Toreng2.htm revision: 15 Nov 01
Exegesis for
Parshat No’ah (Gen. 6:9 –
11:32):
The Flood and the Tower of Babel
And its
possible restitution by The Noahides.
1. Overview: A
Second Beginning for Humankind.
2. Parallels of the stories of the Flood and Ark with
ancient myths and with contemporary stories.
3. The Sin of Adam, the Restitution of Noah and his Sin.
4. Noah and “the Generation of the Separation” – the Great
Builders.
5. The Character of the Ark.
6. About the connections between the Ark and the
Tabernacle.
7. About the Ark and the Torah Scribes of the Temple.
8. About the Teachings of the Earth and “The Occult
Science” of the Ark,
9. The Arcane Meaning of the Ark.
10. About the
sins of the Generation of Division.
11. The
Confounding of the Language and Loss of Human Understanding
12. The Seventy
Nations of the Descendants of No’ah.
13. The Seven Noahide Commands – a New
Ecological Dispensation.
14. The Potential of the Noahid Teachings to
become “Torah of the Tree of Life”.
Notes.
Overview: A Second Beginning for Humankind
After ten generations, which make a complete
era, God could make a summary of the experiment with the human race, and the
summary was negative: “And the Lord- YHWH saw that the wickedness of man
was great in the earth, and that all the impulse (Yetser) of the thoughts
of the heart was only evil. And the Lord repented that He had made man on the
earth, and it grieved Him at the heart. And the Lord said, I will destroy man
whom I have created from the face of the Adamah… for I repent that I have
made them”. Ostensibly – an “original sin”, where humans are evil from their
basis. But in fact – a new beginning, an opportunity for the restitution of what
went wrong.
Once more, human history starts from the
beginning, but this time, instead of the contrived paradise formed by the
creator, there was formed by the man who was selected “a just man
(Tsadiq) and perfect in his generations”, a new “artificial paradise”.
The emphasis this time is not on the flora “every tree that is pleasant to the
sight” (Gen.
2:9) – but upon the fauna “and
of every living thing of all flesh..
to keep them alive with thee” (Gen. 6:19). Yet also the role of the Trees within the
Garden – the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life will not be absent in the
following.
Both the Ark of Noah and the Garden of
Eden serve as environments – biospheres – that are given by God to man for
custody. Both of them include a complete genetic reservoir.
The first Adam came into a ready thing,
received a magnificent biosphere, where his sole role was “to till it and to
keep it” (2:15), and he did not succeed in it for even a
short period.
Noah, on the other hand, was
commanded to build the Ark – “a genetic bank” – to collect all the species,
bring them into the Ark and then to pass an extended pregnancy-like process – of
one year and ten days. This is the apprenticeship period, in which Noah
and his sons learnt a lesson of the maintenance of the inhabitable land - “and
He destroyed every living substance (Yequm-Ecumene) which was upon the face of the
Adamah (Living Earth-Gaia), both man, and cattle, and creaping things, and the
birds of the heaven, they were destroyed from the earth” (Gen.
7:23).
Here is how Midrash Tanhuma describes this apprenticeship year:
“For all the twelve months that Noah
stayed in the Ark, he knew no sleep. Neither he nor his sons, neither at day nor
at night, as he was busy feeding the creatures that were with him. He would give
each beast, animal or fowl their feed in their known time, the time they are
used to eat. There is a beast that eats once a day and there are that eat twice
and in the early night or at midnight, and some when the cock crows, and he
would give each their food in their hour”.
Parallels of the stories of the Flood and Ark with
ancient myths and with contemporary stories
The Bible is not the sole source that
attributes the rescue of the divine creation from a flood to a hero/virtuous
person. In the Story of Gilgamesh, Utnapishtim – the Sumerian parallel to
Noah – saves both all the animals and the human civilization: he takes
with his in the Ark also the artisans and professionals. According to the
Sumerian tradition of the Flood, the Books of Wisdom where hidden safely before
the flood.
Particularly pertinent for our discussion is
the declared reason for the flood according to the Babylonian tradition:
Atrahasis (“Noah”) was asked to preserve his vessel, with the very
symbolic name of “preserver of Life”, because the gods did not manage to control
births, and there rose a concern of population explosion. The great message to
humankind, as the flood subsided, was not a promise for regular world order such
as “neither will I again smite any more everything living, as I have done. While
the earth remains, seed time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and
winter, and day and night shall not cease” (Gen.
8:21-22), but finding less
radical methods of handling the fear of overpopulation: bareness, infant
mortality, plagues and hunger.
It was Plato who added to human civilization
the flood of Atlantis. The myth of the land that went astray and therefore got
lost in the flood received in our times a new impetus: hundreds, probably
thousands of books are being written about Atlantis, even though hardly any
archeological evidence for the Platonic story has turned up. In the Chapter on
“The Cities of Plato” (in his book “The Dimensions of Paradise”) John Michell
makes a thorough analysis of the reasons for the creation of the myth of
Atlantis: Plato planned a new ideal city, Magnesia, and even proposed its laws.
The difference between the two cities, according to Plato, was in the pattern of
the cities: Atlantis was based upon the decimal system of ten, which Michell
exposes as deficient, whereas Magnesia was intended to be based upon the Twelve.
In the following we shall see a great parallel between this approach of Plato
and the Biblical approach, which also strives towards the restitution of human
society based on pattern of the Twelve Tribes.
