#it’s full of allusions to stories from the tanach

[bonyassfish]

It should be illegal for Christians to cover Leonard Cohen songs

[dafpunk]

Noach

24 October 2020

TW: sexual assault

Holy shit y’all, what a parshah. Getting into it:

6:11 “Became corrupt” is “vatishcheit” and “full of lawlessness” is “vatimalei”. At least the first one is familiar from “al cheit shechatanu” But have I heard of “mala’anu”? If it were only vatishcheit—which could be interpreted as “missing the mark”—maybe it was just that G-d was disappointed in humankind? G-d saw that the thing created had free will and we weren’t perfect, so G-d destroyed all of us?

6:14 lol gopher wood

6:15 So dang specific about the construction of the ark! If G-d weren’t so exacting, maybe humankind would have done better in G-d’s sight before the flood!

7:10 It sounds like Noach went into the ark seven days early. Can you imagine? What would it have been like—you’re getting used to your new home for the next year and it’s taking forever for the end of the world to come. You’re not even totally sure it is going to come, the thing you’re trying to escape with this astounding, ridiculous plan. Was Noach wondering? Or was his faith so strong?

7:13 Now it says that the same day the rains started to fall and the fountains of the great deep burst, they went into the ark. Which one was it, then or seven days earlier? Also there’s no discussion of what Noach’s family is going through at this time. There are eight of them, but only one of them seems to have any subjectivity at all so far.

7:22 Only breathing things perished, clearly. Were the fish and sea creatures as perfect as Noach this whole time?

8:1 G-d’s attention was 100% diverted while everything on Earth perished. On the one hand, that could be sweet—imagine HaRachaman, El Rachum v’Chanun gently, considerately causing the compassionate drowning death of every living being, like putting down a beloved pet. Or was Adonai HaDayan Emet actually just reveling in destruction, gleefully tallying the deaths?

8:1 cont’d And G-d remembered Noach—what was Noach doing out of G-d’s sight? Things that weren’t recorded in the Torah, clearly—as in, when our sages and so on posited that no one on the ark had sex for a whole year, maybe there were some unrighteous deeds done while G-d wasn’t watching? Noach definitely had the capacity to get stinky drunk and strip.

8:7 The raven, as far as we can tell, never actually came back to the ark. Or Maybe it never went far? I feel like we always talk about the dove coming back, but not much about the raven. Maybe it kept circling around but never actually leaving the ark?

8:11 Apparently every living thing was wiped off the planet but an olive tree slash olive pit survived the whole flood to such an extent that it just sprang up in the 40 days (plus a few weeks?) and already had leaves and branches and everything? And after all that water and humidity, no mold damage issues (also pretty concerned for the vineyard in 9:20)? Truly a miracle from G-d.

8:13 Incredible how precise this can seem in counting the time, and then you try to scrutinize and actually count the time a little bit and it seems to fall apart.

8:20 Noach sacrificed one of every single clean animal and bird? How long did that take? This is a pretty weird flex. There are lots of animal sacrifices in the Torah, of course. But all of these are out of the person’s own possessions, a sacrifice where part of your possessions—livestock—goes to G-d in thanks or compensation for absolution. But these are all the world’s animals, which I would argue are not Noach’s wealth, but the wealth of all creation. Noach salvaged them at G-d’s command; nowhere else is someone commanded to safeguard certain pieces of property for future keeping and then destroys them! So in returning the live animals to G-d, Noach is being a little flippant, a little rude to G-d—like, have these back, they’re so unimportant that after I observed the commandment, I’ll destroy all evidence of it.

8:20 cont’d So why the heck does G-d smell the pleasing odor and make the covenant with Noach? What about that wanton destruction on Noach’s part made G-d want to end the destruction on G-d’s part and make the promise to keep perpetuating the world?

9:3 And so it seems surprising that there are Jewish vegetarians, but explains why traditional meals are so non-veg.

9:5 Before this, did G-d really not care about the value of human life? Maybe that was the part that was lacking before the flood, just saying. Relatedly, the covenant of perpetuation is really important here. Without a guarantee from HaBorei Bereishit that the Earth won’t be destroyed at any given moment, I can imagine all kinds of wickedness stemming from short-term-ism and short-sightedness.

9:24 “When Noach woke up from his wine and learned what his youngest son had done to him” What had he done to him? It’s unclear; I saw a few different interpretations. Steven Greenberg’s reading in Torah Queeries cites Rashi’s discussion of Rav, who said Ham castrated Noach, and Shmuel, who said, even one step more horrifically, that Ham raped Noach, both by allusions to other places in the Tanach. Greenberg reads the narrator talking about “seeing” and then Noach waking up and understanding some “doing”—a much more active verb—as the kind of seeing “that is about violence and possession, about control and domination”: the use of something sexual for destructive ends. This story is extremely confusing, including the fact that Canaan, Ham’s son, is cursed instead of Ham, leading to an alternative interpretation that Canaan committed the crime against Ham, not Ham against Noach. In any of these cases, the story is extremely complicated, almost as bad as the foreskin part with Tzipporah in Exodus, and probably not discussed much because of its traumatic content, complication, and ambiguity.

10:1 This genealogy is interestingly backward-derived, like the genealogies of Greek gods, but for actual ethnicities, which makes it seem a little more insidious, reminiscent of race science. It’s even worse since we’ve already established that one whole branch of the family tree is cursed to servitude.

11:1 You get through some genealogy, have some Tower of Babel as a treat.