Make an ark: the covenant announced
9 This is the history of the generations of Noah: Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time. Noah walked with God. 10 Noah became the father of three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. 11 The earth was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. 12 God saw the earth, and saw that it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth. 13 God said to Noah, “I will bring an end to all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence through them. Behold, I will destroy them and the earth. 14 Make a ship of gopher wood. You shall make rooms in the ship, and shall seal it inside and outside with pitch. 15 This is how you shall make it. The length of the ship shall be three hundred cubits, its width fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits. 16 You shall make a roof in the ship, and you shall finish it to a cubit upward. You shall set the door of the ship in its side. You shall make it with lower, second, and third levels. 17 I, even I, will bring the flood of waters on this earth, to destroy all flesh having the breath of life from under the sky. Everything that is on the earth will die. 18 But I will establish my covenant with you. You shall come into the ship, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you. 19 Of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every sort into the ship, to keep them alive with you. They shall be male and female. 20 Of the birds after their kind, of the livestock after their kind, of every creeping thing of the ground after its kind, two of every sort will come to you, to keep them alive. 21 Take with you some of all food that is eaten, and gather it to yourself; and it will be for food for you, and for them.” 22 Thus Noah did. He did all that God commanded him.
The first covenant in Scripture is announced before the judgment falls, and the man told to build is told the measurements and nothing else.
This is the history of the generations of Noah. A new section of the book opens, and its subject is what came of this man.
He is described in three ways and the third governs the other two. He was a righteous man, he was blameless among the people of his time, and Noah walked with God — the phrase used of Enoch, and used of nobody in between. The middle description is comparative and honest: blameless among his contemporaries. Chapter nine will show him drunk in a tent, so the text is not claiming perfection and does not need to.
The indictment against the world is stated twice with the same word: the earth was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. Corruption is the inward state and violence is what it produced. The word for violence covers cruelty, oppression and the strong taking from the weak, which is exactly what the preceding paragraph described.
God's sentence is announced with a first-person emphasis that leaves no room for a natural process: I, even I, will bring the flood of waters on this earth. Whatever means are used, the agent is named.
And then, in the middle of the sentence of destruction, comes a word that appears here for the first time in Scripture: But I will establish my covenant with you. Covenant is one of the Bible's great terms, and its first occurrence is a promise made to one family in the announcement of a judgment on the world. The pattern of the whole book is already set — God narrows in order to preserve, and the preserving is stated before the destroying is carried out.
The instructions are practical and almost entirely dimensional. Gopher wood, sealed inside and out with pitch, three hundred cubits by fifty by thirty, three decks, a door in the side, a roof. On the ordinary reckoning of a cubit that is something like four hundred and fifty feet long, and the proportions of six to one in length to width are those a shipwright would recognize as a hull built for stability rather than for speed — a vessel intended to float and to survive, not to sail anywhere.
What Noah is not given is worth noticing. There is no timetable beyond the fact of the coming flood, no explanation of how the animals will be gathered, no assurance of how long the building will take, and no answer to what his neighbors will say. He is given measurements and a promise.
The chapter ends in six words that account for the next chapters: Thus Noah did. He did all that God commanded him. The construction of an enormous ship, over an unstated span of years, in a world filled with violence, on the word of God alone, is summarized in one sentence — and the New Testament reads that as faith, and as a warning delivered by a man who kept working Hebrews 11:7.
settled What this mark means