We may recall another ancient myth, a Biblical one, that even though it does not treat a flood, it deals with the great waters, a quasi-ark and its additional function, of metamorphosis and rebirth, which we shall discuss in the sequel. This is the story of Jonah the prophet and his journey inside the “great Fish” appointed by God. There, in the depth of the “ark” that was intended to save him from the raging waters of the sea, Jonah prayed and received a reprieve, and agreed to accept the prophetic mission for the city of Ninveh. The soul of Jonah underwent a metamorphosis and he became a prophet. He hoped that God will upturn Ninveh, just as he did to Sodom and Gomorrah, but the real turning was the moral turning that the citizens of Ninveh experienced as they repented.
In our generation there are new myths that recall the image of the Ark: I refer to Science Fiction books, in which spaceship transfer humans, and the entire ecosphere, from our destroyed world towards new worlds. A case in point is Arthur C. Clark, with his series of “Space Odyssey” books: not only is the ship’s crew held frozen until their arrival at the goal, but that a mysterious object, with a perfectly proportioned rectangular prism, the monolith, serves for creating the appropriate infrastructure for new human colonization in our solar system.
We have already mentioned in the former
chapter (Bereshit) that the sin of Adam was not in eating of
the Tree, but in eating of its fruit, which is the source of its seed. He harmed
the continuity of species.
After Adam ate of the Tree of Knowledge, God
withheld from him the Tree of Life.
Noah is the representative of the
Tree of Life, even though the genetic pool in the Ark was no longer a natural
genetic pool, but one involved with human intervention: Noah was
commanded to take seven from each type of the “clean beasts”, which gave
advantage for the domesticated animals.
Adam was, as we recall, the first who was commanded for the care of the earth: “Be fruitful and multiply, replenish the earth, and subdue her”. Noah the second inheritor of the earth – was no longer commanded to subdue the earth. He was appointed to recover the curse of the earth, the “cursed is the ground (Adamah – the Living Earth) for thy sake”. He was appointed to treat the earth with compassion after the flood. In return, so he was commanded by God-Elohim – who, we recall, is equal with “The Nature” – that there would be no more flood upon earth.
But Noah too did not meet the expectations. He was “Ish ha’Adamah” – “the husband of the Living Earth” – and knew the nature of each plant. But instead of returning to cultivate the trees that would bear fruits for his descendents, he hurried to gratify his immediate desires. Right upon leaving the Ark, Noah planted a vine, in order to become intoxicated of its fruit as quickly as possible, from a short range economic-hedonistic consideration (to act only for the sake of the Fruits of the Action) – and to bring to self-forgetting (it was for a reason that the traditional interpreters were divided to those who identified the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge with wheat, and those who identified it with grapes). Abraham, who came to restore that which Noah failed to, was tried again and again by trials that required patience.
Yet there is advantage in the restoration that Noah effected over the action of Adam: he yielded to the temptation of the fruit of the earth only after he completed successfully, as we recall, his initiation in the guardianship and maintenance of the earth and after he learnt to respect the identity of every species, and to help safeguard the biodiversity.
His descendents, the protagonists of the other part of the portion, the builders of the Tower of Babel, would try to overturn this balance.
Noah and “the Generation of the Separation” – the Great
Builders.
Two canonical building efforts are found in the core of this Parasha, one opposite the other: the Building of the Ark, and the Building of the Tower in Babel “whose top may reach to heaven”.
Noah gathered in one structure the whole of the creation - the ecosystem – due to a clear objective to spread it later, spreading intended to guard and fortify it; the people of the Tower of Babel aspired to unify all the human endeavor and gather it in one man-made structure, and were punished by spreading abroad, a spreading aimed to confuse and weaken them, but essentially to regain the diversity.
In order to distinguish between these two types of building, we may turn to one of the seminal Christian thinkers, to Augustine of the 4th and 5th centuries, who distinguished two types of cities: the material city – with examples by the city of Cain and later the city of Babel which desired a tower that reaches to heaven, and opposite it the spiritual city – like Noah’s Ark and later also Shalem, the city of Malkitsedek (Melchizedek).
The whole of human history, claimed Augustine, is the struggle between the two types of cities: between the sinful City of Man and the just City of God, between Babel and Jerusalem. In our terms, between corruption and restitution.
The construction of the Ark is the third building act reported in the Bible. God builded the rib He took from Adam into a woman (Gen. 2:22), Qayin was building a city (4:17), and Noah was commanded to make an ark as a building project. This was actually the first “condominium”, shared by all the inhabited land – the Ecumene or the ecosystem. In this, it was also the home of the renewed humankind – from Noah and his sons. The ark was intended to conserve the ecumene from the impending flood, which was threatening to annihilate the order of the creation in which “let there be a firmament… and let it divide water from water” (Gen. 1:6), and “let the water under the heaven be gathered together to one place, and let the dry land appear” (1:9).
Because “all flesh had corrupted its way upon the earth” (Gen. 6:12) – all flesh was punished to be swept by the waters.
The Zohar goes far in this direction, and sees No’ah’s entry into the Ark a sexual union – the union of the Sefirah of Yesod-Foundation (which is called “Tsadiq”, namely “righteous”, as referred to No’ah) with the Sefirah of Malkhuth-Kingdom: “For the Adamah (Living Earth/”Gaia”) is Malkhuth, and the Yesod is the male partner of the Malkhuth, in order to connect with her and to maintain the seed of the whole world…” (Zohar for No’ah, 5, my translation).
But even if there was no real coitus involved, there is no doubt that No’ah was appointed to be the guardian of the seed: with the help of a hard “shell” – the walls of the Ark – he guarded the nucleus that contained the genetic endowment needed for the renewal of the biosphere. This is much like the modern imitations of that Ark, the attempts to build artificial biospheres that may conserve whole ecosystems on Days of Ire of ecological holocaust
The building of the Ark, surmise our sages of blessed memory, parallels not just the creation of the world but also the building of the Tabernacle and of the Temple.
