GENESIS 7


1 And Yahweh said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation.


As the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.


In the days of Noah, things had attained a bad development. There was a complete abandonment of the restraints of divine law among the population, and God saw fit to remove them by a flood, saving "only Noah".

The flood was not an ending of the Lord's law among men, but the assertion of submission to God as the divinely desired rule of life for all men.

The reason of Noah's exemption from the universal destruction was expressed thus:

"Thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation" (Gen. 7:1).

The continued life of himself and family was to be on the basis of submission to God:

"Behold, I establish my covenant with you, and with your seed after you . . . between me and all flesh that is upon the earth" (9:9,17).

Law of Moses Ch 2




In process of time, Noah was "warned of Elohim of things not seen as yet." Noah believed them, and "God, by His spirit" in him, "went and preached to the spirits (now) in prison " (1 Pet. 3:19), that is, to the Antedillivians, "who were disobedient in the days of Noah."

He warned them of the coming flood, which would "destroy them from the earth;" and proved to them his own conviction of its certainty by "preparing an ark for the safety of his own house; by the which he condemned the world, and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith " (Heb. 11:7).

But, his faith, thus made perfect by his works, made no salutary impression upon his contemporaries.

Elpis Israel 1.4.



13 In the selfsame day entered Noah, and Shem, and Ham, and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah's wife, and the three wives of his sons with them, into the ark;

Noah and his family left a world absorbed with its own material wants, leaving homes, property and relations for a situation in which was promised only the sparsest of necessities. He did it because he "believed God."

GEM



15 And they went in unto Noah into the ark, two and two of all flesh, wherein is the breath of life.

The same

"breath of the spirit of lives,"

I say, is common to all animals and man. This will be evident to those who can consult the original of Gen. vii. 22,15. They know that in the English Version it is not correctly rendered "breath of life;" the words "the spirit of" have been unfaithfully omitted. In verse 15, the words rendered "breath of life" are not the same as those similarly rendered in Gen. ii. 7. In this, it reads nishmath khayyim, "breath of lives;" and in that, "from all the flesh which has in it ruach khayyim, spirit of lives."

So that man is affirmed to have "the breath of lives" in his nostrils, and all other flesh "the spirit of lives" in theirs; hence, as spirit is regarded as of a higher dignity than breath, we might, on such premises, conclude that the "lower" animals are really demiurgically superior to man. And, indeed, when we compare the doings of said animals with the conduct of men, lay and clerical, we might suppose that the stupidity and brutishness of brain-flesh was truly their distinguishing characteristic, and that the so-called "brutes" were essentially their superiors.

But said premises are not sound; for the superiority of the one race over the other is not predicated on the matter of which they are made, and by which they are vitalized, but on the organic formation of the same. Hence, there is no natural demiurgic difference between an Archbishop of New York or of Canterbury, or a Bishop of Natal, and the serpent and monkey tribes of the forest; the Spirit, therefore, by Moses (and this perhaps, may be the reason why the Bishop of Natal is so hostile to Moses) has been careful in Gen. vii. 22, to give us to understand that the nishmah and ruach, "breath" and "spirit," are common to all kinds of human brutes, both "lower animals" and men.

I say human brutes, for the word human, which one class of brutes has appropriated to itself exclusively, really or demiurgically pertains to all the earthborns or formations from the ground*.

[* Homo, a man or woman, for humo, from humus, h.e., made of earth. Hence, humanus, human (Lat. Dict.).]

The text reads, after mentioning all the creatures,

"and every man, all which has breath of spirit of lives, kol asher nishmath-ruach khayyim, in their nostrils, out of all which is in the dry land, died."

We have seen that man and the other creatures are all termed nephesh, and are said to have nephesh in them; and in Gen. ix. 4, we are informed by the Spirit what nephesh elementally, or in concrete essence, is, in the law given to Noah.

"Flesh with its nephesh, or soul, its blood, ye shall not eat."

From these premises, then, we learn, that men and their brethren of the ground are all of them souls -- human or ground-souls; that they have all got souls in them; and that these souls are the blood of their flesh.

Eureka 6.5.5.



19 And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered.

The first reflection that occurs to the mind is, that in the flood itself (leaving out of account the miraculous nature of its revelation beforehand to Noah, and the directions for preparation) the miraculous element was, so to speak, minimised to the lowest point. God could have annihilated the human race more expeditiously in many other ways; for example, Nadab and Abihu struck dead in a moment; all the first-born of Egypt destroyed in a night; Sennacherib's army decimated by a single fatal blast, and many more.

