Noah Refused the Exit Until God Spoke Again

The springs came up before the rain turned serious. Men who had spent their whole lives on high ground stood watching water climb out of the earth in places where no water had ever been.

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Each man went and got his son.

They carried the children to the openings and pressed the small bodies down into them, as stoppers, to hold the deep where it belonged. The water rose anyway. It came around the children and kept coming.

The Cure They Would Not Take

There had been a way out of this for years. No wound comes into the world without a cure lying somewhere near it, and the cure for the appetite that turns a man into that kind of father is repentance. Prayer, repentance, and charity break a harsh decree. Some add a change of name and a changed record of deeds. Heaven had been holding the sentence open on this generation, waiting for one turn in that direction, ready to take them back.

They stoppered the springs with their children instead, and the decree closed.

Fire for the Ones the Water Could Not Kill

They were of enormous stature and they were hard past ordinary hardness. Water alone was never going to finish them. Men that size can stand in a flood and argue.

So the fire came down on them from above and burned them where they stood in the rising water. Then the animals turned. Birds came down out of the air, cattle and wild beasts came at them across the shrinking ground, and the creatures they had bred and eaten and driven finished the work the flood had started.

A king of flesh and blood who loses a province to rebellion sends his legions and levels it. He does not stop at any door to ask whether the man behind it is honest. Everyone in the province dies the same way. This was not that. A whole generation had spent itself provoking Heaven, and Heaven went through the water looking for one household and found it.

Lions Around the Ark

When they understood they were finished, they went for the ark.

Not to get in. To turn it over. A crowd of drowning giants put their shoulders under a wooden hull and tried to roll it into the water that was killing them. And the Lord shut him in. That is what the shutting was. A ring of lions stood around the vessel, and the lions ate them.

Years later an angel would come down and hold the mouths of lions closed over Daniel in a pit. The same hand that closed those mouths had opened these.

Twelve Months of Girding Up

Inside, the sons were working.

For twelve months Noah's three sons girded their loins and fed the animals. Every creature in that hull ate on its own schedule, and somebody had to learn all of them, in the dark, on a floor that never stopped moving. There was no daylight to work by and no help coming and nothing to be gained by doing it well, since nobody outside was left to be impressed.

They walked out of the ark on the strength of that. Not on their father's name. On twelve months of hauling feed to animals that could not thank them.

I Came In by Permission

The water rested. The hull stopped moving. Nothing outside was making any noise.

Noah stood at the door and did not open it.

"I came in by permission," he said. "Am I now going to walk out without it?"

The generation in the water had improvised to the last minute, plugging the deep with children, throwing their bodies at a hull. The man inside refused to improvise a doorway. He stood in a sealed box on a drowned world and waited for a word.

Then God spoke again. "Permission you want? Here is permission for you." And then: "Go forth from the ark."

God hung the bow in the cloud after that, and anyone who sees it says the same three things back: that He remembers the covenant, that He is faithful to it, that He keeps His word. Human love does not run that way. A man loves his friend while the friend is alive, and when the friend dies the love goes into the ground with him. Abraham died and the love did not stop. It went straight to Isaac.

Noah walked out with permission in his ears and mud to his ankles. Behind him the water was going down over a country full of stoppered holes.