Let us be reminded here about the precise task that Noah was commanded: “Make thee an Ark of gofer wood, rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shallt pitch it within and without with pitch. And this is the fashion of which thou shalt make it: the length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth if it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits. A window (Tsohar) shalt thou make to the ark, and to a cubit shalt thou finish it above, and the door of the ark shalt thou set in its side, with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it” (Gen. 5:14-16). Namely: the thirty cubits of the height of the ark were divided to three stories, quite likely equal in height, that is: every story was of ten cubits.
We have already mentioned in the former chapter that the most important and canonical construct ion in the Torah is the building of the Tabernacle. We’ve shown that, compared with the 34 verses that the Torah needed to describe the whole of the process of Creation, the Torah needed 256 verses to describe the pattern of the Tabernacle and its building. “The verses of the Torah are scant at their place and rich in another place” (Tosafot, Tractate Kritut, page 14,a 4-5), and through comparison with the pattern of the Tabernacle and its construction, we may comprehend more about the Ark:
1. The proportions of the long and narrow ark resemble those of the boards of the Tabernacle (Exodus 26:15-30). The boards measured 1x1.5x10 cubits, whereas the size of the ark was 30x50x300, namely a proportion of 1:1.67:10 (the difference between 1.67 (or 5/3) and 1.5 may be explained by the need to use whole or simple numbers to describe building elements).
2. The ground plan of the ark – which is three hundred cubits by fifty cubits – contains three times the court of the Tabernacle (hundred cubits by fifty cubits, according to Exodus 27:19).
3. The basic module of the Tabernacle is the 10x10x10 cubits cube of the Holy of Holies. All the dimensions of the Ark are multiples of 10; therefore it is possible to divide the Ark by the module of the Tabernacle. The whole volume of the Ark contained 450 such modules (30x50x300) – which are ten times 45, the gematria value of AdaM, a motive to which we shall return.
4. The human image – Tselem – and the Tselem of who in whose Tselem was Adam made – namely God-Elohim is also of three floors: the top one related to the head (“brain”[1]), the middle one related to the chest (“heart”) – just as was the ark, the top floor of which probably served for the human residences (the “brain”), the middle floor for the residence of the animals (the heart of that enterprise), whereas the bottom floor must have been the floor of services feeding and storage (the belly and liver). Also in the Tabernacle (and in the Temple that developed from it) there can be discerned a similar division: the measures of the whole Tabernacle were 10x10x30 cubits, which were derived from the combination of the Holy of Holies (whose form, as mentioned above, was a cube) and the Holy (exodus 26:33). The Holy, with the dimensions of two floors of the Ark is related to the chest and belly (and the seven lower Sefirot), and the Holy of Holies is related to the head (and the three supernal Sefirot.
5. Another connection, which is semantic rather than numerical, is between this Ark and “The Ark of the Covenant/Testimony” in which there were kept the Tablets of the Testimony, and the temporary inheritor of the Tabernacle and the Temple – namely the Synagogue, in which the Torah scrolls are also kept within “Tevah”-ark.
From this view, there is Torah that resides in the Ark-Tevah: this is the case with the Ten Commandments, with the Five Books of Moses, and with the “Torah of the Living Earth” from the teachings of No’ah.
About the Ark and the Torah Scribes of the
Temple.
There is therefore an evident connection, both geometrical-symbolic and functional, between the pattern of No’ah’s Ark and the Tabernacle and Temple.
Let us assume for now that one of the suppositions we raised in the introduction chapter – that the scribes of the First Temple were those who wrote or edited the Torah – is valid. The priests of the First Temple lived with the knowledge – derived from the prophets of their time – that the Temple was due to be destroyed by invaders from the North, and that the Torah will become a öååàä and testament for assuring the restoration of the Temple in the future. For this end it would be required to preserve the people through the intermediary period, from destruction until restoration, and this is actually the alegorical content of the story of the flood and the Ark.
The threat of the destruction of the People of Israel became in the Biblical narrative the destruction of all humankind, No’ah and his sons are those of the People who would remain connected to the Torah and would assure the preservation and the restoration of the nation. It is possible to advance another stage with the allegorical understanding, and to picture the temple scribes themselves as identifying themselves with “No’ah and his sons”, who build the Ark and preserve all those within it.
“The earth became corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence…” (5:11). Do these word not remind us from the prophecies of wrath of the prophets anticipating the destruction? For example, the prophet Jeremiah threatens “Behold, I am against thee, O destroying mountain, says the Lord, which destroyest all the earth” (Jer. 51:25), or Ezekiel, who was brought to the company of the elders of Israel who “have filled the land with violence” (8:17).
The Ark is thus a kind of ferryboat between “the old world” that was destroyed and wiped out, and “the new world”. The Ark passes the codes of two genetic pools – the physical and the cultural – so that they can set root and bear fruit in the new world.
Also the second story of the Parashah of No’ah – the story of the Tower of Babel – fits in with this description, which returns us to the story of Babylon and of the diaspora, which are the exiles. It pertains to many diasporas, Tefutsot, which means that the role of the Ark does not end with the terra firma of the Second Temple, but must still carry the seed along “the Exiles of Edom and of Ishmael” (Christianity and Islam), till our own times.
As opposite of the current notion of those for whom the Torah is their trade, we may say about No’ah and his sons, that their work was their Torah. The building of an Ark of such gigantic size must have required many decades of work. Midrash Tanhuma amplifies even more the construction process and tells how No’ah and his sons planted and grew the cedar trees for the Ark. The construction reuired complete comprehension of the requirements of all the living creatures, and their gathering two by two required even more. Then they toiled for exactly one year in order to maintain the whole biosphere, the “Genetic Bank” of the whole settled earth, the Ecumene.
