Why God Called Noah a Foolish Shepherd

After a year on the water, Noah stepped off the ark and wept. He looked at the world and saw what the flood had done to it, the raw earth, the absence of everything that had been alive, and he spoke to God: You are called the Merciful. You should have had mercy on Your creatures.

It was a reasonable thing to say. It was also, according to the tradition, a catastrophic failure of timing.

Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews preserves God's response to Noah's tears, drawing on midrashic sources compiled between the third and sixth centuries CE. The rebuke is direct and withering. God called Noah a foolish shepherd.

The argument was this: when God had first spoken to Noah, telling him about the coming flood, naming him as righteous, commanding him to build the ark, all of that was an invitation. Not just an instruction. God had laid out every circumstance, the corruption of the generation, the decision to destroy them, the mechanism of the flood, precisely so that Noah would understand what was coming and would have the chance to pray for the world before it was too late. That was the opening. That was the moment for intercession.

Noah had heard all of it and immediately begun calculating the dimensions of the ark.

He had not prayed for a single person outside his household. For a hundred and twenty years, he had built and warned and prophesied, but the sources are clear that his building was for himself, his warning was instruction rather than intercession, and his prayers were not recorded because they were not offered. He saved the animals. He saved his family. He preserved the calendar and the Sabbath and the book of Raziel. He did not once stand before God and ask that the punishment be lightened or that the time of repentance be extended or that even some portion of the generation be spared.

Compare this to Abraham, who had not yet been born when the flood destroyed the world but whose example the rabbis understood as the correction to Noah's failure. When God told Abraham that Sodom would be destroyed, Abraham argued. He bargained. He pushed back against the decision ten times, each time lowering the threshold at which he asked God to spare the city. He was not arguing for people he loved. He was arguing for strangers. For people he had reason to dislike. That is what a shepherd does: he advocates for the flock, even when the flock has done nothing to deserve advocacy.

Noah had built a perfect ark. He had followed every specification. He had been, as the Torah says, righteous in his generation. But he had understood his righteousness as a personal achievement rather than a responsibility. His virtue protected him and his family. It did not move him to stand between the condemned and the sentence.

After the rebuke, Noah brought a sacrifice to acknowledge his failure. The priestly duties were performed by his son Shem, because Noah himself had been wounded by a lion in the ark during the year of the flood, struck when he forgot to deliver the lion's ration on time, and the resulting lameness disqualified him from the altar. Even his sacrifice was offered through another's hands. The altar was built on the same ground where Adam and Cain and Abel had once brought their own offerings, the same ground where the Temple would later stand.

God accepted the offering. The covenant was made. The rainbow appeared in the cloud as a sign that the world would not be destroyed by flood again. But the rebuke had landed and the tradition preserved it: the man who wept at the devastation had had the chance to prevent it, and had built a boat instead.

The rainbow itself, in the rabbinic reading, was something God had to install in the world to compensate for what Noah had failed to provide. When a righteous person prays for his generation, the tradition says, he creates a kind of shield around the world. The prayer of one just person can balance the scales when the weight of collective sin tips toward destruction. Noah had that capacity for a hundred and twenty years and never used it on anyone's behalf but his own.

After the flood, the Ginzberg tradition records, God established the seven commandments incumbent on all of humanity: prohibitions against idolatry, murder, theft, sexual immorality, blasphemy, and eating a limb torn from a living animal, and a positive command to establish courts of justice. These are called the Noachide laws because Noah received them first, the representative of the new post-flood humanity. He who had not prayed for others was charged with establishing the systems by which others would be protected. The task he had refused in prayer was handed to him in legislation. What a righteous person would not do by choice, the law now required of every human being who came after him.