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 and with God as the universal creator and judge of all creation. It is not YHWH, the four-letter personal name, traditionally vocalized as Adonai, which is associated with God’s covenant, mercy, and particular relationship with Israel.

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 that seems simple and turns out to be demanding: 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 through the flood and offering them as burnt offerings. In this, the Midrash says, Noah demonstrates genuine gratitude: the impulse came from inside him, not from a command. He did not wait to be told. That much is to his credit, and the Midrash does not minimize it.

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

Elohim is the name of the universal God, the creator, the power that holds all things in existence, the judge behind every natural law. 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 and cry out in raw need, it is the four-letter name that appears. That name carries intimacy. It presumes a bond that predates the conversation. It is the name you use when you are speaking not to the power behind everything, but to someone who knows your name too.

Noah’s sacrifice, spontaneous and generous as it was, addressed the universal creator. Not the personal partner. And Philo’s readings of the Hebrew Bible treat this as a spiritual register, 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, who already knows the rescuer’s history, who can say “you again, you always” and mean it.

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 with considerable force. He was exceptional among the people around him. Whether he would have been exceptional in any other 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 choice as a window into something much larger. Not to diminish Noah, but to map the difference between two kinds of relationship with the Divine. One addresses the God of creation and says: I acknowledge you. The other addresses the God of covenant and says: I know you. I have been known by you. This sacrifice is not acknowledgment of a power. It is a response to a relationship.

Noah knew the power. He built the ark. He watched the world end and begin again. He understood, at some level, that he was standing in the presence of something that held the entire structure of existence together. What he did not yet have, what the rest of the Torah is slowly building toward, is the vocabulary of intimacy. The name that belongs to the relationship. The Adonai that Abraham would later use when arguing with God at the gates of Sodom, not deferentially but as one party in a covenant addressing another.

After the flood, the world began again with a man who knew to say thank you. The long work of learning who to say it to was still ahead.

The Midrash of Philo is working within a tradition that takes the divine names with absolute seriousness. Each name for God in the Hebrew Bible is not a synonym for the others. Each name describes a different facet of the divine nature and a different mode of relationship. Elohim is available to all humanity; it is the name that Noah could reach because it requires no prior covenant, no particular history of relationship. Adonai is the name of those who have been drawn into something more specific, a relationship with a particular history, a set of promises, a series of encounters that accumulate into something that can be called by name on both sides. The distance between those two names is the distance between acknowledging the God of creation and knowing the God of the covenant.