From the entry into the Ark on the 17th of the Second Month, until the exit from it on the 27th of the Second Month (of the next lunar year) there passed exactly one solar year of 365 days. Why did the stay in the Ark last so long when the actual flood itself lasted for “only” 40 days and 40 nights? Because the sons of No’ah had to exercise the upkeep of the biosphere for a whole solar year, which is the minimal whole period, “one day” from the perspective of the whole earth.
The major instruction of the sons of No’ah is, in the overt sense, in the settling of the world (Yishuvo shel Olam). We may see in this their toil at the two lower levels of the Ark – of the food stores (the “belly”) and of the cells/cages of the vqarious animals (the “chest”). But as we’ve drawn a parallel between the Ark and the Tabernacle and the worship in it, we shall describe here also a possible hidden aspect of the instruction of the Ark, as is implied by the literary and gematrical connections of the Ark of No’aH with the H’N acronym for Hokhmat haNistar – the Arcane Wisdom of the Torah.
The verse “And No’ah found Grace in the Eyes of the Lord” is said in Hebrew “veNo’ah matsa Hen be’Eyne YHWH”. In the same sentence there are found two hints to the arcane wisdom. The entry into into the Ark is like the entry into the PaRDeS[2]: The Pshat or ordinary meaning is the very toil in the preservation of the fauna and flora, as well as the skills for agricultural work. The Remez – hint – is given in the dimensions of the Ark, that comprise, as shown above, threefold the dimensions of the Tabernacle; the Drash – exegesis is in the allegory we drew between the story of the folld and the story of the destruction and restoration of the Temple; whereas the Sod – secret – is given in the linguistic parallel between the dimensions of the Ark to the names of YHWH.
The command “enter into the Tevah-Ark” explained the founder of Hassidut, Rabbi Yisrael Ba’al Shem Tov - in a mystical manner – relates to the Tevah, namely The Word uttered in the prayer. This is true about every word in the prayer, but especially true of the essence of the prayer, the Name of the receiver of the prayer: namely, one should express correctly the name of the Lord -“the expressed name” of the Tetragramaton YHWH. As is well known, it is already for very long time that the Jews do not say the name of YHWH, but only the name “Adonay” (and those who still dare and try still to express the name of the Lord in their prayer, do so through combinations of the two names, such as YaHdoWnaHy). “The Entry into the Tevah” is what still allows connection with the Name of HaWaYaH (Being).
Let us examine the inner meanings (Kawanot) of the words and letters. Through them we shall try to understand how is it possible to make a connection between this mystical interpretation and the physical Ark built by No’ah.
According to the mystical teachings, a person does not fulfill the commandment “to know the Name of the Lord” without intention – Kawannah – of conjunction (Zivug) and unification (Yihud) between the Divine Names. All the workings of the Ark, as we already said, are acts of conjunction between No’ah and the Ark.
Recall that the Ark is female, and thus corresponds to the “Sefirah of Malkhut”, which is the only one of the Sefirot that is always feminine. She is represented by the name that the one who prays actually utters – Adonay. Whereas No’ah, who is the the male in the workings of the Ark “et haElohim hit’halekh no’ah” – Noah walked with God (Gen. 5:9) (which has strong sexual connotations), he therefore represents the Name Y-H-W-H, the Name that is written in the prayer books but is not pronounced, according to the pronouncement “Y-H-W-H hu haElohim” – the Lord is God – made at the conclusion of the Day of Attonement.
And now let us “conjoin” these two Divine Names, namely multiply them by each other: The letter Y’od is equall 10 (by gematria), whereas A’leph = 1. The sum of their multiplication is 10. This is the basic unit, or module, of the Ark, as well as the dimension of the Holy of Holies in the Tabernacle. The letter H’e – 5 and D’alet = 4, and their multiplication (which is the Kabbalistic practice of their conjunction) is 20, as tis the length (in cubits) of the Heikhal in the Tabernacle. The two measures together (10+20) give the hight of the Ark 30, as is the length of the Tabernacle, which was built of two parts – 10 of the Holy of Holies, and 20 of the Heikhal). The conjoining-multiplication of the 3rd letter in the Name of YHWH, namely W’aw (6) with the 3rd letter in the name AdoNaY – N’un (Gematria value 50) – is 300, namely the length of the Ark. The fourth letter H’eh, when multiplied by the 4th letter of AdoNaY, Y’od – give value of 50, which is the width of the Ark. Therefore, according to the hint of the Ba’al Shem Tov (the Master of the Good Name), the commandement “Come into the Ark” gives instruction how to make the inner orientation in prayer, how to pronounce “the expressed Name”, so that it will not be forgotten from Israel even after the destruction of the Temple (when the Holy Name used to be announced by the High Priest), and to presenrve Israel as “The nation of those who know the Name” even through the exile that brings amnesia off all.
The first Adam was, as we recall, the first man who was commanded to keep the earth: “Be fruitful, and multiply, replenish the earth, and subdue her” (1:28). Noah, who was the second inheritor of the earth – was no longer commanded to subdue the earth. He was appointed to remove the curse upon the earth, as said, “cursed is the Adamah (the Living Earth) for thy sake (Gen. 2:17). He was appointed to treat the land after the flood with compassion. In return – assured him God-Elohim (which, as we saw, equaled “Nature”) – that there will be no more flood upon the earth.
