Noach
Genesis 6:9-11:32
Précis: The story of Noah and Flood appear in this parasha. Noah, called by God, builds the Ark and collects the animals. Then it rains for forty days and nights. Noah and his family are saved, and afterwards they leave the Ark, build an altar, and make sacrifices to God. God sets a rainbow as a promise not to destroy mankind again. Noah plants a vineyard, makes wine, and becomes drunk. An odd incident takes place with his sons. The story of the Tower of Babel is included, and the parasha ends with a genealogy of the ancient peoples of the Bible, ending with Abram.
Genesis 11:1-9 “All the earth had the same language…and as man migrated from the east they settled in the valley… and they said, ‘’let us make bricks….and let us build a city and a tower with its top in the sky, and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered all over the earth.’ Adonai came down and said, ‘If, as one people with single voice this is how they have begun to act, then nothing will be out of their reach. Let us go down and confound their speech.’ Thus Adonai scattered them across the face of the earth.”
This week’s reading includes details about two building projects: Noah builds and Ark (6:14 and following), and his descendants build the Tower of Babel (11:1−9). God orders the building of the Ark, but the people themselves decide to build the Tower. As the text tells us, the people (presumably all of humanity was living together at the construction site) were subsequently scattered across the globe, with different languages. This penalty (and what, exactly was the crime?) is long-lasting in impact. We still feel the ramifications of ethnic conflict today arising out of God’s judgment at Babel.
The traditional view is that while Noah worked at God’s behest and according to God’s plan, the builders of the Tower were acting alone, at their own initiative and for their own purposes. Early commentators suggested that the rulers of Babel used force labor to create the Tower in an effort to turn people away from God towards their human rulers. One suggestion for the building of the Tower was to provide an escape should God decide to flood the world again (although why they would build the Tower in a valley argues against this suggestion). Tradition tells us that God’s judgment was based on the fact that the humans behind the building were tyrants, that they were seeking immunity from God’s future wrath, and that they were acting out of a sense of their own importance. God, in effect, “learns” that the people building the Tower had not absorbed the lesson of the Flood. Because He would not flood the world again, He found another means to punish evil-doers.
The reading this week offers us once again an opportunity to examine our free will and the choices we have. We can act righteously and in accord with our understanding of what God intends (like Noah building the Ark), or we can act in disregard of what is right and just, like the builders of the Tower. Choices are available people!
