The Giants Blocked the Deep and Still Could Not Enter the Ark

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What Is Man That You Remember Him

The angels had already said it before the rain started. What is man, that You remember him.

They were not being cruel. They had watched the same century God had watched, and they had reached a verdict, and when God announced the flood He phrased it so that the announcement leaned on somebody. Behold, I am bringing the water. The word behind that opening carries an agreement in it. He was concurring. The angels put the motion, and the Holy One did not overrule them.

It came down as ordinary water. That was the first mercy and nobody noticed it. Water fell on a wicked country the way water falls, and only when it kept falling and kept falling did it stop being weather and become the flood.

The Giants Could Cover the Deep With a Foot

The generation had men in it who were not worried.

One of them could set his foot over the mouth of the deep and stop the springs from coming up. One of them could put a hand flat across the window of heaven and hold the sky shut. These were the mighty ones, the ones the sixth chapter of Genesis mentions and then walks away from, and they had spent their whole lives finding out that nothing on earth or above it could be pushed against them and stay standing.

So the rain was a nuisance. They blocked what they could block, and when the water rose past blocking they came for the boat.

The Door Would Not Take Them

Their legs went out from under them at the ramp.

That is all it took. A man who could hold back the deep with one foot got to the threshold of a wooden box and could not make his own legs carry him up it, and the water took him with the rest. A lion came at the door too, and its teeth dulled in its mouth before it reached the timber, and it turned around.

Nothing entered that hull that the covenant had not named. Rabbi Hiyya bar Abba said it straight to Noah's face across the centuries. You were a carpenter. You cut every rib of that hull yourself and you fitted the pitch. And without My covenant you could not have gotten inside it either, not with that weather coming down and not with those men outside who had been promising for years to kill you. The covenant is also why the grain in the hold did not rot and did not go moldy and did not turn over the course of a year in the dark. A boat full of stored food and dung and animals should have gone bad in a month.

Which Animal Eats in the Third Hour of the Night

Noah found favor. The sages who took that phrase apart did it with one picture and three endings, and the picture is two men meeting on a road and one of them attaching himself to the other.

Rabbi Yohanan said the meeting ended in friendship, the way Joseph found favor with Potiphar and ended up trusted in the house. Reish Lakish said it ended in authority, the way Esther found favor with everyone who looked at her and ended up wearing a crown, and Noah walked out of the ark with every living thing put under his hand. The rest of the sages said it ended in a marriage, that the man on the road gave the stranger his daughter, and the daughter in that reading is wisdom.

Here is what the wisdom turned out to be. He knew which creature had to be fed in the second hour of the day. He knew which one would not eat until the third hour of the night. He knew this for every animal on board, and he got up and did it, in the dark, on a schedule, for twelve months, while the world he had grown up in came apart under the hull.

The Famine Waiting at the Border

Generations later the pattern ran again on dry ground, faster and with less water.

Abraham had just been told he would be blessed and his name made great. He packed, he left his father's country, he crossed into the land he had been sent to, and the land was starving. There was famine there when he arrived. He had been walking toward it the whole time.

He did not complain. Rabbi Pinhas noticed the silence and said it was the whole instruction. Blessed is the man You chastise, and if he chooses to be indignant about it, then You teach him from Your Torah instead. Abraham skipped the indignation. The verse gives him one sentence and it is not a protest. Abram went down to Egypt to stay there.

Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi read the same beat off a line in Psalms about food, hearing in the word for food the word for disruption. He hands out disruption in this world to the ones who fear Him. In the world coming, He remembers, and the remembering does not stop. Which leaves the picture the sages were content to leave: a man on the road down to Egypt with a promise in his pocket and nothing to eat, walking away from the country he had been promised, and not saying a word about it.