[Little do readers of the Hebrew Scriptures realize that on top of communication from the Revelator on Sinai regarding teachings and instructions for mankind, we would learn about earthly time and seasons, regional flora and fauna, differences between raven and dove, things that biblical figures like Noah would automatically know but that we would most likely miss simply because we do not live in the fertile crescent region or the geographical setting of this biblical narrative.
YHWH said in his heart: I will never curse the soil again on humankind’s account, since what the human heart forms is evil from its youth; I will never again strike down all living-things, as I have done;
—‘the imagination of mankind’s heart is evil and wicked from his youth’ might appear like a confirmation of the doctrine of ‘original sin’ . . . .but thankfully, the Jewish commentators are quick to explain the meaning in this context. Find out for yourself!
Commentary is from Pentateuch and Haftorahs, ed. Dr. J.H. Hertz; translation with commentary from EF/Everett Fox, The Five Books of Moses; supplemented by commentary from RA/Robert Alter’s The Five Books of Moses.—Admin1]
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Genesis/Bereshith 8
THE DIMINUTION OF WATERS
1 But God paid mind to Noah and all living-things, all the animals that were with him in the Ark, and God brought a rushing-wind across the earth, so that the waters abated.[P&H] God remembered. His covenanted promise to Noah that He would preserve him, and all that were with him in the ark (Ibn Ezra). The animals are expressly included in the kindly thought of God. As there is no forgetfulness with God, so we cannot really apply the term remembrance to him (Kimchi). This phrase, which is in continual use in devotion, is only a human way of speaking of the Divine.
assuaged. The Heb. verb is used of anger being calmed down (Esther II,1). The waters grew calm after the fury of the storm.
[EF] paid mind: More than merely “remembered.” rushing wind: Reminiscent of the “rushing-spirit of God” at creation.
2 The well-springs of Ocean and the sluices of the heavens were dammed up, and the torrent from the heavens was held back.[RA] the wellsprings of the deep . . . and te casements of the heavens, the rain. In keeping with the stately symmetry that governs the style of the whole Flood narrative, the ending of the Flood precisely echoes the terms in which its beginning was represented, in the same order: the poetic inset of 7:11 immediately followed by “rain” at the beginning of 7:12.
3 The waters returned from upon the earth, continually advancing and returning, and the waters diinished at the end of a hundred and fifty days.[P&H] returned . . . . continually. i.e. kept gradually diminishing.
a and fifty days. VII,24. The Flood commenced on the 17th day of the second month (VII,11); and 150 days later, on the 17th of the seventh month, the waters had decreased to such an extent that the ark grounded on the mountains of Ararat.
4 And the Ark came to rest in the seventh New-Moon, on the seventeenth day after the New-Moon, upon the mountains of Ararat.[P&H] the mountains of Ararat. Ararat is the name of a country; see Isa. XXXVII,38, where the Septuagint translates Ararat by Armenia. Assyrian inscriptions also speak of Armenia as ‘Urartu’. Mount Ararat is 17,000 feet high.
The waters continued to decrease for a further period of 73 days, and then the tops of ordinary mountains, as contrasted with Ararat, became visible.
5 Now the waters continued to advance and diminish until the tenth New-Moon. On the tenth, on the first day of the New-Moon, the tops of the mountains could be seen.[EF] advancing and returning . . . advance and diminish: Again, as in 7:17-20, the motion of the waters is suggested by means of sound.
[RA] the mountaintops appeared. There is an echo here of “that the dry land will appear” of 1:9.
6-14. THE RAVEN AND THE DOVE
6 At the end of forty days it was: Noah opened the window of
[P&H] at the end of forty days. i.e. after the first day of the tenth month, referred to in the last verse.
window. lit. ‘aperture.’ The Heb. is a different word from that used in VI,16.
[RA] at the end of forty days. After the ark comes to rest, not the forty days of deluge.
[P&H] a raven. He selected the raven because, as a bird of prey, the raven would sustain itself by feeding on carrion which would abound if the earth were dry.
[EF] sent out: Or, “released.”
8. Then he sent out a dove from him, to see whether the waters had subsided from the face of the soil.
[P&H] sent forth a dove. Rashi explains that between the sending forth of the raven and the sending forth of the dove there was an interval of seven days, since in v. 10 it is stated ‘he stayed yet another seven days.’ Noah changed his scout, because the action of the dove would give more reliable information. The dove fed on vegetation; and should it find food, Noah would have the sign for which he was waiting.
