NOAH appears in Genesis v. 29 as son of Lamech and tenth in descent from Adam. The hazardous attempt of the verse to find an etymology for the name in the Hebrew verb "comfort" is an extract from another tradition, and views Noah as repairing in some measure by his discovery of vine-culture, Gen. ix. 20, the disaster of the curse pronounced upon the ground by Yahweh in consequence of the Fall. The story of the Deluge has Noah for its hero. He is represented as the patriarch who, because of his blameless piety, was chosen by God to perpetuate the human race after his wicked contemporaries had perished in the Flood. He receives a divine warning of the impending disaster, and is instructed to build an ark, in which he and his family are pre served alive. In accordance with God's instructions Noah took into the ark specimens of all animals, from which the stocks might be replenished. The story has close affinities with Babylonian traditions, in which Ut-napishtim plays the part corresponding to that of Noah (see DELUGE) . The narrative of Gen. ix. 18-27 be
longs to a different cycle, which seems to know nothing of the Flood story. In the latter Noah's sons are married, and their wives accompany them in the ark; but in this narrative they would seem to be unmarried, living in the tent with their father; nor does the shameless drunkenness of Noah accord well with the character of the pious hero of the Flood story. Three different motives may be traced in Gen. ix. 18-27: first the passage ex plains to whom agriculture, and in particular the culture of the vine, was due ; secondly it attempts to provide in the persons of Noah's three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, ancestors for three of the races of mankind, and to account in some degree for their historic relations; in the third place, by its censure of Ham— f or whom it is almost certain that Canaan stood in the original text—it reprobates the licentious Canaanite civilization.
(W. L. W.)