptions from P we have read about the springs of the deep breaking loose and the gates of the sky opening up (7:11) may be more than just hype, dramatic hyperbole, but be meant to be taken quite literally. God said enough and pressed the reset button, and that is a mabbul.
9:14 b‛an'ni ‛anan
Another cognate object construction, which Fox renders 'when I becloud the earth with clouds.'
9:16-17
This is repetitive, but the repetition may be considered acceptable from a literary standpoint to underline a "THE END" to this long and dramatic episode.
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