“Noach was in his six hundredth year when the Flood occurred and water covered the earth”
Noach was born in the year 1056 (2704 BCE) and passed in the year 2006 (1754 BCE). Thus, Noach’s life spans the entire second millennium of history. The main event of the second millennium is the deluge. It is in its description of this global flood, documented throughout ancient Mesopotamia, that we find the Torah’s description that, “All the wellsprings of the abyss erupted and the windows of the heavens opened,” words that the Zohar interpreted as alluding to the eventual joining of Divine and mundane waters and wisdom in the sixth millennium.
In this verse, the lower waters appear first (as the wellsprings of the abyss) suggesting that in the flood-millennium mundane wisdom was developed before Divine wisdom (described as the waters coming from the windows of the heaven).
Indeed, we find that the life of Noach, the most important person living in the second millennium, is replete with the discovery of natural, mundane wisdom is Noach. His life straddled both the antediluvian and the postdiluvian worlds.
Noach is considered one of the most gifted inventors of all time. The Torah explains that he was named Noach, which means “relief” (נֶחָמָה) or “solace” because his father hoped that, “This one will bring us relief from our work and from the anguish of our toil over the soil God has cursed.” Noach’s unique abilities as an inventor and as a master of the natural world were gifted to him by God. Apparently at an early age, he invented the plow, perhaps the most important instrument of the Agricultural Revolution, which shifted mankind from surviving as foragers to living as farmers. Relatively speaking, the plow has had more impact on bettering humanity’s physical condition than even the computer.
Later, God entrusted Noach with the monumental task of building an ark suitable for surviving the flood and carrying a sampling of Earth’s living organisms to safety. While in the ark, Noah exhibited unsurpassed insight into all living organisms and their habits ensuring that all had their myriad needs met, on time.
After the flood, and still within his lifetime, Noach’s descendants (possibly using his engineering skills) constructed the Tower of Babel. This was another magnificent engineering project, requiring a very high degree of cooperation between those involved, except that its purpose was not to serve God—a noble purpose which would have unified scientific and Divine knowledge—but to rebel against Him.
What most people know about Noah is that God forged a universal covenant with mankind through him. Named after Noach (even though most of the universal commandments were already given to Adam), the Noachide covenant between God and humanity serves as a contract whose purpose is to both ensure that the world never again sink to its antediluvian level and to provide a new starting point for humanity’s pursuit of its goals as masters of the mundane realm. The Noahide covenant affords every single human being a chance to grow both spiritually and materially in the shadow of God, as Noach had done prior to the flood. With this covenant with humanity made through him, Noach was the individual who was meant to serve as a conduit to the great revelation of Divinity in the second millennium. But Noach failed to live an exemplary life, dedicated to Godliness, after the flood. Instead, it was his descendant, Abram (later renamed Abraham) who succeeded him as the greatest recipient of Divine knowledge in the second millennium.
(Excerpted from Wisdom: Integrating Torah and Science, chapter 4, “Six Millennia, Six Integrations”)
