Noah and the limits of patience

Does Noah have a place in Pirkei Avot? The Torah describes him as a man who is righteous in his generations, but its narrative does not elaborate on the reason why this might be so. We know that he found favour in God’s eyes, but most of Avot addresses character improvement and interpersonal relationships rather than the relationship between man and God. All the Torah tells us of his dealings with other mortals is that, of his three sons, he gave one an unqualified blessing, a second one a more circumscribed one and the third a curse. We also learn that he discharged a heavy burden of responsibility for the survival of the livestock within the Ark. But we see no obvious evidence of the sort of middot—character qualities—that is the main focus of Avot.

As it turns out, Noah gets two name-checks in Avot and they are both somewhat pejorative. At 5:2 we are taught that there were ten generations from Adam to Noah (Adam, Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Yered, Enoch, Mathuselah, Lemech, Noah). Each generation angered God more than its predecessor to the point that God finally lost patience with humankind, as it were, and sent a flood to wipe them out. The next mishnah repeats this theme, referencing the ten generations from Noah to Abraham (Noah, Shem, Arpachshad, Shelah, Ever, Peleg, Re’u, Serug, Nachor, Terach, Abraham). This time God did not send a flood, but rewarded Abraham for such righteousness as he and the preceding nine generations had accrued. These two mishnayot tell us nothing about Noah, the man and his middot. Rather, they use his name as a convenient shorthand for a literal watershed in Biblical history—the transition from antediluvian to postdiluvian culture. We might characterise the Adam-to-Noah era as a sort of “wild west” anything-goes free-for-all period, while Noah-to-Abraham marks the commencement of an era in which some form of law and order are manifested (the seven so-called Noahide laws), even though it appears that most humans before the time of Abraham did not live in accordance with them.

Some interesting timeline points arise from these two mishnayot.

According to Tosafot Yom Tov, the first mishnah presumably embraces Noah’s entire lifespan, since the second Mishnah—though it mentions Noah by name—would contain not ten names but eleven if it included him. While the Maharal (Derech Chaim) and the Anaf Yosef appear to agree, this view is open to challenge because the first mishnah refers to those ten vexatious generations continuing to annoy God “until He brought upon them the waters of the Flood.” Noah however lived on for a further 350 years after the Flood abated. If account is taken of that mainly quiet and unrecorded part of his life, which in any event overlaps the generation of his three sons, Noah’s last three and a half centuries must surely form part of the ten-generation span that leads to Abraham.

For the record, the Torah gives very much longer lifespans for the generations between Adam and Noah than it does for Noah’s descendants. Thus the number of years that the Bible records from the Creation to the Flood is 1,656, while the ten generations from the Flood to the death of Abraham account for just 467 years. The Alshich (Yarim Moshe) notes that the average age of a first-time father from the time of Adam to the birth of Noah’s first-born Japheth was 165 years; however, from the generation of Shem to that of Abraham, the average age of a first-time father was just 40. Likewise, the average lifespan of the generations from Adam to Noah was 857 years, while that from Noah to Abraham dwindled to 317. The Alshich attributes these statistical diminutions to the fact that the 20 generations from Adam to Abraham angered God increasingly, to the point at which God decreased their lifespans. There is however a problem with this explanation: it would seem to contradict the force of this pair of mishnayot because it implies that God was becoming increasingly impatient as the generations passed since He was giving them less and less time in which to repent, while we are supposed to learn here about the magnitude of His patience and slowness to anger.

Does this analysis have any take-home relevance for us today? On the basis that we should seek to emulate God’s actions where this is possible, we can see how much less patient God appears to be in the later mishnah before acting on His anger. Though the first ten generations were far from righteous, they had yet to receive any warning as to what the consequences of their misconduct might be. Far from destroying Adam and Eve after they ate the forbidden fruit, God performed for them an act of kindness when made them clothing before He sent them on their way. It was not until the cataclysmic flooding of the natural world and everything in it that the physical consequences of bad behaviour were truly manifested. But from Noah onwards, the Flood—and the rainbow that was set in the sky to remind us of the reason for it—served as a warning that God’s expectations are matched by His acts. Perhaps this teaches us that we too should feel morally justified in being less patient with those whom we have cautioned than with those whom we have not.