The people of “The Generation of Disision” (Dor haPalga), whose story is also given in this portion-Parashah, insisted on preserving their complete, man-made, unification – “the whole earth was of one language, and of very few principles” (my translation of “Devarim Ahadim”). The whole purpose of building the Tower of Babel was just “lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth” (11:4). The production of the uniform bricks characterizes the nature of their striving for unity: the builders of the Tower of Babel who build themselves a Temple of Uniformity “lest we be scattered”, are the antithesis of the genetic diversity preserved by Noah. The bricks are uniform – produced in the same mold, each resembles the other – and so were the builders: “one language and very few principles”. Therefore their punishment is through scattering and diversity: “so the Lord-YHWH scattered them abroad from there upon the face of the whole earth” (11:8).
The people of the Generation of Division, the representatives of the Tree of Knowledge, have forfeited the covenant between the divinity and Noah. There is no more typical way for “subdue her” as to take the most fertile land and make it into bricks, to burn them (her) in fire, and to cover with them all the fertile ground – namely the very Adamah-Living Earth-(Gaia) – with cities and roads. (Incidentally, he word Adamah parallels the Latin word Homus; its counterpart – the word “Adam” parallels the Latin “Homo”).
Thus instead of No’ah Ish haAdamah, the husbandman of the Living Earth, the man of plowing and sowing, there rose the Generation of the Division, the builders of the Tower, and chose a still more difficult toil: “let us make brick and burn them thoroughly, and they had brick for stone and slime had they for mortar” (11:3), just like the work of the slaves, the builders of the pyramids of Egypt “in mortar and in bricks” (Exodus 1:14). Only that for the builders of the Tower of Babel is emphasized their choice: “And they said to one another, Come, let us make bricks… And they said, Come, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach to heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth”.
So what
underlies their proclamation? In what differs their construction from
No’ah’s?
We have emphasized the feminine image of the Ark. It is even more evident that the Tower is a phalic, masculine statement, an attempt of domination and conquest[3]. To emphasize more the masculine motive of the Tower, we may note that the architectural form used by those people is called “Zikurat”, a Semitic word meaning in Hebrew “Erection” and related to Zakhar – masculine – and Zakhrut – penis. We shall presently return to analyse this architectural conception.
According to the Biblical narrative, all the people of that generation gathered together, in order to build “A World Order” in one global city, a city that would contain them all. This is a human creation, which to some extent parallels Noah’s Ark. But whereas “the sanctuary city” that Noah made functioned according to the laws of nature, something like a living cell, whose membrane protects it from the external threats, there came the Tower-City that wanted to base itself upon the man-made laws of human civilization – to make an artificial environment that is divorced from the laws of nature and which is based upon few and uniform principles “Devarim Ahadim”. The agriculturist must have some consideration of the natural environment, both local and global – day and night, summer and winter, seeding and harvesting. The city and its inhabitants are committed only to the man-made laws, with the meanings and values imputed to them by humans. If they had dispersed upon the face of the whole earth, the builders of the tower would have to adopt upon them the local qualities of each disparate habitation, and would have been, no doubt, forced to develop a local culture that suits the condition of the new habitation. They preferred to dominate, rather than be ruled by nature – to impose a uniform and artificial human order upon nature. The prospects for such an enterprise are enormous, and so are the risks. When one vital component would fail in the great artificial system, this may lead to a total collapse, compared with natural systems, which contain much more redundancies and flexibility.
Here we can again realize the validity of the Torah as a vision for our times. For today we are faced with the building of such a Tower of Babel, of a global urbanization and distancing humankind from the need to consider daily the natural conditions. The developing communications media, the computerized communications systems, may turn us again into “one language and few issues” – and with them the dangers of technological breakdowns, ecological catastrophe and environmental destruction. We must therefore beware of the “Tower of Babel Syndrome”. (The selection for destruction of the World Trace Center towers was not accidental, because these towers symbolized to the terrorists – and to many others – the “Tower of Babel” of our times, “The New World Order” that threatens all whose world – or local – order is different).
At the middle of the world-city that was built by the people of Babel – they erected a man-made mountain. Not a Temple that maintains good connection between heaven and earth, not a garden that may enable the extension between humankind-Adam and the Living Earth-Adamah, but a mountain of burnt bricks, which has no interiority and no center, but only a call of challenge against heaven.
Most painters who imaged the Tower of Babel, pictured it as an enormous phalic element, tall and narrow. From archeological excavations it emerges that in ancient Babel it was customary to build Zikurats. The Zikurat is a stepped pyramid, built as cube upon cube – customarily sven cubes - where each cube is smaller than the lower one, until at the top there is only a small cell where one may stay.
In contrast with the lightweight portable Tabernacle, of the Israelites in the desert, in contrast with the Temple of Solomon, that most of its worship was done in the large court, and in contrast with the light-filled Gothis Cathedrals, and in contrast with many of the ancient temples, the Zikurat is not attempting to allow flows from below above, or from above to below. Some ancient temples served as lightening rods, which were supposed to transfer heavenly affluence for the fertility of the soil. In the city – in Babel – there was no need of all these. Their very intention that “its top may reach to heaven”, namely above the clouds, above the need to be alert to the changes of weather – indicates their attitude. On the top of the Tower there stood most likely the leader – the priest, the astrologer, whose role was to observe the stars and contend with the gods.
What, then, are the connections between the Cube – which served as template for the Tabernacle and the Temple – and the Pyramids of Egypt abd the stepped pyramids – the Zikkurats – that apparently served as template for the Tower of Babel?
Not only that the connection with the havens is not an open connection, but the fact that there is no interior space to speak of indicates that only the leader – one person – could stand at the top of the tower, the top of the pyramid.
Perhaps the chief problematic idea was the endeavor to focus on the external side of the structure “”let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach to heaven”. This is not a tower inspired by an architecture that seeks to gather the community inside. As we have compared it, it does not resemble the lightweight portable Tabernacle, or the massive Temple with courts overflowing with people, certainly not like the lighted and lightweight Gothic Cathedrals, designed to accommodate the community and its needs.
