According to the biblical account, from the period after Adam and Eve to the time of Noah, the sin of humanity became so severe that it required a sort of “re-creation.” The Flood can be understood in this way. What happens is that God plunges the world back under water, just as it was before the six days of creation (in Genesis 1:2), and then brings the dry land up out of the waters as He did on the third day of creation (in Genesis 1:9).
The Great Flood
The ark, furthermore, is a kind of floating garden — a garden of animals rather than plants. The ark is a floating garden of life, a kind of floating Eden. It lands on a new mountain, Mt. Ararat, and so Mt. Ararat becomes a kind of sacrament of the original mountain of Eden.
Even more, after Noah exits the ark he is a new Adam figure, a new father of the human race. As a father, he enjoys a kind of natural priesthood — for fatherhood and priesthood are linked all throughout the Scriptures. In accordance with this, when he exits the ark, he offers sacrifice to God. The Scriptures describe God “smelling,” as it were, the sweet smell of Noah’s sacrifice and forming a covenant with him.
Renewal of the Covenant with Adam
This covenant that God forms with Noah in Genesis 9:8-17 is really a renewal of the covenant that was originally enjoyed by Adam. There is a repetition here, in the covenant with Noah, of many phrases and commands in Genesis 1 and 2. For example, the command to “be fruitful and multiply and to fill the earth”[1] is repeated; so is man’s rule over all the animals;[2] and how man bears the image of God.[3] That’s reiterated with Noah because Noah is being raised back to this “Adamic status.” Noah is becoming a son of God like Adam was, and humanity is being invited once more to be the family of God.
Sin Continues
The flood is over, and Noah’s family is set to spread out over the earth. There is great hope. Unfortunately, this new covenant has scarcely been formed with Noah and it, too, is broken.[4] Noah himself undergoes a fall into sin that involves the consumption of fruit (in the form of wine). It involves him becoming naked, being ashamed, and ultimately calling down a curse on his descendants. Consumption of fruit, nakedness, shame, curse; when lined up like that, there are parallels with the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden. Noah is repeating, or “recapitulating” the fall of Adam and Eve.
The message is that sin once again rears its ugly head through Noah’s fault. As before, things degenerate until several generations later. By the time of Genesis 11, there is the Tower of Babel incident where the whole human family joins together in rebellion and defiance against God. Well, God cannot be defied, of course, and so He comes down and confuses their languages, foiling their effort to join together in a common active rebellion against God.
Human beings scatter over the face of the earth because of the confusion of their languages, and are in a sorry situation. Human beings are alienated from each other and alienated from God. That was not God’s original intention. God’s intention was for a family, for all human beings to be united to Himself as their Father, and united to each other as brothers and sisters. How is God going to address this situation of alienation? That will bring us to the next step of salvation history, which is the call of Abraham.
Relation to Evangelization
What is the covenant with Noah’s relevance to evangelization? This covenant is not something often talked about when presenting the Gospel, but it does have a powerful message.
The covenant with Noah asserts that all human beings are related, descended from a common pair: All of humanity is one family. That’s not just symbolic talk, this is really a truth of faith and, one could argue, that this can be affirmed even on a scientific level. Some biological studies exist that give some really strong evidence that all human beings alive have descended from a common pair, but there is no need to go into this matter.
All of humanity is one family, loved by God. The covenant with Noah shows that God has given multiple chances for humanity to get back into a relationship with Him through human history. But, humanity kept “blowing it,” as the popular term goes, by our own choices. The gift of a family relationship was given to our first parents, Adam and Eve, and they sinned against this gift. It was extended later to Noah, and then Noah too fell into sin.[5]
God gave multiple chances to the human family to return to a family relationship with Him. But we kept rejecting Him over time, and so something better is necessary: God’s greater assistance is required to be able to respond to His invitation. That’s going to come through the Holy Spirit and through Christ’s work ultimately.
[1] Genesis 9:1,7 with Genesis 1:28a.
[2] Genesis 9:2 with Genesis 1:28b.
[3] Genesis 9:6 with Genesis 1:26, 28.
[4] Genesis 9:20-27.
[5] It might be that there are even other incidents in ancient human history where God renewed or offered that covenant again to humanity, which, perhaps the sacred author did not record.