The Box that Noach Built...
Genesis 6:9-7:16
Breisheet (Genesis): Noach: Noah
Day One: 27th day of 7th month 5786
October 19, 2025
Haftara: Isaiah. 54:1–55:5
B’rit Hadashah: Luke 17:20-27
The change of season is not turning back. It is as God ordained it. The leaves have dropped. The trees are settling into their seasonal sleep over winter. I now have a clear line of sight to the garden from my bedroom window. Most days, there is a brisk and cold wind. Sweaters and jackets are coming out of the closet. I found myself going over the seasonal acceptance meme I snagged for days like this. I must resign myself to the influence of the earth that is, ultimately, under the influence of our Father God. The change with the rain and increased damp has ramped up the muscle pain of the fibromyalgia, and this past week I’ve walked through some increased joint pain. The tens machine has mitigated enough of the osteo situation in that right knee and modeh ani/I am so grateful! Now that the tens machine has become a regular intervention, the over-the-counter pain medication works a whole lot better if I decide to opt for it. Some days, I feel like I can force my way through it with no pharmaceutical intervention, and other days, not so much. But this seasonal change into winter is always so much more difficult than shifting into spring. Bring it on anyway!
13 I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me. Philippians 4:13.
Into the weekend, I discovered an explosion of bird-police clips on Facebook. At first, they were quite entertaining, but then the next day, I had a burning need to figure out where they came from. I searched for the term “SORA” that was superimposed on the little videos. As I suspected, these clips are purely powered by AI and a person who knows how to consolidate one video over another with computer graphics and manipulation. The topic of AI and this ‘chat’ thing came up at the end of the week, about the same time. Now the comedy of these clips is all in clean fun, but I’m thinking, this protocol to ‘mix’ images with AI will go too far. Eventually, will they be able to make it look so good that you have no idea that what you’re watching is fake? Will we be watching the regular news media with graphic clips that will be totally fake? (Is it doing that now?) Will it get so good that folks like me who don’t want anything to do with it won’t be able to discern if the footage is real or not? Perhaps we need to be alert. We need to be very alert. The marriage of AI with computer manipulation scores high for deception on a grand scale. Don’t we have enough deception already?
But we move on. A daily dose of God’s Word will ground us. We can find the things we know that work, and we can find our balance with that. Along with this damp and inclement weather, the asthma has been presenting with wheezing in the evenings. The coughing was increasing during the day. I started drinking a cup of mullein tea each evening, and this has mitigated the lung situation dramatically! God has supplied a huge “medicine chest” in our yard! We are moving up the closing of the coop by another half hour as of last night. I’m going to try to catch that second rooster and will be bringing him over to the farm up the road. My “chicken lady” will deal with him. I do believe that if we only have the one rooster for nineteen hens, the stress on the hens will be less and the egg laying may increase again. Yesterday was incredible. We haven’t collected five eggs in one day in many months! We were a chicken farm and we were egg poor! This week we can have them any way we choose! God is good.
8 But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD. 9 These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God. 10 And Noah begat three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Genesis 6:8-10.
There is that word again that we’ve always had some major misunderstanding: perfect. It is recorded that Noach was ‘perfect’ in his generations, or ancestry. Generations from the Hebrew in these passages from the Old Testament is תּוֹלְדָה tôwlᵉdâh, to-led-aw’ or תֹּלְדָה tôlᵉdâh; from H3205; (plural only) descent, i.e. family; (figuratively) history:—birth, generations. Noach was perfect in that his ancestry was free from the taint of those fallen angels. His bloodline was clear. He was completely free of any genetic manipulation that had gone on in his lifetime. It might have been all around him, but he was free of it. This made him the ideal candidate to build a vessel for the salvation of the future of mankind, along with the animals. This will not be the story that was told in Sunday school on the flannel graph board. There are some dark aspects of the story of Noach, as I discovered when I did the first deep dives into Torah and what the Hebrew sages had to say. But we shall come to this later this week. For now, we see that Noach receives his calling from Yahweh.
13 And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth. 14 Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch. Genesis 6:13-14.
Essentially, the ‘ark’ wasn’t a boat, as it’s been described all our lives. It was a three-story box. It couldn’t be called a boat because it had no rudder or steering device whatsoever. It was a box made of wood and covered with tarry ‘pitch’ that made it waterproof!
17 And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die. 18 But with thee will I establish my covenant; and thou shalt come into the ark, thou, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons’ wives with thee. 19 And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female. 20 Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive. 21 And take thou unto thee of all food that is eaten, and thou shalt gather it to thee; and it shall be for food for thee, and for them. Genesis 6:17-21.
