Noah: A Covenant With HumanitySample

A Covenant with Humanity

There were ten generations between Adam and Noah. During that time, from the moment Adam sinned by eating from the Tree of Knowledge, humankind was on a spiritual and moral decline. By the time Noah’s generation came around, humanity was in such a depraved state—steeped in sexual immorality, murder, and theft—that God had to intercede.

Jewish tradition teaches that if the generation alive during the flood would have repented—even as the rain fell and the waters rose—God would have accepted their repentance and saved them all. The rain could have served to turn the hearts of humanity back to God. However, the people refused to repent, and the flood cleansed the earth of all their evil.

In His infinite wisdom, God chose to begin the world again. For that, He needed a person and a plan. The person God selected was Noah, and the plan He put into place to ensure a better world was the covenant He made with Noah and all his descendants. Like any other covenant, this agreement would serve as a contract between God and humanity, where both parties had obligations to each other.

Interestingly, the symbol of the covenant is the rainbow. The rainbow can be seen as half of a circle, or half of a whole. Even when a rainbow is seen in its entirety from one end to another, it is still only a half a circle. This semicircle placed in the sky reminds us of God’s commitment never to destroy the world again. The other half—the part that would complete the circle—has to come from humanity on earth. It is our obligation not to destroy ourselves. As God told Noah, “I will demand an accounting from every animal. And from each human being...”(Genesis 9:5).

Ultimately, this covenant was not enough. The ten generations between Noah and Abraham failed, and God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah before their way of life spread throughout the world. Later, God would create a new covenant with Abraham and then another with his descendants, Israel. However, the covenant with Noah—and, by extension, with all humanity—is an important step in this process, and is this lesson’s focus.