Noah

Noah is the hero of the flood narrative of Genesis 6-9: the one righteous man of a corrupt generation, commanded to build an ark, to preserve his family and the animals through a deluge that destroys all other life, and afterward to receive God's covenant, sealed by the rainbow, never again to flood the earth. As with the creation accounts, scholars find the Genesis flood story to be a composite of two interwoven sources, which accounts for its doublets, one pair of each animal in one strand, seven pairs of the clean in the other, and differing counts of the days.

The biblical flood does not stand alone. It belongs to a much older Mesopotamian tradition of a great deluge sent by the gods and survived by one favoured man in a boat. In the Atra-hasis epic and in the eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the survivor, Atrahasis, or Utnapishtim, builds a vessel, rides out the flood, and sends out birds to test for dry land, releasing them exactly as Noah does. The parallels are close enough that the Genesis account is understood to draw on this common Near Eastern heritage, reworking it around the covenant with a single God rather than a quarrel among many.

The reworking is the point: what the Mesopotamian versions tell as the caprice of the gods, Genesis tells as moral judgment and merciful promise.

In Jewish tradition Noah's importance extends beyond the flood to the covenant God makes with him and, through him, with all humanity, the first of the biblical covenants and one held to bind not only Israel but every people. From it the rabbis derived the seven Noahide laws (Sheva Mitzvot B'nei Noach), a minimal universal moral code, prohibiting idolatry, blasphemy, murder, theft, sexual immorality and cruelty to animals, and requiring courts of justice, regarded as incumbent on all descendants of Noah, that is, on all humankind. In this framework a non-Jew who keeps these laws is counted among the righteous, and Judaism does not seek to make such a person a Jew.

Christianity received Noah as a type: the ark that carries the faithful through the waters became an image of the church and of baptism, and Jesus compares the suddenness of the flood to the coming of the end.

Islam counts Nuh among the greatest prophets, one of those called the resolute of purpose. The Qur'an dwells on his long and thankless preaching to an unheeding people and on the flood as divine judgment, and it adds a poignant detail absent from Genesis: a son of Noah who refuses the ark, trusting a mountain to save him, and is drowned among the rejectors, a warning that kinship to a prophet saves no one who turns away.