The Flood and the Covenant with Noah

In Genesis, human wickedness has become great and the earth is filled with violence, and God resolves to make an end of all flesh (Genesis 6:5–13). Noah, a righteous man, finds favour (Genesis 6:8–9). God tells him to build an ark of wood sealed with pitch, three hundred cubits long and three decks high, and to take into it his wife, his three sons and their wives, a pair of every kind of animal, and food for all (Genesis 6:14–21). Of the clean animals he is to take seven pairs (Genesis 7:2–3).

In Noah’s six hundredth year, the account continues, the fountains of the deep burst open, the windows of the sky open, and rain falls for forty days and nights (Genesis 7:11–12). The waters cover the mountains. Everything that breathes on dry land dies, and only those in the ark are left (Genesis 7:19–23). After a hundred and fifty days the waters go down and the ark comes to rest on the mountains of Ararat (Genesis 8:3–4). Noah sends out a raven, and then a dove three times. The second time it brings back a fresh olive leaf, and the third time it does not return (Genesis 8:6–12). When the ground is dry, more than a year after the rain began, they all leave the ark (Genesis 8:13–19).

Noah builds an altar and offers burnt offerings, and God resolves never again to strike down every living thing (Genesis 8:20–22). He blesses Noah and his sons, allows them meat but not blood, and requires a reckoning for human life, “for God made man in his own image” (Genesis 9:1–6). Then he makes a covenant with Noah, his descendants and every living creature: no flood will again destroy the earth. The rainbow is its sign (Genesis 9:8–17). This is the first covenant the Bible names (Genesis 6:18).

The book of Isaiah takes the oath about “the waters of Noah” as a pledge of God’s lasting kindness (Isaiah 54:9–10). Jesus compares the days of Noah with the coming of the Son of Man (Matthew 24:37–39), and 1 Peter sees in the eight people saved through water a figure of baptism (1 Peter 3:20–21).

Mesopotamian literature also tells of a great flood. In the eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh the gods decide to send a flood, and the god Ea warns one man. He builds a boat, takes his family and animals aboard, comes to rest on a mountain, sends out a dove, a swallow and a raven, and offers a sacrifice whose smell pleases the gods. In that poem the gods are many, and the survivor and his wife are made immortal (Epic of Gilgamesh tablet XI, lines 8–205). Josephus, in the first century AD, names Berossus the Chaldean and other non-Jewish writers as witnesses to the flood and places the landing on a mountain in Armenia (Josephus, Antiquities 1.89–95).