Genesis 8:1-5

2006.Oct.05 09:49

Snakes on a boat

Read Genesis 8:1-5 | Full Chapter

But God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the cattle that were with him in the ark; and God caused a wind to pass over the earth, and the water subsided…and the water receded steadily from the earth, and at the end of one hundred and fifty days the water decreased.
(Genesis 8:1,3, NASB)

Let’s start with “God remembered Noah…” Now I have the unsubstantiated feeling the “remember” here is more of an “attended to” than a “oh, yeah, I forgot about that boat”. But either suggests that Jehovah’s focus had been elsewhere. It seems likely to me that his attention was centered on the people dying in the flood he’d commissioned, the passing away of part of his creation, but also of a generation given over to rebellion against him. I don’t know how God’s emotions work, but I feel confident that I have never experienced emotional turmoil that might compare to this moment for God. But, Jehovah then turns his attention to what remains: a family of eight (I think) and a bunch of animals. On a boat.

Now here’s something that I hadn’t thought about until just now. Among those animals on this boat where serpents, snakes. God saves humanity, which has fallen, and the animal who represents that fall, the trickster who decieved Eve and Adam (or at least the form taken by that trickster). God has isolated this small group of humans to have another go, and he doesn’t just allow the serpent to continue existance, he deliberately has Noah puts snakes on the plane…er, boat…er, big box ark thingie.

This isn’t a short jaunt on the boat, wait for forty days of rain to end, and get off. No, they have to wait 150 days before the water starts receding. The rains began on the 17th day of the second month (Genesis 7:12) and its not until 27th day of the second month (Genesis 8:14), a full year later, that they disembark. They’re on the boat more than a year (a Hebrew year anyway; I haven’t quite figured out how that translates to the modern western calendar). That’s a lot of time. Eight people and hundreds of animals including fun things like snakes and bears and anteaters (at least, I’m assuming). And the things I get impatient over!

The miracle, to me, is less that God saved the eight from the flood, but that he saved them and the animals from a year in the boat. What peace he must have rained in that bastion, what patience he must have poured on them. And each of these eight deserves the due as well, for their faith and their part in keeping to God’s peace. This was no cruise, it was cramped quarters with the earth dying beneath them and a tempter on the boat (because, seriously, whatever you believe about Satan, what are the chances he was not going after this group, even aside from the issue of the snake as figurative deceiver?). So, yeah, I’m gonna say it again, because here it is in the Bible once again: however bad life gets, trust in God.