Kept by the covering

What I noticed when I read Genesis 6 again

When I read Genesis 6 again, something struck me in the command God gives to Noah. Noah must build an ark and coat it inside and outside with pitch. That is understandable in itself, for the ark had to keep the water out. But when I looked at the Hebrew words, I saw a few connections that set me thinking. The word for ark is teva, and the same word returns later in Exodus 2, where the mother of Moses makes a basket to lay her son in the Nile. In both cases someone threatened by the water is kept in an enclosed space. One time a great ark with a whole family and the animals, the other time a small basket of reeds among the rushes. Very different circumstances, and yet the same word and the same function: to be kept safe through the water.

And there is something more. For coating the ark the text uses the verb kafar, and for the material, the pitch, the word kofer. Both with the same consonants, k-p-r. That is exactly the root we later see in words that have to do with atonement: kipper, to make atonement, and the name Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The ark is covered, and precisely through that covering what is inside is kept. That is why this story got its title for me: kept by the covering.

Not everything is ours to rule

Last week, at Bereshit, it was about Cain having to rule over the sin that lay at the door. This week Noah teaches me something that stands well beside it: not everything that happens in our life is given to us to rule over. Noah cannot rule the water. He cannot decide when the judgment begins, and he cannot decide when the door closes. What he can do is obey in what God has entrusted to him. He builds the ark, he takes the instructions seriously, he does what God commands him.

And then there is a small sentence I easily skip over. In Genesis 7:16 we read: “and the LORD shut him in.” Noah had built the ark and done what God had told him, but in the end it is God who closes the entrance and keeps it. Noah does not shut the door; God does. I think then of what Yeshua says in John 10: “I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved.” Being saved does not begin with our own attempt, but with going in through the door God Himself gives, and with trusting that He shuts that door and keeps it.

Then God remembered Noah

When you read the flood story as a whole, it is striking how carefully it is built. It runs toward one centre and back out again, like an arch. At the beginning Noah and his sons, then the violence on the earth, then God’s decision and the building of the ark, then the entering and the rising of the water. And strikingly, precisely in the middle, in Genesis 8:1, it says: “and God remembered Noah, and every living thing.” From that point everything returns: the water falls, the earth dries, they leave the ark, and God makes a covenant. That remembering is no recalling as though God had forgotten him for a while; it is that God moves toward His faithfulness. And it says that God sends a wind, a ruach, over the earth to make the water fall. The same word stood in Genesis 1, where the Spirit of God hovered over the waters. I think that is not by chance: it is as though creation begins again, the Spirit over the water, and then new life.

Kept while the water comes

What sets me thinking most in this is that God does not keep Noah by taking away the flood. The flood really comes; the judgment God announced is carried out. God keeps Noah not around it, but through it. In Hebrews 11 we read that Noah, by faith, after he was warned by God, prepared the ark to the saving of his house. And Peter himself later takes up that image of being kept through the water; he links it with baptism and with the resurrection of Yeshua, and says expressly that it is not about the putting away of bodily filth. The keeping, then, does not lie in avoiding the water, but in the way God opens through it.

And then the question comes close for me. Do we expect that God keeps us only when He takes away the difficult circumstances? Or do we trust Him also when He shows us a way straight through those circumstances? I think the instructive thing in this story lies there. God’s keeping does not always mean the water disappears. Sometimes He keeps us precisely while we have to go through it. The ark is then no escape from the water, but a covered space in which we are carried until the water falls.

The waters of Noah

The haftarah takes that image over directly. Isaiah has God say: “for this is as the waters of Noah unto me: for as I have sworn that the waters of Noah should no more go over the earth, so have I sworn that I would not be wroth with thee.” Isaiah calls the judgment a small moment, and over against it stands a loving-kindness that is everlasting. And then those words I find so beautiful: the mountains may depart and the hills be removed, but my covenant of peace shall not be removed. At the end of our parashah people build at Babel a city and a tower to make a name for themselves, and it falls apart into confusion and scattering. Isaiah sets something against that: not a name we try to make ourselves and that falls apart, but a covenant God gives and that stands. And in Isaiah 55 the invitation sounds: everyone who thirsts, come and drink, without price.

The days of Noah

In the gospel Yeshua Himself draws a line to it. When the Pharisees ask when the Kingdom of God comes, He says it does not come in a way you can calculate from outside; it is in your midst. And then He links the day of the Son of Man with the days of Noah: they ate, they drank, they married, simply carrying on, until the day Noah entered the ark. What struck Noah’s contemporaries was not only great violence on that one day, but that they were wholly absorbed in ordinary life without any longer heeding God’s word and His warning. And as God Himself shut the door of the ark, so the coming of the Son of Man marks a separation between who is awake and who is caught off guard. That makes me quiet, for it is not about special wickedness here, but about carelessness, about going on as though nothing is the matter.

Where it leads

So Noah stands at the beginning of something new. The generations are named again, from Noah to Shem, and on to Terah, and so to Abraham. The line runs on; the keeping passes over into a calling. And from this story I keep above all this. God asked Noah to cover the ark inside and outside, and in that covered space He kept him, not around the water but straight through it, and it was God who shut the door. Perhaps that is also for you and me the heart of it: that we do what is entrusted to us, and leave the water, the judgment and the door to Him. And that we, when the water comes and does not disappear, may know that He keeps us. With that I want to bless you: that wherever you have to go through, you may be covered and carried by Him who shuts the door and opens it, and that you may stay close to Him until the water falls.