[EF] dove: This bird is portrayed in the bible as beautiful (even pure) and delicate. From this passage of course, stems the popular use of the dove as the symbol of peace.
9 But the dove found no resting-place for the sole of her foot, so she returned to him into the Ark, for there was water upon the face of all the earth. He sent forth his hand and took her, and brought her to him into the Ark.10 Then he waited yet another seven days and sent out the dove yet again from the Ark.
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[P&H] at eventide. Noah had presumably let the dove out in the morning. It must therefore have flown a considerable distance if it did not return until the evening. The inference was that the earth all around was covered by water.
olive leaf. Since the olive tree grew to no great height, Noah understood that the waters had almost disappeared, though not completely. The Rabbis have a beautiful comment on the fact that the dove comes back to Noah with the bitter olive leaf in its mouth. ‘Better,’ it seemed to say, ‘bitter food that comes from God than the sweetest food at the hands of man.’
12 Then he waited yet another seven days and sent out the dove, but she returned to him again no more. 13 And so it was in the six hundred and first year, in the beginning-month on the first day of the New-Moon, that the waters left firm ground upon the earth. Noah remove the covering of the Ark an saw: here, the face of the soil was firm.[P&H] first month. Two months after the tops of the mountains had become visible (v.5).
removed the covering. He took off part of the roof so as to get a view of what was outside.
the ground was dried. i.e the water had drained away from the surface of the ground; but the surrounding earth must have been a mass of marsh and bog, and it was unsafe to step upon the ground.
[EF] left firm ground: Or “were fully dried up.”
[RA] in the six hundred and first year. Of Noah’s life. The Septuagint adds these words, through whether that reflects a gloss or a more reliable text at this point is unclear.
ground. The Hebrew is ‘adamah, the word that also means “soil” and that figures importantly in the Garden story and its immediate aftermath. It recurs again in verse 21 in God’s vow not to destroy the earth again.
14 Now in the second New-Moon, on the twenty-seventh day after the New-Moon, the earth was (completely) dry.[[P&H] dry. A different Heb. word from that used in the previous verse. It denotes that the ground had become hard, and could bear the weight of the inhabitants of the ark.
[RA] completely dry. There is no “completely” in Hebrew but that may be implied by the verb used. The verb for “was dry” in the preceding verse is arev; the verb here is yavesh. The two are occasionally paired in poetic parallelism (e.g., Hosea 13:15), but they also occur twice in what looks like a temporal sequence (Isaiah 19:5 and Job 14:11): first a water source dries up (arev), then it is in a state of complete dryness (yavesh).
15-22. LEAVING THE ARK, AND BUILDING AN ALTAR
15 God spoke to Noah, saying:
16 Go out of the Ark, you and your wife, your sons and your sons’ wives with you, that they may swarm on earth, that they may bear fruit and become many upon the earth. 17 All living-things that are with you, all flesh—fowl, animals, and all crawling things that crawl about upon the earth, have them go out with you, that they may swarm on earth, that they may bear fruit and become many upon the earth.[P&H] swarm. ‘Breed abundantly’ (RV). The Heb. word denotes a moving about from place to place.
18 So Noah went out, his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives with him,
19 all living-things—all crawling things, and all fowl, all that crawl about upon the earth, according to their clans they went out of the Ark.[P&H] families. i.e. species, as in Jer. XV,3.
[EF] clans: Classifications.
[RA] The verb ramas and the noun remes usually refer to crawling life-forms, but there are a few contexts in which they appear to designate any kind of moving creature. (The meaning of the root is probably linked with minute movement, shuffling, or trampling.) In Genesis 9:3, remes must indicate all kinds of animals because Noah’s diet is surely not restricted to reptiles and insects. Here, the initial romes seems to mean “crawling things,” because it stands in contradistinction to “every beast,” whereas romes in the next clause summarizes the catalogue that precedes it, which includes birds.
20 Noah built a slaughter-site to YHWH. He took from all pure animals and fom all pure fowl and offered up offerings upon the slaughter-site.[P&H] builded an altar. Noah feels moved to express his gratitude to God. He is the pioneer of all the altar-builders of the Bible.
burnt offerings. A burnt-offering was entirely consumed by fire on the altar, and no part eaten by the priest or the bringer of the sacrifice.
