Why Noah Would Not Step Off the Ark

The flood had ended. The waters had receded. The earth had resumed its old form. The raven had been sent and come back. The dove had been sent three times, and the third time did not return. The ground was dry. Anyone with eyes could see that the catastrophe was over and the world was waiting.

Noah did not leave the ark.

The Legends of the Jews supplies the reason, which Genesis does not. Noah said to himself: as I entered the ark at the bidding of God, so I will leave it only at His bidding. He had not boarded the vessel on his own initiative. He would not disembark on his own initiative. He had watched God destroy the world, and he had learned something from it: that the situation which appears to be over is not necessarily over, and that the appropriate authority for declaring an ending is the same authority that declared the beginning.

When God did bid him leave, Noah still hesitated. He feared that after he had lived upon the dry land for some time, and begotten children, God would bring another flood. He had seen this once. He had watched the water come and take everyone. He needed assurance that was more than an observation of dry ground. He needed a promise. He would not leave until God swore He would never visit the earth with a flood again. God swore. Noah left. The rainbow appeared as the seal on the oath.

This portrait of Noah, reluctant, cautious, demanding a guarantee before he would take the step that seemed obvious from outside, is consistent with a man who had spent one hundred and twenty years watching people make confident predictions about the future that turned out to be wrong. The generation of the flood had plans for every kind of flood. They had iron rods for the waters from below and remedies for the waters from above. They had watched Noah build the ark for over a century and remained certain he was a fool. Noah had been right and they had been wrong in the most absolute way possible. He was not going to let confidence in an apparent ending substitute for actual confirmation that it was safe to proceed.

The second source, on the land of Israel in the time after Noah and before the conquest, takes a different angle on the same theme of inheritance and readiness. It records an observation about the trees of Canaan at the time Israel was preparing to enter the land. God looked at the situation and said: the trees planted in the time of Noah were old and withered. Shall I permit Israel to enter an uninhabitable land? So God commanded Israel to wander in the desert for forty years, that the Canaanites might in the meantime fell the old trees and plant new ones, so that Israel, upon entering the land, might find it abounding in plenty.

This is a hidden mercy inside a punishment. The forty years of desert wandering is presented in the Torah as a consequence of the sin of the spies, of Israel's refusal to trust that they could take the land. But the midrash adds a dimension: even if Israel had been ready, the land was not ready for them. The trees planted by Noah after the flood were ancient by the time of the exodus, six or seven centuries old by the chronology of the tradition. They had served their purpose and were exhausted. The Canaanites needed to clear them and plant new growth. The land needed a generation of cultivation before it could support the nation that would inhabit it.

So the same God who had flooded the earth to clear away a generation that could not be redeemed was now clearing away old trees to prepare the land for a generation that was almost ready. The scale is different, the method is different, but the patience is the same. God waits for conditions to be right before completing what has been prepared. Noah had to wait in the ark until God spoke. Israel had to wait in the desert until the land was ready. The arrival is always preceded by a period of apparent readiness that is not yet actual readiness, and the gap between the two is the space in which the preparation occurs that makes the arrival possible.

The Canaanites who were planting new trees did not know they were preparing the land for Israel. They were simply doing what people do: clearing old growth, cultivating new land, making the earth productive. The text notes that the inhabitants of this land were such misers that they would not indulge in a drop of oil for their gruel, that if an egg broke they sold it for cash rather than eat it. They were hoarding everything. And all of that hoarding, all of those accumulated stores from a generation of agricultural miserliness, God later gave to Israel to enjoy and to use. The miser's treasure became the inheritance of those who had been waiting in the desert while the old trees were felled.

Noah stood at the edge of the ark and required a promise before he would step down. He was not being stubborn. He was being accurate. He knew the difference between the appearance of safety and safety itself. He had built a vessel to specifications God provided, carried a book of sapphires that told him the difference between night and day, and survived a year in the dark waiting for the word. He was not going to walk out prematurely because the ground looked dry from the window. He needed the word. God gave it. He stepped down into the new world, into the land that was still full of old trees, into the centuries of preparation that would eventually become the covenant. That covenant would eventually become the people who would plant their feet on the ground Noah first touched when he left the ark. The Legends of the Jews preserves this entire arc: the man who would not board until God spoke, the man who would not disembark until God swore, the man who walked out onto newly washed earth and planted something, because that was the only thing left to do.