I’ve heard it said that the flood is, at its core, a story of identity crisis. Typically when people get to know you, they get to know you by your interests, your friends, the places you go and the things you do. But imagine Noah aboard the ark. Those demarcations of identity cease to exist. His entire world has been swept away. He has to make sense of himself without so much as a hobby or a hometown.
To relate this to modern times, it would be like suddenly finding yourself in a world without sports, restaurants, pop culture. Apple computers? No such thing. Nike shoes? No such thing. Hollywood? No such thing. Starbucks?––what is coffee? The Superbowl?––none of your grandkids have heard of it.
Alive without context, who are you?
Noah is battling sea sickness and asking himself this very question. He is forced to understand himself as God sees him. The surrounding culture has been stripped away. What remains––his character, his family, his faithfulness––constitutes his identity before the Lord.
Without male contemporaries of similar age and experience, he certainly feels lonely! He misses the company of an older person. No matter how much he appreciates God’s deliverance and watching his sons have children of their own, in certain respects his heart remains on the other side of the flood. He spent the majority of his life there, after all.
I have to relate this to Job. Job also lost his whole world in a storm. (Job 38:1 literally refers to Job’s experience as a storm.) Job had an identity crisis of his own. (Job lost his kids, whereas Noah did not. But Noah lost his friends, whereas Job did not. They both weathered the storm with their wives.) What we see in the story of Job is that, even after all things are restored to Job (Job 42:10), God never takes away the pain of his loss. Job still has to grieve his previous life. We read that “the Lord blesses the latter part of Job’s life more than the former part” (Job 42:12) and that Job goes on to have “seven sons and three daughters” (Job 42:13). Nevertheless, Job never forgets the children he had at first, those who died when a storm killed them (Job 1:18-19). Job remembers them and longs for their presence even after God blesses him in the latter part of his life. And so, too, Noah’s heart breaks when remembers his former life. I can’t help but think a large portion of him died right along with the others.
The Torah does an interesting thing with Noah. It groups him with his fathers, as if to suggest Noah belongs to the old world more than the new one. To see this, we have to set two lineages side by side. First look at Shem’s lineage in Genesis 10. These people represent “the new humanity,” those living after the flood.
Now that you have a sense for how it reads, compare the language to Seth’s lineage back in Genesis 5. You’ll notice the rhythm is totally different. Genesis 5 tells of those living before the flood:
Now look at Noah. Specifically, look at the two verses that bookend his life (Genesis 5:32 & 9:28-29). Bringing those bookends together, we read:
After Noah was 500 years old, he became the father of Shem, Ham and Japheth . . . After the flood Noah lived 350 years. Noah lived a total of 950 years, and then he died.
Do you recognize the language? This is the language of Seth’s lineage! It follows right along with the repetitious nature of Genesis 5. Pulling out the middle plot points, we find that Noah’s life is encapsulated by language resembling those who came before.
Why?
Because Noah is of the old world. Unlike his sons, he belongs to the past. All the future will come through him, yes, but most of his life experience remains on the other side of the flood. Unlike his sons, he will, in large part, remain a foreigner in this new world.
From an early age, his sons grew up expecting a new beginning. Their short time in the old world was spent preparing for the new one. Their minds were always looking forward. But Noah? He spent 600 years in the old world! And for much of his life, he knew nothing of a flood! For at least five centuries, the old world was the only world as far as Noah was concerned. So naturally, Noah is attached to the older generations more than the newer. The old man Noah belongs with his fathers on the other side of the flood, and so the Torah, poetically, uses language that attaches him to the lineage of Adam and Seth. But his kids, living most their life after the flood, go on to populate a new world, knowing a rhythm different than that of Noah and his fathers.
