Noah in the Torah, the Gospels and the Qur’an

Noah is the man God saved from the flood in Genesis, a name Jesus uses as a warning in the Gospels, and a prophet with a whole sūrah of the Qur’an to himself. The three scriptures agree on the rescue. They part over what Noah said, how long he said it, and what happened to him after the water went down.

Noah in Genesis

The flood story runs from Genesis 6 to 9. God sees that the wickedness of humankind is great, and resolves to blot it out. One man is set apart: Noah was righteous, blameless in his generation, and he walked with God.¹

God tells him to build an ark 300 cubits long and to bring his family and the animals into it. The rain falls for 40 days and 40 nights, the waters hold the earth for 150 days, and the ark comes to rest on the mountains of Ararat. He sends out a raven, then a dove, and the dove returns with an olive leaf in its beak.²

Then comes the covenant. God sets the rainbow in the clouds as a sign that no flood will destroy the earth again, and the patriarch lives 950 years in all.³

He does a great deal in Genesis and says almost nothing. Before the flood he obeys in silence, and the first words the text gives him come afterwards.

Those words belong to a hard episode. He plants a vineyard, drinks its wine, and lies uncovered in his tent. His son Ham sees him, and Noah, on waking, curses Ham’s son Canaan to be a slave to his brothers.⁴ Readers in later centuries stretched that curse into a charter for slavery by race, a use the text itself never names.

Noah in the Gospels and the letters

Jesus speaks of Noah as a warning about the end. As it was in the days of the flood, he says, people went on eating and drinking and marrying, and they knew nothing until the water swept them away.⁵

The letters go further and give him a voice. The Second Letter of Peter calls him “a herald of righteousness”, and the Letter to the Hebrews says that by building the ark he condemned the world.⁶ So the New Testament remembers a man who warned his people, where Genesis records a man who built.

Jewish tradition kept the same memory. The Talmud says that Noah the righteous rebuked the people of his generation while he built, and that they mocked him: “Old man, why are you building this ark?”⁷

Noah in the Qur’an

The Qur’an tells the story of Nūḥ (نوح) many times, and Sūrat Nūḥ, the 71st sūrah, is given over to it. Its centre is the preaching. The ark and the water come at the end.

وَلَقَدۡ أَرۡسَلۡنَا نُوحًا إِلَىٰ قَوۡمِهِۦ فَلَبِثَ فِيهِمۡ أَلۡفَ سَنَةٍ إِلَّا خَمۡسِينَ عَامًۭا فَأَخَذَهُمُ ٱلطُّوفَانُ وَهُمۡ ظَٰلِمُونَ ١٤

And We certainly sent Noah to his people, and he remained among them a thousand years minus fifty years, and the flood seized them while they were wrongdoers.

Qur’an 29:14⁸

Sūrat Nūḥ records what those 950 years cost him. “My Lord, indeed I invited my people [to truth] night and day,” he says, and his call only drove them further away: they put their fingers in their ears and covered themselves with their garments.⁹ His message is the one every prophet in the Qur’an brings, to worship God alone. His people hold to their idols, and the sūrah names five of them: Wadd, Suwāʿ, Yaghūth, Yaʿūq and Nasr.¹⁰

When the command comes, he loads the ship with a pair of each kind, his family, and the few who believed.¹¹ One of his sons stays apart. His father calls to him to come aboard, and the son answers that he will climb a mountain to escape the water. “There is no protector today from the decree of Allah,” Noah replies, and the waves come between them.¹²

He then pleads for his son as one of his family, and God corrects him: “he is not of your family; indeed, he is [one whose] work was other than righteous.”¹³ Lineage saves no one. The ship comes to rest on al-Jūdī (الجودي), a mountain the Qur’an names in place of Ararat.

What the accounts of Noah keep

Set side by side, the three scriptures share a frame. A corrupt generation, one righteous man, a ship built on God’s instruction, and a world given a second start. On that much the Torah, the Gospels and the Qur’an speak with one voice.

The differences fall where al-Fārūqī said they would, in the historical record and its handling of the prophets. The Qur’an gives Noah a long ministry and a message, the call to one God that he shares with Abraham and Moses (see Abrahamic monotheism). It tells nothing of the vineyard or the curse. For the Qur’an a prophet is a human being, open to a plea that God corrects, and also a man God guards from disgrace.

The Qur’an measures the earlier account by its origin. It confirms the rescue, the warning and the righteousness of the man, and it leaves out the episode that later readers turned against a whole people. That is the method the Qur’an applies to the Bible across the board, set out in What the Qur’an says about the Bible.

One thread runs through all three. The rabbis taught that every descendant of Noah, meaning every human being, is bound by seven commandments, among them courts of justice and the ban on idolatry.¹⁴ The Qur’an says that God sent a messenger to every nation with the same call.¹⁵ Both make Noah the father of a single humanity under a single law, which is where the Abrahamic family tree begins. Best of Islam takes that claim further in A messenger to every nation.

Further reading: Figures of the Abrahamic religions, Abrahamic monotheism, The Abrahamic family tree.

Notes

1. Genesis 6:5-9. ↩
2. Genesis 6:15; 7:12, 24; 8:4-11. ↩
3. Genesis 9:13-17, 29. ↩
4. Genesis 9:20-27. ↩
5. Matthew 24:37-39; Luke 17:26-27. ↩
6. 2 Peter 2:5, NRSVUE; Hebrews 11:7. ↩
7. Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 108b, William Davidson translation, Sefaria. ↩
8. Qur’an 29:14, trans. Saheeh International; Arabic text from Quran.com. ↩
9. Qur’an 71:5-7, trans. Saheeh International. ↩
10. Qur’an 71:23. ↩
11. Qur’an 11:40. ↩
12. Qur’an 11:42-43, trans. Saheeh International. ↩
13. Qur’an 11:44-46, trans. Saheeh International. ↩
14. Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 56a. ↩
15. Qur’an 16:36. ↩