The Zikurat parallels thus the Egyptian Pyramids in its external splendor, even if it might have stood for even greater height. The pyramids, too, was not intended to serve real functional needs but to stand up for ever, with the cost of countless human lives. The terrible slavery of the Children of Israel was “in bricks and mortar”, just like the work of the builders of the Tower of Babel.
“Let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech” (Gen. 11:7).
We have already mentioned that the two construction projects of Parashat No’ah represent two conceptions – a feminine and masculine ones – one that gives a living room, the other all focused upon the top.
Also the punishment suffered by the builders of the tower stands in dramatic contrast to the deeds of the builders of the Tower.
We have already brought the explanation of the Ba’al Shem Tov to the term Tevah-Ark, as representing a word of speech. Let us momentarily assume that all the deeds of the Flood and the salvaging of the Ark are not only an ecological narrative, but also a description of the development of human language and communication. Who came into the Ark? Shem, Ham and Yefet. Each one of the three Sons of Noah represents a certain facet of humankind. They represent not just the forefathers of the races of humankind, the Semitic, Hamitic (African) and Yefet (Indo-European) people but also, to a large extent, three distinct “cognitive types” – the “Sons of Shem” (the Hebrew word “Shem” means “Name” and is related to Shemi’ah-Hearing) emphasize Hearing, “the Sons of Yefet” emphasize Beauty – Yofi – and the “Sons of Ham” express themselves well by bodily movement and gestures. These are the three Cognitive Types and Learning Styles that are used by educational scientists today.
Let us examine through this cognitive system the three aspects of human language.
The sciences of Language (Linguistics, Semiotics) delineate three aspects to language – the Semantic (word meaning) aspect; the syntactic (grammar) aspect and the pragmatic (usage) aspect. The esoteric explanation of Hokhmat haNistar (called by the acronym HeN, which is the reverse of the letter-consonantss of the name No’aH), is that each one of the three Sons of Noah has special access to one aspect of the language – the sons of Shem know the meanings – MaShMaUyot – of the Language of the Torah, the Sons of Yefet can paint it in its Beauty – Yofi, “to bring the Beauty of Yefet to the tents of Shem” – whereas the Sons of Ham may animate and dance it.
In parallel with the genetic diversity that the Ark carries, it carries thus diversity in the styles of learning and speech, not in the words themselves. The whole Ark was built three levels of cells, which parallel the roots of the Semitic words, the majority of which have three-letter roots[4].
This is the worl into which the builders of the Tower were born, “one language and one principle”, uniformity constructed to replace diversity. The punishment for the removal of diversity and for the desire to unify the Ark into a structure that becomes ever narrower for making “a top that may reach heaven”; the punishment for the fear from the blessed diversity, through the claim of “lest we be dispersed” is toal chaos – “that they may not understand each other’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from there…” (Gen. 11:7-8).
The restitution for this chaos is held again in the hands of “The Sons of Noah” – Shem, Ham and Yefet. The Torah will be whole only in the Temple of the Time to Come, where people of all the nations will be represented there, as the prophets said: “And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the Lord’s House shall be established at the top of the mountains… and all the nations shall flow unto it” (Isaiah 2:2), and there “For then I will convert the peoples to a purer language, that they may all call upon the Name of the Lord” (Zefania 3:9)
The Ark and the Tower are thus not just physical constructions, but also linguistic allegories. In the threefold template of the Stories of Genesis: of Bri’ah, Yetsira, Assiyah (Creation, Formation, Making) – or in a more familiar terms: Thought, Speech and Action – there Parashat No’ah tells about experiences that correspond with the level of Yetsirah. Not only “for the impulse – Yetser – of man’s heart is evil from his youth” (Gen. 8:21), but because human creation is mainly verbal. TheArk is an allegory for immersing and going into the language, for the transformation of speech into a holy language, whereas the story of the Tower is the story of the decay and loss of the common language of humankind.
“The Waters of Noah” (Mey No’ah, Isaiah 54:9), which come to annihilate everything, to obliterate memory of everything, at the beginning of the process of human choice – come as an antithesis to the “End Waters” (Mayim aharonim), as described by the prophet Isaiah “for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11:9). All of human history is thus necessary to turn the waters from a medium that obliterates memory, to a preserving environment, into a “Noosphere”, namely a layer of Knowledge that covers the whole earth.
In our times there is rising the threat of the impending flood. Scientists are predicting that “The Greenhouse Effect” of global warming, which was precepitated by human actions, through a careless use of technological resources, will bring to the melting of the polar icecaps and in sequence to the flooding of the coastal cities, cities full of human inhabitants and cultural treasures. Already now there are environmentalists who are preparing rescue craft – from boats at mountaintops to whole biospheres that emulate the terrestrial ecosystem. Both means are attempts to reproduce Noah’s Ark. The fear of the approaching flood is just one expression to the worries that the enormous technological advance, managed by an exploitative economic system – something like a modern Tower of Babel – is liable to bring to catastrophes and to the destruction of the whole global biosphere. These worries breed new belief systems and religions, many of which emphasize the commands for environmental preservation and biosphere preservation. Among these there appear also the religion of the Noahides, “The Sons of Noah”.
The concept from were the Noahides, about whom we’ll soon expound, draw is not new. The Talmud, and in its wake several Jewish philosophers and scripture interpreters, have treated extensively the Seven Commands that would bind also those who are not amng The Children of Abraham.
