Walking Around (Gen 6:9)

The Flood

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⁹ Noah had walked around with the gods. אֶת־הָֽאֱלֹהִ֖ים הִֽתְהַלֶּךְ־נֹֽחַ׃

NJPS translates this phrase as “Noah walked with God.” Nahum Sarna comments:

See Comment to 5:22. The exceptional inversion of the Hebrew word order gives God pride of place in the sentence, thus accentuating the fact that the standards by which Noah’s righteousness is judged are divine, not human.

In 5:22, as you remember, a similar phrase occurs with Enoch, and it is repeated in 5:24. Here’s that comment:

The regular formula [of The Genealogy of Adam], “he lived,” is replaced by a description of how he lived. The idiom is used again only of Noah in 6:9 and, in a slightly varied form, of the ideal priest in Malachi 2:6. It is expressive of a life spent in full accord with God’s will and in closest intimacy with Him.

Give Sarna credit for paying attention to this phrase, which most commentaries don’t seem to find very interesting. I find it interesting indeed, since it seems to be telling us that Noah is the second coming of Enoch. Perhaps because I am not as pious a person as Sarna, I don’t have as Sunday-Schoolish approach to the Bible as he did.

Certainly from the narratives that we’ve read so far, we haven’t been told about anything about either Noah or Enoch — nothing to indicate that their lives were spent “in full accord with God’s will,” and in fact nothing whatsoever about their lives except these notes in Genesis 5:

• ²¹ Enoch lived 65 years and fathered Methuselah. ²² Enoch walked around with God, after he fathered Methuselah, 300 years, and he fathered sons and daughters. ²³ All the days of Enoch were 365 years. ²⁴ Enoch walked around with God and was gone, because God took him.

• ³² Noah lived 500 years, and Noah fathered Shem, Ham, and Yéfet.

Everybody else in The Genealogy of Adam also lived for a while and fathered children, so what is the big deal about these two? If in fact they lived “in closest intimacy” with God, tell us something about that, please.

Given that we’re not told anything of the sort, I feel free to think differently about what we’re reading. To give Sarna credit, most translations (including the one Sarna was commenting on) don’t even bother to mention the “inversion of the Hebrew word order.” Tip of the hat to the LXX (but not NETS) and to Everett Fox, who do invert the words of their translations.

It’s true that YHWH and Elohim do like to elbow their way in front of the verb from time to time, but I don’t think the syntax alone is telling us anything about Noah. As we’ve discussed a number of times previously, this kind of word order tells you “what I’m about to say is not the next thing that happened.” In this case, the phrase might well be giving us background information, as the beginning of the verse does, so let’s take it seriously: Noah did what Enoch had done.

Three months ago (my, how time flies), in a series of posts starting here, we spent a lot of time getting to know Enoch — a minor character in the Bible but a major character in the world that produced the Bible. How about Noah?

In fact, Noah shows up in some quite unexpected company in the book of Ezekiel:

^{Ezek 14:12} The word of the LORD came to me: ¹³ O mortal, if a land were to sin against Me and commit a trespass, and I stretched out My hand against it and broke its staff of bread, and sent famine against it and cut off man and beast from it, ¹⁴ even if these three men—Noah, Dan’el, and Job—should be in it, they would by their righteousness save only themselves—declares the Lord GOD. ¹⁵ Or, if I were to send wild beasts … ¹⁶ … ¹⁷… the sword … ¹⁸ … ¹⁹ Or … a pestilence … ²⁰ should Noah, Dan’el, and Job be in it, as I live—declares the Lord GOD—they would save neither son nor daughter; they would save themselves alone by their righteousness.

I have left out most of the gruesome details and added a vital apostrophe to the name of Noah’s and Job’s companion; he is not דָּנִיֵּ֣אל of the book of Daniel (who was just a kid in Ezekiel’s time) but דָּנִאֵל, an ancient king who is the father of the hero of the Ugaritic Epic of Aqhat and, like Noah and Job, a non-Jew. Ezekiel’s point presumes that these are the three top righteous people in world history.

Sarna pointed us to Job 12:4, which uses the same two words that our verse uses about Noah, צַדִּ֥יק תָּמִֽים, but in Job’s case to mock him. The narrator of Job uses similar language near the very beginning of the book, to praise him:

^{Job 1:1} There was a man in the land of Uz named Job. That man was blameless and upright [תָּ֧ם וְיָשָׁ֛ר].

Wondering whether תם tam is related to tamim? It is, of course, and yashar ‘straight’ is semantically quite close to tzaddiq. Was there a Book of Noah that would have told us more? The Genesis Apocryphon, incompletely preserved, has some tantalizing fragments in Noah’s own voice, including one where he is sent “a great Watcher as a messenger and as an embassy of the Great Holy One.” Yes, it’s the Watchers again, Enoch’s pals.

All of which is intended to explain to you why I think Noah too “had walked around with the gods” just as Enoch had. There’s a reason “YHWH liked Noah” (6:8), even if we don’t quite know what it is. Instead of removing Noah from the other humans, though, YHWH will remove them from him.