In the flood, natural suffocation by water was resorted to. There was doubtless a reason for this slow method. Probably, it admitted of those adjuncts of preliminary terror which the justice of God saw the case demanded. Then, again, Noah's salvation was accomplished by as little of the miraculous as possible. It would have been easy for God to have isolated a certain district from which the destroying waters should have been kept, and within which Noah and all his, would have been protected from the destroying tempest.

Instead of that, just as the death of the doomed population was effected by natural means, so the salvation of Noah was effected by natural means, by the floating of a wooden structure within which he had previously retired for safety. For this also there was doubtless excellent reason: Noah's salvation was in this way made the result of his own faith and obedience, in which God was honoured and Noah brought into the right relation.

The ways of God are always most wisely adapted to the requirements of each situation as it arises, and it will be found in the study of each case that the amount of miracle employed is the smallest that the case calls for. There is none of the prodigality of marvel-meaningless marvel that characterises all artificial histories-such as the apocryphal gospels, the life of Mahomet, or the Arabian Nights entertainment. Only so much extra-natural effort is put forth as is needful for the object in view.

The miracle in the case lay in the bringing of the water. The question of how much was necessary involves the question of the area to be covered: in other words, was the flood universal in the sense of covering the entire globe? Considering the comparatively limited extent of the human family at the time, and that it was confined to one small district of the globe, it would seem reasonable to conclude from the principle already looked at-the divine sparingness of means-that the flood was co-extensive only with the Adamically-inhabited portion of the globe.

There are facts that compel such a conclusion; and as all facts are of God, they must be in agreement. The animals of New Zealand are different from those of Australia. The animals of Australia, again, are different from those of Asia and Europe. These again differ entirely from those of the American continent: all differ from one another: and the fossil remains on all the continents show that this difference has always prevailed.

Now if the flood were universal in the absolute sense, it is manifest that these facts could not be explained, for if the animals all over the earth were drowned, and the devastated countries were afterwards replenished from a Noachic centre, the animals of all countries would now show some similarity, instead of consisting of totally different species.

The animals taken into the ark in that case would be the animals of the humanly-populated district only-a comparatively small district in relation to the face of the world at large. If we suppose that only the district populated by the human race was submerged, there would be no difficulty, because in that case, the outlying parts of the earth would not be interfered with, and the state of the animal life in these parts would continue to be what it had been in previous times.

It seems at first sight a difficulty in the way of this view, that the Mosaic description of the flood seems to set before us an absolutely universal flood.

"All the high hills that were under the whole heavens were covered."

This difficulty will vanish, however, if we realise that the language of the narrative is intended only to represent things as they appeared to the Noachic survivors. The whole Bible narrative was written for the inhabitants of the earth, and therefore adopts their point of view throughout. Any other would have been inconsistent with the object of the narrative. When you describe a matter to children, you instinctively adapt the form of your discourse to their modes of looking at things, otherwise you fail to be understood. You speak very differently to an equal.

In relation to God's great works, men are children: they can only take in the aspects of these works as they appear to mortal sense, and consequently the Divine presentation of them in narrative has to deal with aspects, not with the modus in esse. This is not to present an error instead of a truth, but to use in discourse a part of the truth where a part only is serviceable: for the aspect of a matter is certainly part of the truth of a matter, though it may be but a small part. To speak of the sun rising in the morning is to speak of an aspect of the truth not in any way inconsistent with the fact that the sun does not move.

To an onlooker, "all the high hills under the whole heavens" would be covered; as a matter of fact, all the hills within range of his observation and for many miles beyond it would be submerged. But the hills in other parts of the world might be untouched for all that.

When Moses said that God had put the fear and the dread of Israel upon the nations that were "under the whole heavens"; and Paul, that the Gospel had been preached "to every creature which is under heaven," the statement was not intended in the absolute sense, but in the sense relative to the speaker. The nations "under the whole heavens" of Israel's experience were afraid, but there were other nations under the whole heaven of absolute speech, that had never heard of them.

Every creature under the heaven of actual apostolic operations had heard the Gospel, but there were vaster multitudes under other skies to whom the Gospel never went-the Chinese, Japanese, and others. This indicates the local stand-point that must be recognised in the understanding of apparently absolute expressions-a thing common to current speech, as when we say of an invited party of friends, "Every one has come," the "every one" is absolute only within the range of the subject referred to.





21 And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man:

As it was in the days of Noah...

"indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish upon every soul of man that doeth evil, of the Jew first and also of the Gentile" (Rom. 2:8, 9, 16).



22 All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.

Man and Beast compared


...both men and beasts often derive their names from the principle of life which they inhale through their nostrils. Hence they are called animals, because they are bodies of life; souls, because they live by breathing; spirits, because they respire the breath of the spirit of life; breaths because they are so many breathing creatures.