Straight reading of the Bible reveals several divine commands that were given already before there appeared the People of Israel, which are: Adam was commanded “Be fruitful, and multiply, replenish the earth, and subdue it (“her” in Hebrew). And have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Gen 1:28), but with only vegetarian nutrition. and then later “Of every tree of the garden thou mayst freely eat, but of the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, thou shalt not eat of it” (Gen. 2:17). Whereas Noah was commanded “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every bird of the air… Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you, even as the green herb have I given tiy all things. But flesh with its life, which is its blood, you shall not eat. And surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man’s brother will I require the life of man. Whoso sheds man’s blood by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God made the man” (Gen. 9:1-6).
On the face of it, it is possible to learn three prohibitions from the fregoing: keep away from Knowledge (of Good and Evil) – but this command has been abrogated and changed – and in addition: do not eat a part of a living being and do not murder.
In tractate Hulin of the Talmud, there are detailed seven implied commands that are learnt from these: 1) To appoint courts of law to settle disputes; 2) Not to curse the Name of God; 3) Avoidance of Idolatry; 4) Prohibition of Incest; 5) Prohibition of shedding blood; 6) Prhibition of theft/exploitation (Gezel), and 7) Prohibition of eating a mmber of a living being – Evver min haHay.
All these prohibitions, apart from the last, are basic rules of human society. Maimonides (the RaMBaM) even distinguishes between the righteous gentiles (Haside Umot haOlam) who keep the Noahide commands because they read the Torah, and the sages of the gentiles – who keep them out of their own reflection.
The exception here is, as we noted, the prohibition about the living limb. On the face of it, eating a living limb is extremely rre in our times, and it does not seem to provide a basis for a new global culture. But since this command was given to “No’ah Ish ha’Adamah” – which means literally “Noah the husband of the Living Earth”, it is very likely that its meaning encompasses also a limb of the Living Earth – the Adamah.
With this we return to our times and to the nevironmental concerns. The ancient concept, that the earth is a living being, is becoming accepted amount adherents of “Deep Ecology” (thus, for example” in “The Gaia Theory” of James Lovelock[5]). Now to the extent that the Adamah-Earth is a living being, then the meaning of the prohibition of a limb from the living – Evver min haHay – is that there should be constraints on activities that maim the Adamah, such as construction, mining and agriculture in ways that damage the earth – and this has global significance[6].
In our days, there has started to grow a new universal religion, which is based on the seven Noahide commands. This religion is spreading nowadays in the USA and ther Western countries, and in the process it is also improving and getting deeper insights. There are thus those who present the seven Noahide commandements as generic ones, from which derive additional commands, and there are those who draw a parallel between the seven commands and the seven Sefirot (the divine attributes that the Zohar relates to the seven Days of Genesis, see chapter 1).
The union between the environmentalists and Noahides is really called for. Together, they would be able to determine that any human activity that is found to disturb the ecological cycles of the earth-Adamah should be taken as prohibited thrugh the rule of “Limb from a Libving Being” (Evver min haHay) – through which will be affirmed most of the demands of the adherents of the environment and ecology, and the Noahid religionwould be able to become a significant world movement.
There are those among the adherents of the environment who attack “The Judeo- Christian Tradition” as if it were respnsible to a large extent to the contemporary degradation of the environment. A prevalent claim is that the Biblical attitude towards the earth is exploitative, since in His first command to Adam, God said “Be fruitful, and multiply, replenish the earth, and subdue it/her”. But accrding to our understanding of the Torah as a narrative of sequential restitution (Tikkun), this command has already been changed and corrected. In His blessing-command for Noah and his sons upon their exit from the Ark, God again says, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth”. But the added command “and subdue it/her” is no longer there. “Noah the husbandman of the earth” (No’ah Ish ha’Adamah) is the New Adam, who is appointed to rectify that which was spoiled by the first Adam, on whose account the Adamahbecame cursed, and he was to renew the diadic relationship of “Adam va’Adamah”. But as we shall still see, this was not enough. The problem with the religious conception of “Gaia” is that this is a pagan conception[7], which is symbolised in the Torah by the Bacchanalic figure of the drunker Noah, who loses his consciousness in his copulation with the earth powers. There would be required, therefore, an additional restoration, which would be effected by the Children of Abraham.
The Potential of the Noahid Teachings to become “Torah
of the Tree of Life”.
In conclusion, let us examine the potential of the concept f “The Seven Commands of the Noahides” to become a religion for all humankind, or significant publics of it. For this end we shall need to compare the basic “Seven Noahide Commands” to the Seven Days of Genesis and the seven lower Sefirot – “the Sefirot of Construction” – as a raw Torah, and explicate more the hidden side of HeN (reverse of No’aH, and acronym of Hokhmat ha’Nistar – the hidden Wisdom), which may be embodied in the Ark.
The seven commandments are, as noted, kind of “Raw Torah”, from which it is necessary to extend their “generations” (Toldot), as is written in the beginning of the Parashah – these are the generations of Noah (Eleh Toldot No’ah). The Torah we have from Sinai, and is intendd for the People of Israel, has, as we know, 613 detailed commandments, of which 248 commands for action and 365 prohibitions. Yet they all derive, by certain courses, from the Ten Commandments on the Tablets. Through the generations, these 365 commandments were xtended through the mechanisms of “The Oral Torah” to a huge system of commandments, laws, rulings, statutes and norms. This gives a certain model for the derivation of a universal Teaching/Torah from the skeleton of “The Seven Noahide Commandments” as generic commands, as well as from the embedded lessons of the Ark, when seen as a Tabernacle.