In all the years since I’ve been reading the story of Noach, it never ceases to appeal to my imagination, and even as I read, there is a little movie rolling in my head, and I’m watching them carry out the sheer work of putting this ark together. What about the problems of explaining to the people around why it was being constructed? Do you think that Noah told them right off–or did he fudge a bit and say: “Oh, I don’t know. I just got an urge to build something. I haven’t really had any hobbies so, I’ll putter along on this till I get inspired as to how it’ll work.” Did he explain it by telling them that his old gramps Enoch had foretold the day of a great inundation of flood waters on the earth, and he was just a “preparedness” kind of guy? I imagine the animals beginning to move forward towards the ark, edging closer until the set time. I wonder if the women got together and secured a promise from Noach that all the insects, arachnids, and snakes, and the entire rodent species would be quartered in the farthest corner of the lower deck. Did they decide that the men only would deal with the maintenance down there? And come to that, where would Noah build the bathroom on this thing? Whatever we can all think of and wonder about, we can all agree that this project was a gargantuan effort. I’m pretty certain that it took much hard work on Noah’s part, and some of the miraculous on the part of Yahweh.
We do not hold with the rules of the Rabbis, but early in this project, from the Chabad source, I realized that God was saying “clean and unclean” animals were to go into the ark.
2 Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female. 3 Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth. 4 For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth. Genesis 7:2-4.
Wait a minute. Didn’t the law only come into being when it was given to Moses in the desert? If God is already talking clean and unclean in the days of Noach, then that means that the Torah must have been around from the very beginning! For Noach to know the clean and the unclean, he would have to have had education in Torah! We can only assume that God informally shared the Torah with the saints before the formal giving of the Law on the tablets in the days of Moses. The Hebrew sages might be correct in their estimation that the Torah was the light that split the darkness in the early days of creation. The opening words of John’s Gospel were what occurred to me while thinking about this:
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 The same was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. 4 In him was life; and the life was the light of men. 5 And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. John 1:1-5.
When mainline Christianity speaks of The Law, they mean the body of rules and regulations set down in the first five books of the Bible that include the Biblical feasts, abstaining from pork, and separating meat from dairy. That seems to be about it for what they understand to be ‘The Law’. The Hebrew meaning for Torah is “a teaching”. Torah is “a teaching” or “instructions for living”. What Christianity sees in ‘The Law’ is only focused on those rules and regulations. But wait! There is much more to The Law than that!
It also contains valuable knowledge for our education in getting to know God. I’m beginning to think that ‘Torah’ is to God what we might think of as ‘personality’ is to a person we know. Take any person you know, and consider the characteristics in which they operate. Look at their work ethics. How do they treat people, their children, their animals? Look at how they relate to life. Are they cynical, optimistic, unforgiving, or easy-going and merciful? Torah is beginning to look more and more like a part of God’s personality. How can we split off a part of a person’s very being that makes them the person whom we like, and in some cases, we cherish? To look upon Torah as only a rule book of passé rules and regulations is to cheat oneself out of knowing the Creator in His totality! Torah is not just a rule book, and certainly not passé.
Researching the stories in the Torah, like Noach and the flood, impresses upon me that there are so many details that are lost. There is enough dispute and theory that could fill another book about the actual dates of the Flood. When I first studied Noach, years ago, I didn’t know the Biblical calendar that they used to reckon the length of that account. No wonder I was spinning my wheels for days, trying to get the flood account to fit into the calendar we use in our time! When I researched the Hebrew calendar for an adult Sunday School Bible Study one year, it all fit together! The Hebrew calendar is Lunar, while the rest of the world follows a Solar calendar. But no matter how many discrepancies we may find in our research, whether the cubit measurement is exact, or the timeline in a commentary is radically different than the timeline from Hebrew sources, the main thing is: the flood happened, the animals and the eight people were saved. We can only guess about what life might have been like on the ark, but what remains is this:
When the faithfulness of the Creator covenants with the obedience of a faithful follower, the world changes!
13 In the selfsame day entered Noah, and Shem, and Ham, and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah’s wife, and the three wives of his sons with them, into the ark; 14 They, and every beast after his kind, and all the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind, and every fowl after his kind, every bird of every sort. 15 And they went in unto Noah into the ark, two and two of all flesh, wherein is the breath of life. 16 And they that went in, went in male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded him: and the LORD shut him in. Genesis 7:13-16.
Scripture reading from the KJV unless otherwise stated.
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"The marriage of AI with computer manipulation scores high for deception on a grand scale. Don’t we have enough deception already?" Well stated & I agree with you. I stay away from it.