For breaths, see Isaiah 57:16, where the Hebrew for souls is neshamoth, signifying breaths; also Deut. 20:16; Josh. 10:40; 11:11, 14; 1 Kings 15:29. In these passages, the noun and not the verb is used in the Hebrew; hence, we read breath instead of breathe. For spirits, see Psalm 78:39, where, for wind, read spirit, which is, according to the Hebrew, ruach. See also again Isaiah 57:16.

As the phrase "breath of life," is plural in the Hebrew, when applied to man (Gen. 2:7, Khayeem), so it is also plural when applied to beasts (Gen. 7:22), breath of lives.

God's word describes men and beasts collectively as "living substance" (Gen. 7:4, 23), and "all flesh."-(Gen. 7:21

Men beasts, fishes, and birds, are only so many different kinds of flesh.-(1 Cor. 15:39.)

The ox knoweth his owner and the ass his master's crib, and this is more, by a good deal, than can be said of some who call themselves men.-(See Isaiah 1:3.)

The Scriptures really affirm a certain class of vicious men to be no more than wild beasts: such as "ravening wolves" (Ezek 22:27; Zeph 3:3); "ravening wolves" (Matt. 7:15; "grievous wolves" (Acts 20:29); "serpents and vipers" (Matt. 23:33); "evil beasts" (Tit. 1:12.)

The same ungodly class are referred to as "bulls of Bashan" and "dogs" (Psalm 22.); and again as "natural brute beasts" (2 Pet. 2:12; Jude 10.); "unclean and hateful birds" (Rev. 18:2.) All such have a common destiny with the grovelling and devouring animals they so much resemble.-(Psalm 49:12; Eccles. 3:18-20.)

The lower order of animals think, know, remember, calculate, contrive, suit their tactics to the situation, and develop under different influences a variety of character the same as man. They also display affection and sympathy, joy and mourning, courage and fear; they play truant and shew fidelity; they can be trained to mischief or works of mercy; they can play false and fair; manifest obedience and disobedience; they can sulk or be cheerful; they can be trained to almost any kind of mechanical manœuvre; they can be converted and tamed, and made intelligent in many useful directions; indeed, they can be made almost anything except religious.

The principle upon which the beasts do these things is the principle upon which men do the same things. They are brain phenomena in both cases, and according to the nature, quality, quantity, number, and kind of faculties and organic disposal of brain substance, so will be the phenomena.

The Christadelphian, Mar 1872



Moses groups all that came out of the ground together, man included, and denominates them as "all flesh;" and then informs us that in the nostrils of this "all" is the nishmath ruach khaiyim, or "breath of the spirit of lives." The same is repeated in chs. 6:17, and 7:15; but with this diversity, that the word nishmath, "breath," is omitted; and the phrase stands as ruach khaiyim, "spirit of lives," which is in the nostrils of all formations.

Now, if we accept the traditions of Sin's spirituals, as expressed in the proposition of their master the Devil, we are logically forced upon the conclusion, that "all flesh," cattle, beasts of prey, and reptiles, with all the fowls of the air, and men, are individually possessed of indwelling immortal souls.

Admit their definition of "the breath," or spirit "of life," and this conclusion is inevitable; for Solomon, who was wiser than they, declares that men and beasts

"have all ruach echad one spirit; so that," saith he, "man hath no pre-eminence above a beast"—Eccl. 3:18, 19.

Whatever, therefore, is affirmed of man psychologically, be it high or low, the beasts must be allowed to come in and share with him in his pretensions. If they be not immortal, then is not man; but if he be, then also are they. The Devil's "divines" must accept this demonstration, or stultify themselves.

Heigh O! then, upon clerical principles, all snakes and toads, all hyenas and ladies' lap-dogs; in short, all ex humo formations that have a nose, or the rudiments of one, possess indwelling immortality; because they have therein the "breath of the spirit of lives," which in their verbiage is immortality.

Admitting their definition, I say, this is very logical; but at the same time very inconvenient. Upon their premises they have now upon their "holy hands" immense multitudes of disembodied ghosts of all species of four-footed beasts, and winged and creeping things!

Where are all these "immortal souls" to be sent to? Is there no "hell" for the souls of those wild beasts which devoured the bodies of the saints in the Roman amphitheatres, thrown to them by men more ferocious than themselves?

And is there no sky-heaven for the souls of those noble-hearted lions, who refused to crunch the bones of Daniel, their companion in the den?

In view of the teaching of Solomon, and their own traditions, they are bound to send them to one and the same habitation with men; for, saith Solomon, speaking of men and beasts, "All go unto one place."

Now we think that the clergy with their foolishness have got themselves into a pretty mess! Here are immortal snake-souls, and toad-souls, and souls of all other species of immortality, in "the spirit-world!" Some in one department, and some in 'the other.'