The Ten Commandments that we have are those of “The Second Tablets”, which were given after the sin of the Golden Calf. Over the generations, many have wondered whether the First Tablets - about which it is written “And the tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, engraved upon the tablets” (Exodus 32:16) – were identical with those of the second set (as written in Exodus 32:1), or were different. Is it possible that they contained a different and simpler one, more from the side of mercy than of the side of judgement? There were Mekubalim who maintained thus, and even thought that in the future (perhaps in those days about which the prophecy said: “the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord-YHWH, as the waters cover the sea”?) this Torah might become revealed anew. Let us examine then how might the Noahide teachings to be regarded as a parallel to the first tablets.
It is possible that the Ten Commandments that were engraved upon the first tablets were were in parallel with the structure of the biosphere as represented at Noah’s Ark. We have already shown that the seven commands that are referred to today can be regarded as relevant and universal commands if we relate to “Limb from a living being” as relating to the whole earth, and the totality of these seven primordial commands would relate to the preservation of the global biosphere, as it is represented symbolically in the Ark – Tevah – that symbolizes and preserve Nature – Teva.
We have already drawn the parallel between the seven Noahide commandments and the seven lower “Sefirot of Construction”, which are relatively more manifest. But the pattern of the Tree of Life, which is a Kabbalah model, assumes the existence of three more hidden Sefirot, which relate to Wisdom-Hokhma, Understanding-Binah and Da’at – which entail the nurture of the intelligence and of thought. So in summary we get ten possible prime commandments.
“And Noah found favor/grace – HeN - in the eyes of the Lord”. Is not this the aim of the universal religion – that each human being, Ben Adam, or Ben No’ah – will find the hidden grace- HeN? The Ark is supposed to be the means whereby the divine gift would pass from Noah to his offsprings. Not through biological inheritance, but through the rectification of Knowledge, retification-Tikkun to the failure of the first Adam. It is possible to develop a concept of an “Ark of Education”, the arena of manifestation, realizations and collection of insights. Perhaps like a womb that serves collective rebirthing through various types of spiritual exercises.
Let us suggest here a new vision to the Noahides: it is possible to envision the future schools of the Noahides built in the form of the Ark, located within nature parks and functioning like active nature museums (like fourth generation science museums, in which the visitors exercise in the making of science[8]), with animal cells for caring for and scores of laboratory cells. Such an Ark would function as “A Learning Womb”[9] in which the trainees will learn to care for the ecosystem of the planet “to till it and to keep it”. (By its form the Ark recalls chiefly a giant coffin. But its function is actually survival. In the conclusion of his book “Moby Dick”, Melville describes a similar situation, when a coffin acts as a life raft for the last survivor from the sunken ship. Only that Noah’s Ark does not serve a sole survivor, but it preserves the whole global ecosystem).
Notes
[1] The characterization of “Brain”, “heart” and “liver” – in Hebrew Mo’ah, Lev and Kaved – is characteristic of the spiritual anatomy used in the Kabbalah. It is of some significance that the acronym that is derived from these three words is Melekh, namely “king”, signifying the “rulers” of the body.
[2] "Pardes" is a Persian word that entered Hebrew, meaning a watered grove, and from which came the word “Paradise”. In Tractate Hagigah of the Talmud (Bavli 14:2, Yerushalmi 77), is given an enigmatic story about “The Four who entered the Pardes” meaning some secret and mysterious domain. The common Jewish interpretation from Medieval time onward, was that this Pardes is an acronyme for the 4 levels of interpretation of the Torah – Pshat, plain interpretation; Remez - hint; Drash an exegesis, or allegorical meaning; and Sod – secret – or mystical meaning. In our book “Let the Old be renewed and the New sanctified – insights about the meaning of the Temple”, Ohad Ezrahi shows quite conclusively that the original meaning must have refered to the Holy of Holies in the Temple, to where the prophets and the mystical sages entered in ecstatic contemplation. See also a short story “Another Story of Four who wanted to enter PARaDiSe”.
[3] See, for example, Rianne Eisler: "The Chalice and the Blade".
[4] The very salvation-sparing – HaNiNah - of NoaH from the fate of the rest of his generations is noted by, perhaps even derives from, the addition of a third root letter to the two letters (consonants) of his name. This letter – N’un – means “Fish” – a creature not subject to perish in the flood.
[5] According to this cybernetic theory, the Earth has many diverse circuits, which are connected and integrated in homeostatic feedback loops, which maintain specific levels of vital components, like the percentage of oxygen in the air and the salinity of the oceans. These are specifically the characteristic of living systems – where the various living creatures that live upon the earth are integrated within the overall cycles of life. The theory was first proposed in the book of James Lovelock (1979): “Gaia – A New Look at Life on Earth”. Oxford University Press.
[6] See also my article “World, Humankind and Living Earth” (Olam, Adam va’Adamah) in the Intrnet.
[7] See also my article “Eco-Paganism, Eco-Antisemitism and Biblical Eco-Logics” in the Internet.
[8] See Bradburne, J.M. (1991): "Beyond Hands-ON: Truth-telling and the Doing of science". In R. Glanville and G. de Zeeuw (eds.) Mutual Uses of Cybernetics and Science. Special issue of Systematica: Juoprnal of the Dutch Systems Group. Amsterdam, Thesis Publishers.
[9]
The concept of “The Learning Womb” was initiated by Julius Stulman, the
president of “The World Institute, which operated in Jerusalem during 1972-74,
and where the author used to work. The concept was described in an initial
publication:
Y.
Hayutman (1974): "The Learning Womb - an Innovative Educational System for
Brazil", U.F.Pe. It was later further developed, though under a different name,
in the context of the future Temple of Jerusalem – Y. Hayut-Man “Patterns
and Insights for building the Temple in our times” in the book of
Hayut-Man abd Ezrahi (in Hebrew): “Let the Old be renewed and the
New Sanctified – Insights into the Meaning of the Temple. High-Or Ltd, Jerusalem
1997.