[EF] slaughter-site: Etymologically the word mizbe’ah hearkens back to a time when such sites were used mainly for animal sacrifice; the Bible cites other uses such as libations and cereal offerings. offered up: The Hebrew verb (‘alo) implies upward movement.
21 And when YHWH smelled the soothing savor YHWH said in his heart: I will never curse the soil again on humankind’s account, since what the human heart forms is evil from its youth; I will never again sgtrike down all living-things, as I have done;[P&H] the sweet savour. The sacrifice offered by Noah was as agreeable to the Deity, humanly speaking, as sweet odours are to a man. To avoid the anthropomorphism, the Targum renders ‘And the Lord accepted with pleasure the sweet savour’.
in His heart. The Heb. is ‘to His heart’, i.e. to Himself. The phrase means simply, ‘God resolved.’
I will not again curse. There will be no repetition of the curse pronounced in the days of Adam (see III,17). In all probability, the ‘curse’ of the Flood is also implied. A world-catastrophe will in such measure never recur.
for man’s sake. Better, for Adam’s sake.
of man’s heart. Better, of Adam’s heart.
imagination. The Evil Inclination in man, Yetzer hara, which too often gains the mastery over the Good inclination, Yetzer tob.
from his youth. i.e. from the dawn of his knowledge of good and evil.
as I have done. In the future, God will punish the individual sinners, and not the human family as a body.
[EF] smelled the soothing savor: Conveyed by the sound in Hebrew, va-yarah et re’ah ha-niho’ah. evil from its youth: That is, evil already begins in what we might call adolescence. But Speiser renders it “from the start.”
[RA] And the LORD smelled the fragrant odor. Noah has followed in the literary footsteps of the hero of the Mesopotamian Flood stories in offering thanksgiving sacrifice after the waters recede. The frankly anthropomorphic imagination that informs Genesis has no difficulty in conceiving God’s enjoying the aroma of the burnt offerings. What is rigorously excluded from the monotheistic version of the sotry is any suggestion that God eats the sacrifice—in the Mesopotamian traditions, the gods are thought to be dependent on the food men provide them through the sacrifices, and they swoop down on the postdiluvian offering “like flies.” The word for “fragrance” (or perhaps, something pleasing or soothing), nioa, is always attached to “odor” as a technical term linked with sacrifices, and it probably puns here on the name Noah.
The thanksgiving sacrifice is evidently a requisite narrative motif taken from the Mesopotamian antecedents, but the Hebrew writer’s attitude toward it may be more complicated than meets the eye. The first reported animal sacrifice, though equally pleasing to God, led to the murder of the sacrificer. Noah is about to be warned about the mortal danger of bloodguilt, and he himself will become the victim of an act of violation, though not as a consequence of his sacrifice. In any case, divine acceptance of ritual offerings does nothing to mitigate man’s dangerous impulses.
and the LORD said in His heart. The idiom means “said to himself” but it is important to preserve the literal wording because it pointedly echoes 6:6, “and was grieved to the heart,” just as “the devisings of the human heart are evil” explicitly echoes 6:5. The Flood story is thus enclosed by mutually mirroring reports of God’s musings on human nature. Whether the addition here of “from youth” means, as some commentators claim, that God now has a more qualified view of the human potential for evil, is questionable. But after the Flood, God, once more recognizing evil of which man is capable, concludes that, given what man is all too likely disposed to do, it is scarcely worth destroying the whole world again on his account.
damn. The Hebrew verb, from a root associated with the idea of lack of importance, or contemptibility, may occasionally mean “to curse,” as in the Balaam story, but its usual meaning is to denigrate or vilify. Perhaps both senses are intimated here.
I will not again. The repetition of this phrase may reflect, as Rashi suggests, a formal oath, the solemnity of which would then be capped by the poetic inset at the end (which uses an unconventional short-line form, with only two accents in each verset). What is peculiar is that this is a pledge that God makes to Himself, not out loud to Noah. The complementary promise to Noah, in the next chapter, will be accompanied by the external sign of the rainbow. The silent promise in God’s interior monologue invokes no external signs, only the seamless cycle of the seasons that will continue as long as the earth.
22 (never) again, all the days of the earth, shall sowing and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night ever cease![P&H] The regular change of the seasons will not again be suspended. According to the Talmud, these six terms here enumerated mark the actual divisions of the year, each being of two months.
[EF] sowing an harvest . . .: The solemn promise is expressed in verse.
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