NOTES for Gen 7:6-9

Many commentators have asked the question: how could all those animals that God decided to save from the flood fit into the ark? The sacred writer, as can be seen, is not concerned with this question at all: he does not go into details, and even allows discrepancies. In one passage he mentions one pair of each kind of animal, while in the second, which is part of today's reading, he mentions seven pairs of clean (that is, kosher) animals and one pair of unclean (that is, non-kosher) animals. Such discrepancies are entirely acceptable if what is at issue is not history, but a parable. Yet every parable has its own meaning, and so must the mention of the difference between the number of clean and unclean animals.

Of course, the sacred writer's general logic rules out the possibility that Noah knew the laws that were given by God to Moses or to one of his successors. But Noah knows God, and the God in question is undoubtedly the very same God who much later revealed Himself to Abraham and Moses. This means that the Torah, the law of God, also remains one and the same. For the Torah is not simply legislation once given by God to His people; the Torah is an objective law describing the relationship between God and the human being and the spiritual patterns that govern that relationship. This means that the Torah has existed at least as long as the human being himself has existed.

Of course, Noah could not have known the Torah in the form in which it was given by God to Moses and his successors, but something could have been revealed to him by God that related to his concrete situation, which required concrete decisions. In the same way, perhaps, He revealed and still reveals something to other Gentiles who sought before and still seek today the righteous path. For, as Paul says, the Gentile has the Torah written in the heart. And there is no one but God to write it there.

The salvation of humanity from the flood is presented by the author of the parable quite symbolically: people and animals are saved in the ark, on a ship built by Noah according to God's instruction. Literalists and biblical critics have broken many spears trying to prove, some the absolute historical reliability of the story, others its equally complete and absolute unreliability and the impossibility of the events described by the sacred writer.

Meanwhile, the author had no intention of describing events literally. After all, he borrowed the story of the flood itself from a myth he did not invent, as if giving the reader to understand in advance that his story has a symbolic character and should be perceived as myth, not as a chronicle. Yet myth for a person of the time of the Babylonian exile is not what myth is for us. For us today, myth is something like a fairy tale or legend, and we perceive such things as a kind of literary work in which there may be as much fiction as in the fairy tales of Charles Perrault or the Brothers Grimm.

For the ancients, however, myth was a description of reality, but a symbolic description. A symbol is not the same thing as allegory or fiction; it is not arbitrary. Symbols form a kind of language whose elements allow no more arbitrariness in their interpretation than the words of any natural language. The flood and the ship in which people are saved together with animals are a mythologem well known to the ancients, whether Egyptians, Sumerians, or Greeks.

Considered as history, such a mythologem really does look absurd. But when it is read precisely as a mythologem, as a phrase written in symbolic language, we receive meanings that are no longer absurd at all, and precisely the meanings that the sacred writer wanted to convey to us. The matter concerns the unity and wholeness of the entire human race, God's plan in which will and permission stand alongside one another. The flood is more God's permission than God's will.

God does not want the death of people, but humanity cannot go on existing in the spiritual state in which it found itself before the flood. God preserves humanity in the person of the righteous man and of the world that fits with him into his ship, built according to God's instruction. Humanity is not simply saved; it is cleansed and reborn. Or at least it receives a new chance to begin its history with a clean page, and what that page becomes depends on people.

So the Lord looked at all this ugliness and came to the conclusion that He had worked in vain. He had created the world and cared for it, while people took it for granted and forgot the Creator. What next? And next... Every evil, like a stone thrown upward, returns and falls on the one who threw it. Up to a certain point the Lord held out His hands and protected people from these stones, the consequences of their sins. But then came the moment when He decided to remove His hands. Dishonest, unfair? But why, exactly? After all, we are speaking of a situation in which people reject God by all their behavior. And the Lord chooses one person, more precisely, one family. Let us venture to suppose that the one chosen was not simply someone especially pleasing to God. Most likely, Noah was simply the only one capable of hearing His voice! So God speaks with the one person who hears Him. And if enough people had been ready to listen, most likely there would have been no flood at all. But in that situation the Lord did the only thing possible: He warned of the danger the only one who was listening, and by his faith the fragile little vessel on which Noah was saving his family and the animals protected them from the water. A fairy tale, a parable, an image? Is it so important what the scale of the flooding of Mesopotamia was in unknown ancient years before our era? Something else is more important: in this story, once again, we are given the opportunity to look at how the Lord acts. And the main conclusion that can be drawn is simple: the foundation of relationship with God is readiness to listen and trust.

When reading the parable of Noah, the reader's attention is usually drawn first of all to the description of the worldwide flood. Meanwhile, the sacred writer, it appears, was interested in that story least of all. It interested him so little that he did not even consider it necessary to remove the quite obvious repetitions and parallel passages found in the parable when it comes to the description of the flood itself. Scholars and commentators of the Bible have often noted that the biblical author used two different versions of the tradition about the flood. The first is reflected in Gen 6:5-22 and in Gen 8:1-22, and the second in Gen 7:1-24. This clearly became possible only because the sacred writer considered the traditions about the flood merely a background for a story about something else, something far more important to him. And that more important thing was undoubtedly the figure of Noah. The most remarkable thing in Noah's life story turns out to be precisely the absence of that life story. In essence, the description of Noah's whole life fit into one sentence: "Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation; Noah walked with God" (Gen 6:9). The parable contains no details of this "walking," which is not surprising: the events are understood to belong to times that even historians today picture only vaguely. Something else is important: righteousness and righteous people have existed in the world in every age, and God has never abandoned them. In a certain sense, Noah becomes a collective image of all the righteous people of the pagan world who have ever lived on earth. And not only of those who "walked with God" in ancient times, but also of those who "walk with God" today. There are many people in the world who have not yet heard of the God of the Bible, and still more who have not heard in the Bible the voice of the One who led its authors. And if any of these people seeks God, God Himself leads that person after Him by paths known to Him alone. Whether such a righteous person will hear God in the words of the Bible, or whether they will remain for him only words, depends in part on us, who consider ourselves Christians.