Fear No Fear

(All scripture from the World English Bible, ebible.org, all rights reserved)

“Noah lived three hundred fifty years after the flood. All the days of Noah were nine hundred fifty years, and then he died.”
(Genesis 9:28-29)

Noah lived a LONG time. He lived to see generations of his descendants. He lived to see them starting to spread and fill the Earth again. He lived to see the animals and the birds reproducing and spreading. In three hundred and fifty years, Noah COULD have seen as many as a million people (assuming perfect conditions, no early deaths, and high reproduction rates). He and his sons had been blessed by God (Genesis 9:1-2). Noah got to spend three hundred and fifty years seeing that blessing come to pass. To walk in it and the guide others in it (2 Peter 2:5).

Noah died around two thousand years after the Fall. He would have been around seven hundred years old when the Tower of Babel incident occurred. Noah was 892 years old when Abraham was born – and lived another sixty-ish years. Noah was around to witness a LOT of change and upheaval in the world. What a witness for God and for godly living he must have been (Hebrews 11:7).

Noah had no children after the Flood. He had his three sons before it, but not a single child afterward. This is possibly because Ham slept with Noah’s wife (Ham’s mother). When Reuben slept with his father’s concubine, Jacob considered that relationship defiled (Genesis 49:4). When David’s son slept with his concubines, David cared for them but never had relations with them again (2 Samuel 20:3). It’s possible that while Noah loved his wife, he never slept with her again – therefore no more offspring. While Noah had sons, he is never mentioned as also having daughters. The easiest explanation for this is that he stopped having sex with his wife after ham slept with her.

The sage Radak writes: ‘ויחי נח, the principal reason why the Torah lists the ages of these antediluvian people is only to enable us to count back to when human history started with the creation of Adam. All such basic historical data are provided both in the Torah and in the Books of the prophets.’

The sage Steinsaltz writes: ‘All the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years; and he died. Noah passed away without fathering any more children, perhaps as a result of what Canaan had done to him. The entire future course of history will unfold from Noah’s three sons, who were together with him in the ark.’