Noah Built an Altar and Called God by the Wrong Name

Noah had just survived the end of the world, and the first thing he did was say thank you. That part everyone agrees on. It is the way he said it that the Midrash finds interesting.

(Genesis 8:20) records that after the waters receded and the ark settled, “Noah built an altar to God” and offered burnt offerings. In Hebrew, the word used is Elohim, the general term for the Divine, associated in rabbinic tradition with the attribute of justice, with God as the universal creator and judge. It is not YHWH, the four-letter personal name vocalized as Adonai, associated with God’s covenant, mercy, and relationship with Israel in particular.

The Midrash of Philo 20:5, a text associated with the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo and preserved in later compilations, asks why Noah offered his sacrifice to Elohim rather than Adonai. The question is small. The answer is large.

The Midrash begins with a principle: true gratitude is offered freely, without being commanded. When someone does you a great favor, you do not wait to be prompted before expressing thanks. The “thank you” that requires a reminder is already diminished. It signals that you are honoring your benefactor out of obligation, not appreciation. The form of the gratitude is intact, but the heart of it is missing.

Noah’s sacrifice was spontaneous. No divine instruction preceded it. The ark had barely settled when he built his altar, selecting from among the clean animals and birds he had preserved and offering them up. In this, the Midrash says, Noah demonstrates genuine gratitude: the impulse came from inside him, not from a command. That much is to his credit.

But then the Midrash lingers on the name. Elohim. Not Adonai.

Elohim is the name of the universal God, the creator, the judge, the power behind all things. Adonai is the name of relationship, of covenant, of personal encounter. When Moses speaks with God at the burning bush, when Abraham argues for the people of Sodom, when the Psalms reach their most intimate register, it is the four-letter name that appears. That name carries intimacy. It presumes a bond.

Noah’s sacrifice, spontaneous and generous as it was, addressed the universal creator. Not the personal partner. And Philo’s reading of Hebrew scripture treats this as a spiritual distance, not a failure of faith. Noah was grateful. He was genuinely grateful. But he was grateful the way you might thank a stranger who pulled you from a burning building: with full sincerity, but without the particular intimacy of someone who calls the rescuer by name.

Noah was a righteous man in his generation, the Torah says, and the Midrash does not dispute this. But “righteous in his generation” is itself a phrase the rabbis pressed on. He was exceptional among the people around him. Whether he would have been exceptional in a different context is another question. His gratitude was real. Its register was general.

The Midrash of Philo is doing what the best Jewish interpretation always does: reading a small grammatical detail as a window into something much larger. Not to diminish Noah, but to map the difference between two kinds of faith. One addresses the God of creation and says: I acknowledge you. The other addresses the God of covenant and says: I know you.

Both are real. They are not the same.

After the flood, the world began again with a man who chose the first. The rest of the Torah is the long story of how humanity learned, slowly, to mean the second.