Lamech Saw Light Pour From His Newborn Son

The child came into the world already glowing.

His body was white as snow and red as a rose. His hair was long and white as wool. His eyes were like the rays of the sun. When he opened them in that room, light poured from him and filled the whole house, and the midwife, and the father, and everyone who witnessed the birth stepped back. The Book of Enoch, preserved in Ethiopic manuscripts and composed in layers between the 4th and 1st centuries BCE, records what happened next: the infant opened his mouth and praised God. A newborn, in the first moments of his life, giving thanks.

Lamech, the child's father, was afraid. This was not the fear that new fathers sometimes feel, the fear of responsibility or of inadequacy. This was a theological terror. The child did not look like a child born of human parents. He looked like something else, something that recalled the stories told of the Watchers, the angels who had descended to earth and taken human wives and produced offspring outside the natural order. Lamech was certain of his own faithfulness to his wife, but the evidence before his eyes made certainty difficult. He fled.

He ran to his own father, Methuselah, and told him what he had seen: a son whose nature is different, whose eyes are like the rays of the sun, whose countenance is glorious. I fear, Lamech said, that in his days a wonder may be wrought on the earth. He asked Methuselah to go to Enoch, Methuselah's father, who had ascended to heaven and now dwelt among the angels, and find out the truth.

Methuselah went. He traveled to the ends of the earth, to wherever Enoch could be reached, and called out. Enoch heard him and appeared, and Methuselah explained his son's anxiety. Enoch, who had access to divine knowledge from his position among the celestial beings, gave an answer that confirmed and exceeded Lamech's fears. Something was coming. A great destruction. A flood that would cover the earth for a year and kill every living thing except this child and his family. The child was not angelic. He was human, he was Lamech's son, and he had been chosen for the thing that was coming.

Call his name Noah, Enoch said, for he will be left to you, and he and his children will be saved from the destruction that will come upon the earth.

Methuselah returned and told Lamech what he had learned. Lamech named the child. But the tradition adds a complication: Methuselah kept the name Noah secret. He called the boy Menahem, Comforter, in public. The generation the child was born into was, the tradition notes, addicted to sorcery, and Methuselah feared that if the child's true name was known, he would be bewitched. The name Noah, meaning rest or consolation, was known only to the grandfather. Everyone else called him Menahem, and did not know what was coming.

The child was born already circumcised, the tradition records, one of the thirteen perfect births in Jewish memory, born already covenanted, already in right relationship with the divine before any ceremony was performed. And from the moment of his birth, things changed. The Book of Jubilees, composed around 160 BCE, records that Lamech named his son saying: This one will comfort me for my trouble and all my work, and for the ground which the Lord hath cursed. The earth had been cursed since Adam's transgression, the soil producing thorns instead of what was planted in it. The tradition says that with Noah's birth, the ground began to respond properly again. Wheat planted produced wheat. The tools of agriculture, the plough and the scythe and the hoe, were inventions attributed to Noah himself when he grew to manhood. Before him, men worked the earth with their bare hands.

The sea, which had been flooding its banks twice daily since the Fall, pulled back inside its boundaries for the first time. The famine that had struck in Lamech's years ended. Something fundamental in the relationship between the earth and the human beings who lived on it shifted with the birth of this particular child, this child whose eyes filled rooms with light, whose first breath was a prayer, whose existence was a promise that the world, despite everything that was coming, would not end entirely.

The Ben Sira tradition places Noah directly in Enoch's succession: Enoch was found pure and walked with God and was taken. Righteous Noah was found pure, and at a time of destruction he was substituted. Through an eternal sign the covenant was made with him, and without it all flesh would have been wiped out. The glowing child in the house by the river was the hinge on which everything turned.