Thanks to Noah…

Humans have their own ways of choosing between good and evil, and their own arguments for doing so. Yet, there was a time when the knowledge between good and evil had not been acquired by the humankind, and they lived happily without any real problems. It was not until Eve disobeyed the Lord in Genesis 3, that this knowledge, which some might call a curse, came upon humans. In Kass’s accounts about Noah, we learn that thanks to him and the ark he built God was able to give another chance to the humankind. There was one point in time, which the Genesis explains, where God noticed that humans were not purely good anymore. He noticed there were exploting tensions between family member, like Cain and Abel, which would lead to tragic endings, such as one of this brothers killing the other. Moreover, as natural death entered the world when Adam died, humans went crazy and started behaving in ways that were not common at all for the time; they felt jealousy and envy, they valued human life less and valued beauty more. In other words, an unethical and superficial world started to come about, which contradicted all the ideas the Lord had had when creating it. It is in the “wickedness” of men that God began to repent his creation of the humankind, since the moment men and women had the opportunity to choose between the good and the bad (Genesis 3 for instance), their hearts started to change as well. Noah, whose name means comfort and lament, was the opposite of all this wicked people. He really had no desire for immortality or glory, rather, he just wanted to obey the Lord in his commands to him. It was he who had the opportunity to save life on Earth by taking his family, and a female and male of every animal in the world on his ark in order to survive the massive floods God sent to the world to get rid of everything. Noah did not ask anything to God in regards to His peculiar commands, but just obeyed, something most would not have done at the time in his position. Kass’s narrative about Noah does bring into perspective the problem of free will in humans and furthers the concerns of the first sin in Genesis 3. For reasons such as the wickedness, jealousness, and greediness of the humankind that started with the first sin, God got to a point where he repented the creation of life so much that he wanted to get rid of it. Thanks to Noah, humans were saved, yet even in this way, God shortened the lifespan of humans because the shorter a life could be, the smaller the damage it could make.