The Flood

Adam was a hundred and thirty when Seth was born, a son who took after him, in his likeness and his image. He lived eight hundred years longer and had more sons and daughters, long enough to see Seth’s children and their children’s children bent over the same hard ground he had worked all his life.

Adam lived to nine hundred and thirty, and then he died. The breath God had breathed into him at the beginning went out of him, and the ground he had been taken from took him back.

Seth was a hundred and five when his son Enosh was born, and after Enosh came Kenan, Mahalalel and Jared, father to son. Each of them had more sons and daughters, each lived for centuries, and each in his turn died.

Jared’s son Enoch, not the Enoch who was Cain’s son, was sixty-five when his son Methuselah was born. For three hundred years after that, Enoch walked with God, raising more sons and daughters. Then, at three hundred and sixty-five, far younger than any of the others, he was gone. God had taken him.

Methuselah was a hundred and eighty-seven when his son Lamech was born, a different man from the Lamech of Cain’s family. Methuselah had more sons and daughters, and he lived to nine hundred and sixty-nine, longer than any of them, and then he died.

Lamech knew the curse on the ground the way all of them did, in his hands and his back. Lamech was a hundred and eighty-two when his son was born, and he named him Noah. “This one will bring us comfort in our work,” he said, “in all the aching labor of our hands on ground the Lord put under a curse.” Lamech lived five hundred and ninety-five years more, with other sons and daughters, and died at seven hundred and seventy-seven.

Noah was past five hundred when his three sons were born.

“My Spirit won’t keep struggling with people forever,” the Lord said, “because they are only flesh. A hundred and twenty years is all the time they’ll have.”

In those days, and later as well, there were Nephilim on the earth. When the sons of God had children by the daughters of men, those children became the mighty men of the old days, whose names everyone knew.

The Lord saw how far the evil of people on the earth had gone. Whatever their minds planned was evil, and only evil, all day long. It grieved the Lord to his heart that he had made people on earth, and he was sorry he had done it. “I’ll wipe the people I created off the earth,” he said, “and the animals with them, the birds and the creeping things, because I’m sorry I made them.”

Noah was different. The Lord looked on him with favor.

In God’s sight the earth had gone rotten, and violence filled it. When God looked at the earth, he saw how ruined it was, because everything that lived on it had ruined its ways.

“The end has come for every living creature,” God told Noah. “The earth is full of their violence, and I’ll destroy them, earth and all. Make yourself an ark out of gopher wood, with rooms inside, and make it watertight with pitch, inside and out. Make it three hundred cubits long, fifty across and thirty high. Roof it over, leaving an opening a cubit high under the roof, and set a door in its side. Give it three decks, lower, middle and upper.”

“I myself am about to send a flood over the earth,” God said, “that will kill every living creature under the sky, everything that breathes. All of it will die. But with you I’ll make my covenant. You’ll go into the ark, and your family with you, your wife and sons and their wives. Bring into the ark a pair of every living thing, a male and its female, to live through it with you. Birds, beasts and creeping things, two of each kind, will come to you, and you’ll keep them alive. Gather every kind of food there is, and store it up for yourselves and for them.”

So Noah built it, three hundred cubits of it, about four hundred and fifty feet from end to end. His sons worked beside him, cutting and fitting the timbers, and the smell of hot pitch got into their hair and their clothes. He did all of it, exactly as God had told him.

Noah did everything the Lord told him, and seven days on, in Noah’s six hundredth year, the flood came. It was the seventeenth of the second month, and that day every spring of the great deep broke open and the sky’s floodgates were thrown wide.

That same day, with the water coming, Noah went aboard with his wife, and Shem, Ham and Japheth followed with their own three wives. The animals came to Noah down from the hills and in from the fields, with the birds flying low over them. They came in pairs, male and female, wild and tame, clean and unclean, creeping and flying, every kind that breathes, and they went in, as God had said. Then the Lord shut Noah in, and for forty days and forty nights the rain came down on the earth.

The water rose until every high mountain under the whole sky was covered, and stood fifteen cubits over the peaks, more than twenty feet.

The last hilltops people had climbed to get above the water were under it now, and so was every person Noah had ever known outside the ark. Everything on the land died, every bird and beast, wild or tame, every swarming thing, every man, woman and child, everything on dry ground that drew breath through its nostrils. God wiped every living thing from the earth, and no one was left but Noah and his family, with the animals they had taken aboard.

The water stayed over the earth until a hundred and fifty days had gone by, and Noah counted every one of them in the half-dark, among the smell of the animals and the creak of the timbers.

The ark grounded in the mountains of Ararat on the seventeenth of the seventh month. Noah felt it settle with a long grinding shudder and go still. The water went on dropping, and on the first of the tenth month the mountaintops showed above it.

Noah waited forty days more, then pushed open the window he had made and let a raven go. It flew out and back, over and over, until the earth had dried.

He let a dove go too, to find out if the ground was clear of water yet. She found nowhere to land, with water still over the whole earth, and she came back to him. He reached out, took her in his hand and brought her inside, and he could feel her heart beating against his palm.

He waited seven more days before he let her go again. Toward evening she came back to him, and in her beak was a fresh olive leaf. Noah turned it over in his fingers. Now he knew the water had gone down from the earth.

He sent her out once more a week later, and this time she stayed away.

When the new year came, Noah’s six hundred and first, the water was gone from the earth. Noah took the covering off the ark and looked out, and saw the ground drying. There was mud as far as he could see, and bare hills, and nothing moving on them.

Noah came out with his family. The ground gave a little under his feet, and the air smelled of wet earth. After them, kind by kind, came every animal and bird and creeping thing, every creature that moves across the land. The animals scattered over the wet hills, and the birds went up into a clear sky.

The first thing Noah did was build an altar to the Lord. On it he offered burnt offerings, choosing some of each kind from the clean animals and the clean birds.

The Lord smelled the soothing aroma, and in his heart he said, “I’ll never curse the ground again on account of people. Their hearts are set on evil from their youth. Never again will I strike down everything that lives, as I’ve done now. As long as there is an earth, there will always be sowing and reaping, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night.”