Noah Built His Altar and the Rabbis Wondered Who He Was Thanking

After the water receded, after the dove returned with the olive branch, after the raven had gone and not come back, Noah stepped out of the ark onto ground that had been underwater for a year. The first thing he did was build an altar.

It seems like the obvious response. You survived. You give thanks.

But The Midrash of Philo, a text attributed to the first-century Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, stops at a detail that most readers skip over. The verse says Noah built an altar to “God” (Elohim), not to “the Lord” (YHVH, voiced as Adonai). In Hebrew, these are different names for the Divine, and they carry different resonances. Elohim is the general, universal name, the one that describes God as creator and judge of all existence. Adonai is the personal name, the covenantal one, the one associated with the intimate relationship between God and the Jewish people.

Why did Noah, offering his gratitude after one of the most singular acts of divine rescue in all of Genesis, address his sacrifice to the more distant name?

Philo builds his answer around a distinction between two kinds of gratitude. The first kind is voluntary and spontaneous, the immediate overflow of a heart that recognizes it has received something. A person who genuinely understands what they've been given doesn't wait to be prompted. They turn toward the source and give thanks before anyone asks. This gratitude flows from affection, from real recognition, from what Philo calls a heart free from vice.

The second kind of gratitude is commanded. It happens because it's obligatory, because the rules require it, because not giving thanks would create a problem. It is still gratitude, technically. But it is gratitude from the outside in.

Philo's entire body of work, over thirty treatises written in Greek in Alexandria around 25 BCE to 50 CE, circles the question of what genuine religious life looks like when it becomes too habitual. He was writing for a Jewish community that performed the rituals of Torah but sometimes in the way that obligation gets performed: correctly, punctually, and without the inner fire that gives the act its meaning.

His reading of Noah's offering suggests that even someone rescued from a world-destroying flood might give thanks in a way that is not quite complete. Elohim is the creator who made the flood possible. The offering is directed to the God of the universe, the God of all nations, the God who operates the cosmic machinery. That is real. But the personal name, the covenantal name, the name that says “I know you specifically and you know me,” is not there.

The midrash doesn't condemn Noah for this. He was a just man in his generation. He survived. He built the altar. He brought the offerings. But Philo wants his readers to notice the distinction between honoring a power and being in relationship with it, between acknowledging what you've received and being genuinely moved by who gave it.

The altar stands. The smoke rises. And somewhere in the question of which name Noah used, the tradition keeps asking whether gratitude is a feeling or a form. Whether we give thanks because we are grateful, or because we are supposed to be.

Noah built his altar. The rabbis looked at who it was addressed to and found themselves still wondering.