People of the Bible

Noah

The patriarchs and matriarchs · Before the flood · Appears in Genesis 5 to 9

Noah is the man who found grace in the eyes of the LORD when the earth was filled with violence, and who built an ark at God's command to save his household and the living creatures from the flood. After the waters receded God set the rainbow in the sky as the sign of his covenant never again to destroy the earth by flood.

But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD.Genesis 6:8 (KJV)

Grace in a corrupt world

The world of Noah's day had grown unbearable to its Maker. The Bible says the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually, and it grieved God at his heart that he had made man. Into that dark picture comes a single ray of light in one of the most important sentences of Genesis: But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD. He was a just man, perfect in his generations, and, like his ancestor Enoch, Noah walked with God.

God resolved to cleanse the earth with a flood and to preserve a remnant through Noah. He told him to build an ark of gopher wood, giving its exact measures, three stories high, with a door in the side and a window above. The task was strange, enormous, and slow, undertaken far from any sea, and it must have drawn the scorn of his neighbors for years. Yet the verdict of Scripture is quiet and total: Thus did Noah; according to all that God commanded him, so did he.

The flood and the ark

When the ark was ready, God told Noah to enter it with his wife, his three sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and their wives, along with the animals, two of every kind and seven of the clean, that life might be preserved. Then the fountains of the great deep were broken up and the windows of heaven were opened, and the rain fell forty days and forty nights, until the highest hills were covered and every living thing on the dry land died. The LORD shut Noah in, and the ark floated on the face of the waters while the old world passed away.

God remembered Noah, and made a wind pass over the earth, and the waters began to abate, until the ark rested on the mountains of Ararat. Noah sent out a raven, and then a dove, which returned because it found no rest; he waited seven days and sent it again, and it came back with an olive leaf in its mouth, and he knew the waters were drying from the earth. When at last the ground was dry, Noah came out with his family and every creature, and the first thing he did was build an altar and offer sacrifice, and the LORD smelled a sweet savour and resolved in his heart never again to curse the ground for man's sake in that way.

The covenant of the rainbow

God blessed Noah and his sons as he had once blessed Adam, telling them to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth, giving the world a fresh beginning from a single faithful family. Then God made his first named covenant in Scripture, promising, I will establish my covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood. As the sign of that promise he set the rainbow in the cloud, so that whenever the storm gathers, the bow reminds heaven and earth alike of a mercy that holds back the waters.

The rainbow is a token of pure grace, given not because the human heart had changed, for God says plainly that the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth, but because God had bound himself by promise. From this covenant the whole later story of salvation flows, carried by the family that stepped off the ark onto a washed and waiting world.

His character and struggle

Noah is the Bible's picture of steady, obedient faith in a faithless age. He walked with God when the whole world walked away, and he did the long, unrewarded work God gave him without a recorded word of protest, warning a world that would not listen. The New Testament calls him a preacher of righteousness and honors his faith, saying that by it he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith.

Scripture is also honest about his weakness, and does not end his story on the mountain of triumph. After the flood Noah planted a vineyard, drank of the wine, and lay drunk and uncovered in his tent, and shame entered his household. He was a righteous man, not a sinless one, saved by grace as surely as by obedience, a reminder that even the best of the rescued still need the deeper rescue that only God can give.

The nations from one family

From Noah's three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, the Bible traces the whole family of nations that spread over the earth after the flood. The tenth chapter of Genesis, often called the table of nations, lists the peoples descended from them, a reminder that all the diverse nations of the world share one father in Noah and one Maker in God. The command once given to Adam was renewed to Noah and his sons: Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.

The new beginning, however, was not a return to innocence. Not long after the flood came the shameful scene of Noah's drunkenness and the sin of his son Ham, and soon after, at Babel, the descendants of Noah proudly built a tower to make themselves a name, and God scattered them and confused their languages. The flood had washed the earth but not the human heart, and the story presses on, past Babel, to the calling of one man, Abraham, through whom God would begin to bless the very nations that had been scattered.

Where Noah points to Christ

Jesus compared his own return to the days of Noah, when people ate and drank and married and knew nothing until the flood came and took them all away. The ark, one door of safety carrying its people through the waters of judgment, has long been seen by the church as a picture of Christ, in whom alone we are carried safely through the storm that our sin deserves.

The New Testament links the flood waters to baptism, a passing through death into new life, and Noah's family, saved through water, becomes a picture of all who are saved in Christ. The dove that brought back the olive leaf, the sign that judgment was over and peace had come, foreshadows the Spirit that descended as a dove upon Jesus and the peace he makes between God and the world. Where Noah's world began again and yet fell back into sin, the new world Jesus is bringing will never be lost, for its foundation is his own unbreakable righteousness.

A note on the sources: everything above is drawn from the biblical text itself. Where a detail comes from later tradition rather than Scripture, it is named as tradition. Dates for the earliest figures are traditional and approximate, and Scripture does not always give them. The aim is to tell each life honestly, and to let it do what the whole Bible does, point to Jesus Christ the Lord.

Related: Adam · Abraham · All the people of the Bible