January 21

The account of Noah furthers the accounts of the sins in Genesis 3, the original sin of Adam and Eve eating from the tree of knowledge. This act made man “God-like,” yet not quite God, and therefore reinforced the notion that man was made in God’s image. This first sin starts the ball rolling for humanity, now exiled from the garden to continue sin. God sees man and “repents” his creations and all the evil that is now occurring generations later on earth. However, at the end of Noah’s narrative, God proclaims that “never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth” (Gen 9:11). Eating from the tree of knowledge in effect gave humans the capacity to sin; the capacity to know what is good and what is evil and yet make wrongful judgments and actions despite of this. Because while man and woman we created in the likeness of God, they do not contain the capabilities or the values to accurately grasp their labeling of good versus evil. In the narrative of Noah, God sympathizes with Noah and chooses to save him, his wive, his sons, their wives and pairs of every creature on earth while he floods the world and destroys every other living thing. In The Beginning of Wisdom, Kass reflects that it is perhaps due to the fact that Noah was born after humanity discovered that they must die, that he is able to win God’s favor. Since he was born knowing he must die and did not have the anger or recklessness of those before who learned of their newfound mortality, he did not fall prey to a life full of sin and violence. For me, the flood seems to exhibit God’s cleansing of the earth and of humanities current evil, all of which stems back to the original sin: the eating of a fruit from the tree of knowledge. Perhaps it was the first of sacrifices to come for attempting to rid humans of sin. It was like a fresh start, or a clean slate.