Noah Prayed to Leave the Ark Like a Prison

Noah was late once with the lion's food, and the lion took the difference out of his body.

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He had it coming only in the sense that everything on board had a feeding time and none of those times were his. Some animals ate at the second hour of the night and others at the third, so nobody in that family slept for twelve months. They carried tree branches in for the elephants. They carried glass beads for the ostriches. R. Levi said flatly that neither Noah nor his sons could sleep the whole year, and the lion is the proof of it: one delay, one bite, and a man walked out of the ark crippled.

What the Bite Cost Him

Only Noah was left, Scripture says, and the word for only can also be read as a word for affliction, so his body was no longer whole. A whole body is what the altar requires, so the hands that had kept every living thing alive for a year could not bring an offering when the year was over. His son Shem went up and did it in his place, and his father watched from wherever a man watches that from.

Then there was the cough. R. Huna said he came out of the wet timber with a cold in him and spat blood for it. The righteous shall be made whole in the earth, the proverb says, which is a promise about later and not about that morning.

Bring My Soul Out of Prison

He prayed the same line the whole time he was in there. Bring my soul out of prison, that I may give thanks to Your name (Psalms 142:8). It is a prisoner's psalm and he used it as a prisoner, and the Holy One answered him with a date rather than a rescue: you are not to leave this ark until twelve months have gone by.

The lock had another turn in it besides the door. Nobody on that ark was permitted to increase and multiply, because while the Holy One is busy destroying the world men do not sit inside a box repopulating it. Joseph would work the same way later, fathering his two sons in the years before the famine and none during it. So the verse brings Noah and his sons in through the door in one group and their wives in another (Genesis 7:7), and it is only at the end, when the ground is dry, that the order comes as pairs: go forth, you and your wife and your sons and your sons' wives (Genesis 8:16).

He stood at the open door with the whole earth in front of him, empty and rinsed and belonging to nobody, and the first thing he did was ask a question. "Master of the universe, are You going to turn around and bring another flood?" He was told no, and it was sworn to, and that oath has held.

The Stranger at the Field

Then Noah began to till the ground, and the man who had been called righteous and perfect got a new description out of it. Man of the earth. He planted a vineyard, and while he was working somebody came up to the edge of the field and asked him what he was planting.

"A vineyard."

"What is it?"

"The fruit is sweet, wet or dried," Noah said, "and out of it comes wine that makes the heart of a man glad."

"Come, let us be partners in this vineyard," Satan said.

Noah had spent twelve months getting up at the second hour of the night for animals that would have eaten him, and one of them had. He had come out of that wooden box limping, coughing blood, watching his own son do his work at the altar. Here was somebody at the edge of a field offering to take half the labor off him, and he said, "Certainly."

Blood Under the Vines

His partner went and got a lamb and slaughtered it under the vines. Then a lion, in the same place. Then a pig, then an ape, and the blood of all four soaked down into the dirt and watered the roots, which is one way of writing out a contract in advance. Before the wine a man is dumb as a sheep before its shearers. After a little he is a lion and tells the room there is nobody in the world to match him. After more he is a pig in the wet. At the end he is an ape, dancing and laughing and talking nonsense with no idea what he is doing.

The sages held that it all happened on the one day, because the vine went into the ground and bore that same afternoon. He harvested it and pressed it and drank it, and by evening he was uncovered inside his own tent.

Shem, who had been going up to the altar in his father's place ever since the lion, took a garment and walked into the tent backward.