Correct in This Generation (Gen 7:1)
The Flood
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Last time, we saw that YHWH told Noah, “You and your whole family, get into the box.” I pointed out two things:
The word I translated as “family” is literally בית báyit ‘house’. Obviously Noah is not actually wheeling a building of some kind on to this boxy boat.
When God (אלהים elohim) says essentially the same thing in Genesis 6, Noah’s family is “you and your sons and your wife and your sons’ wives with you” (6:18).
Today we’re going to follow up on those two observations. First, we’ll take the opportunity to talk about báyit, a word so basic that it gave the letter beit (ב) and subsequently its Greek cousin beta (β) their names. Then, adding the rest of 7:1 to our data, we’ll discuss the language differences between the two versions of the Flood story.
Architectural styles change over the years, but the Greek letter, the Hebrew letter, and the earlier Paleo-Hebrew, Phoenician, etc. versions of this letter are a drawing of a house. It’s a “basic” word; that is, it doesn’t derive from a three-letter Semitic root. It’s just (somehow) a sound that was used to represent the building that you lived in. From there, it grew to represent the (multi-generational?) family that lived inside such a building and then the multiple generations of a ruling family, like the House of Windsor.
If we take a sneak peek at the next time we’ll see the word בית, we find Abram being told to leave “your father’s house [beit avikha]” (12:1). Is he simply being told to move out, or is it about leaving family behind? Stay tuned!
1 For it is you I have seen as correct before me in this generation.
כִּֽי־אֹתְךָ֥ רָאִ֛יתִי צַדִּ֥יק לְפָנַ֖י בַּדּ֥וֹר הַזֶּֽה׃
We saw last time that if you read the J version of this story continuously, as Ronald Hendel does in his new Anchor Bible commentary, this verse is explanatory:
6:8 But YHWH liked Noah. 7:1 YHWH said to Noah …
It’s also reminiscent of 6:9, where we are told:
Noah was a correct man who was unblemished in those ten generations. Noah had walked around with the gods.
If we juxtapose what YHWH tells Noah about himself in 7:1 with what the narrator tells us in 6:9, we can make the following comparisons:
Noah is compared to others of his דור dor ‘generation’.
Noah’s relationship with the divine realm is also invoked:
- in 7:1, “before me”
- in 6:9, “Noah had walked around with the gods.”
What we’re seeing is that these two different versions of the story are using different words to say something similar. When P insists that elohim is the divine character in the story and J says it was YHWH, P at least has an ax to grind: the name YHWH was not revealed, according to priestly theology, until the time of Moses. It’s the same (as we’ll see shortly, as soon as we get to v. 2) with the number of pairs of animals that are supposed to be saved.
The other language differences, though — like referring specifically to Noah’s three sons and all four men’s wives versus calling the whole group his “house” — don’t seem to carry any particular ideological importance. Both versions point to his “correct” behavior; only P calls him תָּמִ֥ים tamim ‘unblemished’, perhaps simply because that is a word that comes readily to the mouth of someone who wrangles animals for sacrifice and less readily to a writer from some other walk of life.
I’m taking for granted here, as I have been throughout our reading, that earlier tellings have been combined in Genesis to do something larger than just list the facts. (Those who want more details right away can look at pp. 103–110 in The Bible’s Many Voices and / or listen to Episode 16 of the companion podcast.) What I want to think about right now is why there might be (at least) two different versions of these stories in ancient Israel.
When it first began to dawn on scholars that apparent contradictions in the Torah might actually indicate that contradictory views had been combined, the focus was on disentangling them in order to understand them. In our reading of Genesis, I’m also trying to understand the nature of their combination. If we turn around and look back, however, what do we see? I’m thinking out loud here, not asserting facts.
Stories of a world-wide, divinely ordained flood circulated in Israel as they did throughout the ancient Near East.
The Israelite Flood hero was named Noah.
Noah had a relationship of some sort with God.
He was chosen to be the survivor because his behavior matched the way God wanted human beings to act.
The others of his generation did not match his behavior.
Animal life was to be exterminated as well.
Of the humans, just Noah and his immediate family were to be saved.
The most important part of this question (for me) remains without an answer: Who told these stories, and why? Okay, the priests had a version of Israelite history that (presumably) described how they were to establish and maintain sacred sites — hence the rules about sacrifice and about impurity that pervade the book of Leviticus. Why could the story giving them that job not have begun with the Exodus?
We will see — far, far down the road — that the family saga of Genesis is interwoven with hints at the much later family saga of David, the king who made Jerusalem Israel’s capital, and whose son Solomon built a magnificent Temple there. What role, if any, did the Flood play in that story? And how did the exodus story and the David story come to be combined?
If you assume that Genesis 1–11 is a factual record, you still have to think about why these particular facts were recorded. If you think (as I do) that this is (1) a story that was (2) composed by combining elements from more than one earlier source, you have to wonder why those stories existed and for what (presumably different) purpose they were combined into the newer version of the story that we now have.
Our occasional looks at Jubilees and similar re-retellings let us know that the process did not stop when our Bible was finished. I’m leaving it there for now, hoping to come back to this question as we continue to read. Next time, the Noah of our version of the story will get updated instructions — it’s not just one pair of each species, but seven pairs of some species. See you then.