Unscrolled Noach: In the Beginning, Again

What started with light had become dark.

Whatever God had dreamed when He dreamed of creation, had gotten away from Him. Adam and Chava had sinned, tarnishing the perfection of the Garden of Eden. In slaying his brother Abel, Cain had ushered violence and murder into the world. These aberrations, like God’s own creations, came about from nothing: ex nihilo. God had not willed them, and yet they were here.

Moreover, they now threatened to consume everything else.

The people became very wicked. They filled the earth with violence, tearing at one another like beasts. Through their sin, they corrupted the earth.

And so, God decided to begin again.

First, He had to undo what had already been done.

Stitch by stitch, the work of creation was unknit.

Dark clouds concealed the light.

The waters above and the waters below were rejoined—brought back to their primordial unity by the deluge that poured from the heavens down to the earth.

The seas, once discrete, gathered together and covered the land.

The soil loosened and the earth’s vegetation, unmoored, drifted into the stormy sea.

The animals drowned.

The people died.

Not all life, however, was extinguished. Just when it seems as though we had returned to un-being, to the darkness that came before light, we spot a candle flickering in the distance, though it is very dim indeed. Out there, on the surface of this endless ocean, is a sealed cask.

Just when it seems as though we had returned to un-being, to the darkness that came before light, we spot a candle flickering in the distance, though it is very dim indeed.

It is battered by rain above and tossed by waves below.

It is an ark, coated in pitch, in which a family dwells in darkness.

Subdivided into many rooms, the ark is cramped and fetid. It has a window, yes, but that will not be opened to the brilliance of light until many days and nights have passed, until the rain has abated and the dove is sent out to search for land.

For now, it is lightless, and the reek of animals fills the cabins. The family grows insensate to the deafening sound of the animals’ bellowing out for relief or the clatter of hooves on the wooden boards.

Crickets, cockroaches, ants and spiders coat the floors, the walls. Noah and his family huddle close to one another and wait.

Is this Eden in a time capsule? Indeed, inside that dark cell, snakes slither to and fro, winding themselves around one’s legs, constricting and hissing, terrifying and tempting.

But perhaps it is not Eden.

Perhaps, rather, it should be likened to a seed, in which the genetic material of all creation lies coiled, dormant, unrealized.

When the waters abate, Noah expresses his gratitude to the lord with a sacrifice.

He slaughters an animal. The smell is pleasing to God, who vows to never destroy the earth by flood again.

God then permits humans to consume meat.

“Every creature that lives shall be yours to eat; as with the green grasses, I give you all these. You must not, however, eat flesh with its life-blood in it” (Genesis 9:3-4).

We are no longer in Eden. We are no longer in our first draft. This is a revised edition, worked over with a red pen so much that the original text is no longer visible. It is a world of moral compromise, in which violence is to be mitigated but not eliminated, in which God realizes that creation is an act of letting go, of accepting that what you create can never be fully yours to control, in which you learn the hard way, over and over again, that what you create, creates you.

“Whoever sheds the blood of man,

By man shall his blood be shed;

For in His image

Did God make man” (Ibid 9:6).

Matthew Schultz is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (2020). He is a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts.