The flood waters had covered everything. Noah had been sealed in the ark for months — the rain, the silence, the slow recession of the water, the waiting. Then the text says simply: "And God remembered Noah" (Genesis 8:1).
Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai turned that phrase over like a coin. When a person is righteous, God "exalts them higher than the mountains" — your righteousness matches the mountains, which is the highest praise Psalms knows how to give (Psalm 36:7). But when a person sins, the same verse turns in the other direction: "your judgments are like the great deep." The same God, the same measure, pushed down into the depths of punishment instead of raised up in blessing. The rabbis called this the principle of divine precision — not arbitrariness, but exact proportion. What you bring determines what returns to you.
Noah survived the flood not because God forgot him and then suddenly remembered — that reading would make God seem capricious. Rabbi Shimon reads "remembered" as a kind of divine re-attention: the waters subsided, the world was silent, and then God turned His full presence back toward Noah as an act of compassion. Righteousness had been tallied, suffering had been weathered, and the accounting came due. The mountains of his righteousness exceeded the depths of the world's punishment. And so the waters fell, and the dove found the branch, and Noah's long patience was answered.
Chapter 4: Torah. [1] "And God remembered Noah" (Genesis 8:1), This is what the scripture says: "Your righteousness is like the mountains of God" (Psalms 36:7). When a person is worthy, You bestow righteousness upon them, and exalt them higher than the mountains, as it is written, "Your righteousness is like the mountains of God." But when a person sins, You punish and humble them to the depths below, as it is written, "Your judgments are like the great deep" (Psalm 36:7). Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai says, the verse should be read as follows: "Your righteousness in accordance with Your judgments is like the mountains of God and the great deep." How did the Holy One, blessed be He, measure the great deep? He took a high mountain and placed it upon the great deep, and so too with all the deeps, He subdued them beneath high mountains, so that they would not rise up and flood the entire world. And just as He set the mountains above them to keep the world from being flooded, so too did He establish righteousness above judgment, so that the world would not be destroyed through judgment. Therefore, Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai says, "Your righteousness in accordance with Your judgments is like the mountains of God and the great deep." Alternatively, "Your righteousness that You have done for Noah" caused his ark to rest upon the mountains, as it is written, "And the ark rested upon the mountains of Ararat" (Genesis 8:4). "Your judgments are like the great deep" refers to the judgments You rendered upon the generation of the Flood, as it is written, "On that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth" (Genesis 7:11). And after all of this devastation, "You save humans and animals alike, O Lord" (Psalm 36:7). When did God remember Noah? [2] Another explanation for "And God remembered Noah" is that "the memory of the righteous is a blessing" (Proverbs 10:7), and Noah is the righteous person mentioned in the verse "Noah was a righteous man" (Genesis 6:9). So what is the memory of Noah? That God remembered him for a blessing, as it says, "And God blessed Noah and so on" (Genesis 9:1). "But the name of the wicked shall rot" (Proverbs 10:7), referring to the generation of the Flood that rotted away in the waters, as it says, "And He blotted out and so on" (Genesis 7:23). The word "blotted out" (מחה) is also used in Exodus 17:14 in the phrase "I will utterly blot out the memory of Amalek". [3] Another explanation for "And God remembered Noah", The righteous man knows the soul of his animal, etc. (Proverbs 12:10) The righteous one of the world knows the soul of his animal even in its death, even when he is angry, the attribute of the Holy One, blessed be He, is not like the attribute of flesh and blood. Flesh and blood [edit. Ruler, like Cesar], when a nation rebels against it, sends legions to destroy it, and it does with it a great destruction and kills the good and the bad. There is no difference between, saying "So-and-so was righteous, so they spared him" and "They killed everyone." But the Holy One, blessed be He, is not like this. When the generation angers Him, He has compassion on them. There is only one righteous person who knows Him and is saved, as it says, "The righteous man knows the soul of his animal in its death." And so it says, "The Lord is good as a stronghold in the day of trouble," etc. (Nahum 1:7) And "The mercies of the wicked are cruel" (Proverbs 12:10) - these are the people of the generation of the Flood, who were more cruel than the floodwaters. Our rabbis said, when the waters rose upon them, as it is written, "The fountains of the great deep burst forth" (Genesis 7:11), and they saw the fountains rising above them, what did they do? They had many children, and each of them would take his son and put him on the abyss and press him down with stones, and the waters would rise over them. And again, when the waters increased, they would take other children of theirs and place them on the abyss. See how the mercies of the wicked are cruel. And how do we know that they did this? Because Job says, "May his compassion be forgotten" (Job 24:20) - his compassion for his children. And what did the Holy One, blessed be He, do to them? He sent a flood upon them from above and broke them, as it is written, "And it broke apart like a tree rising from the earth" (Genesis 7:17).Rabbi Berachiah said, "The harshness of the generation of the flood was greater than any other generation, and their stature was higher. If not for the fact that God punished them from above, they could not have been destroyed, as it is said, 'If we had not been left like a few survivors' (Isaiah 1:9). How was this done? When the Lord saw that they did not die in the depths below, He sent down fire from above and burned them, as it is written, 'fire broke out against...' (Psalms 78:21). Once they saw that they were lost, they sought to overturn the ark. What did the Lord do to them? He encircled them with lions and killed and ate them, as it is said, 'And the Lord shut him in' (Genesis 7:16), and there is no closing in, except with lions, as it is written, 'The God sent His angels and shut the mouths of the lions' (Daniel 6:23). End.
