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Noah's name comes from the Hebrew verb nu'ach (נוּחַ), meaning "to rest." He was so named by his father Lamech who said, "Out of the ground that the LORD has cursed this one shall bring us relief (rest) from our work and from the painful toil of our hands" (Gen. 5:29). As such, Noah is a type of Messiah who saves the world and gives comfort and rest.
In our Torah portion, God revealed to Noah his intention of destroying all the inhabitants of the earth with a great and worldwide flood (mabbul), and therefore instructed him to build a 450 foot long, three-tiered wooden teivah ("ark") and to daub or cover it (כָּפַר) both inside and out with pitch (i.e., resin). Noah took his wife, his three sons (Shem, Ham, and Japheth) and their wives, and two (male and female) of every sort of unclean animal (and seven of every clean) into the ark to be sheltered from the coming deluge.
In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the 17th day of the month, all the "fountains of the great deep" burst forth, and the rain began to fall for 40 days and nights. The waters eventually covered the entire earth, overwhelming even the tops of the highest mountains. After 150 days, the water began to recede, and on the 17th day of the 7th month, the ark came to rest on Mount Ararat. From its perch, Noah dispatched a raven, and then a series of doves, "to see if the waters were abated from the face of the earth." In the six hundred and first year of Noah's life, in second month, on the 27th day of the month, after a stay of 1 year and 11 days (i.e., a complete solar year), the ground was finally dry.
Noah then removed the ark's covering (מִכְסֶה) and built an altar to offer sacrifices to God. The LORD then made covenant (בְּרִית) with Noah and his descendants never to destroy the earth with a flood, and gave the rainbow (i.e., keshet: קֶשֶׁת) as its sign. The specific commandments given to b'nei Noach (the sons of Noah) are detailed in Genesis chapter 9, but may be summarized as follows:
- The command to be fruitful and multiply (9:1, 7)
- The prohibition about eating blood (9:4)
- The prohibition of murder and the institution of capital punishment (9:6)
The parashah then explains the early life of the survivors. "Noah began to be a man of the soil, and he planted a vineyard. He drank of the wine and became drunk and lay uncovered in his tent. And Cham (Ham), the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brothers outside" (Gen 9:20-22). According to various chazal, "Cham saw his father's nakedness," meant that Noah's son either sodomized or castrated him (Talmud - Sanhedrin 70a), rendering him impotent. Because Ham stopped Noah from fathering a fourth son, Noah cursed Ham's son, Canaan (though he blessed Shem and Japheth, who "covered the nakedness of their father").
After this, the parashah describes how the earth was repopulated through Noah's three sons (as the founders of the "seventy nations" of the Gentiles - as described in the detailed genealogy of Genesis chapter 10). The descendants of Noah remained a single people group with a single language (lashon hakodesh) for ten generations. However, they eventually returned to the evil ways of the "sons of Cain" by uniting in an idolatrous religion that led them to build a "tower with its top in the heavens." God confounded their evil religion, however, by "confusing their speech" and thereby dispersed the people into the seventy nations of the earth (the abandoned tower was called Bavel (Babel) and is considered by many to be the origin of "Mystery Babylon").
The Parashah concludes with a genealogy of the generations from Noah to Terah, a Chaldean (Kasdim) who was the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran. Now Haran died in the city of Ur but had a son named Lot, who was made part of Terah's extended family. Abram married Sarai and Nahor married Milcah.
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Interestingly, Abram's father Terah may have originally been called by the LORD to inherit the Promised Land, since he took his son (and his grandson Lot) away from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan. However, he appears to have lost the calling and settled instead in the city of Haran, where he eventually died.
Here we once again see the LORD preparing the lineage for the Promised Seed to come - the Mashiach and Savior of the world. Just as there were ten generations from Adam to Noah, so there were ten generations from Noah to Abram, the father of the Jewish people.
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