{"id":2342,"date":"2004-10-11T22:41:14","date_gmt":"2004-10-12T02:41:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2004\/10\/11\/2342.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:46:45","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:46:45","slug":"parshah-noach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2004\/10\/11\/parshah-noach\/","title":{"rendered":"Parshah Noach"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This week’s Parshah is Noach, so named after its first character. It covers Genesis 6:9<\/a>-11:32. There’s a fair amount in here: the flood, the rainbow, the vineyard, drunken Noah, nasty Ham, subservient but triumphant Shem and Japheth, Nimrod the mighty hunter founding Babel, the tower, the introduction of Abram and Sarai, later Abraham and Sarah.\n\n

The obvious Decision Moment in the Noah story is when the Lord goes to Noah and tells him to build the ark. What happens if he refuses, like Jonah? Or if he bargains, like Abraham in the Sodom story? Could he have saved more people (oddly enough, although there are saved seven pairs of every kosher animal, and only one pair of trayf, there are four pairs of humans)?\n

Once I started to look at this, I noticed that Noah doesn’t ever talk to the Lord. He walks with him, but he never addresses him. Noah doesn’t even hearken to the Lord; there is neither a henini<\/I> moment (‘here I am’) or a sh’ma<\/I> moment. He just does what he’s told. Asah Noah elohim tsavah asah<\/I> (6:22<\/a>). He does as the Lord commanded. We’re all familiar with Bill Cosby’s famous exegesis, but in the Scripture, Noah isn’t so much a character as a tool, like a hammer. He does what he’s told. What if Noah showed a little spunk?\n

In a way, that’s why the second Noah story, the story of the cursing of Ham, seems so unconnected to the first one. They seem like they are about different people; the Noah of the first story doesn’t have the initiative to get drunk, much less to get in trouble with his middle son and later, sobering up, to curse that son’s son.\nBy the way, when Noah walks with the Lord, the word walk is halach, from which we get the word halachah, or law. When et-haelohim hithalech Noah<\/I>, you could say that Noah ‘law-ed’ with the Lord. This reinforces, to me, the idea of Noah as a tool, or at least as constrained in his choices. And yet, after the end of the Noah story he is given the Noachite laws. Hmph. Very confusing.\n\n

What do y’all think?\n

                           ,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week\u2019s Parshah is Noach, so named after its first character. It covers Genesis 6:9-11:32. There\u2019s a fair amount in here: the flood, the rainbow, the vineyard, drunken Noah, nasty Ham, subservient but triumphant Shem and Japheth, Nimrod the mighty…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[207],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scripture"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2342"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17157,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2342\/revisions\/17157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}