But, we would ask their reverences, if it be fair, if it be just and equal, that they should take so much pains, and make so much effort to save immortal man-souls, and not institute a mission, both home and foreign, for the salvation of immortal quadrupedal and creeping, yea, and flying, souls likewise!

We protest, that many of these souls, or at least the formations to which they belong, are naturally more estimable than multitudes of men they seek to save.

Or, do they send immortal souls of beasts and creeping things to sky-heaven ex necessitate rei without any risk of missing it; while immortal man-souls can hardly squeeze in with the most careful vigilance and self-denial?

If so, were those things which Peter saw in the sheet descending from heaven the immortal souls of emancipated beasts, who had slipped off and left their "mortal coil" below?

We have read of certain saints of the Romish calendar who preached to fishes; and if to these, why may not the clergy invent religions suitable to all other species of animated nature? They are equal to any absurdity, or piece of fantastic piety; and might possibly, if not "turn an honest penny," at least make it profitable in the way.

We do not see any serious objection to it on the ground of its being ridiculous; their reverences are accustomed to playing the fool. Their lord the Pope blesses mules, horses, and donkeys in Rome; why should not they preach blessedness to the same elsewhere? Surely, it would be as rational a pastime, and as efficacious, and we are certain it would be as scriptural, as the sprinkling of an infant-immortal soul's face with holy water in the name of their trinity!

But irony aside, and to turn from the reductio ad absurdum—to the teaching of the Word. This clearly shows, that the "me" is the flesh, and that it is vitalized by the "breath of the spirit of lives," which is common to men and other animals; that these have all one spirit; that they have no pre-eminence over one another; that at death, they all go to one place, and that that place is the ground from whence they originally came; for Solomon saith,

"all go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again."

In all this there is not the least intimation of inherent immortality.

Herald of the Kingdom and Age to Come, Jan 1860



23 And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.

The ark and all its contents sanctified

"They were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the ark, and knew not till the flood came, and took them all away" (Matt. 24:38-39);

leaving only eight persons of the sons of Seth alive.

Thus was the mingled seed of Seth and Cain exterminated from the earth. Cain's race became utterly extinct, and those only of Seth remained who were upright in their generations, and who walked with Elohim. The distinction of seeds was temporarily suspended. The generation of vipers was extinct; but sin in the flesh survived -- a principle destined in after times to produce the most hideous and terrible results.

Elpis Israel 1.4.



24 And the waters prevailed upon the earth an 150 days.


The flood is a standing instance to which Jesus more than once refers. An irruption of merciless waters drowned the whole population - nice babies, pretty children, beautiful girls, stalwart fine-looking men, and old men of grey and venerable aspect. What was the cause of the terrible visitation? Because

"all flesh had corrupted His way, and the earth was filled with violence."

Men thought it a light thing to corrupt the way of God. They were not afraid to disregard His appointments; they thought it a weak and womanish thing to fear to do wrong - just exactly as it is now, as Jesus said would be the case.

After a time of long-suffering and expostulation, destruction swept them all away, and so it will be again, except that the destruction will not be of so sweeping a character, as the times and circumstances are different. The judgment to be inflicted on the world's population at the coming of Christ is to subdue and enlighten them, and bring them into harmony with God for the glory of God and His people in the Kingdom to be set up.

Yet as regards vast masses of mankind, it will be as thorough a perdition as that which overtook the contemporaries of Noah. Sodom was overwhelmed in the most direful destruction in another instance; so also with the plaguing of the Egyptians, the slaughter of the Canaanites, the affliction of Israel in various ways till the piled-up wrath of God descended upon the unhappy nation in an avalanche of destruction at the hands of the Romans.

These are illustrations in the past from which we learn something for the future. The Scriptures inform us that the anger of God will burst in an aggravated form upon the heads of rebellious mankind in the latter days.

"The whirlwind of Yahweh is gone forth with fury, a continuing whirlwind, it shall fall with pain upon the head of the wicked. The fierce anger of Yahweh will not return until He have done it, and until He have performed the intents of His heart: in the latter days ye shall consider it."

Of these days, it is written both in Daniel and the Apocalypse that they will exceed in stress of evil all the previous experiences of mankind, "a time of trouble such as never was." Such a time happened to Israel; such a time will befall the Gentiles. People to the last moment have a kind of feeling that their affairs are secure. It does not occur to them to think how easy, humanly speaking, it is for God to bring evil upon them.

Look at London, with her seven or eight millions of people. What an enormous quantity of food is required for the daily victualling of such a community; where would they be in the event of that supply being cut off, either by failure of seasons, or the fortunes of war?

Or look at Britain as a whole, with her 45,000,000 of population and producing only about a third of the food required by the inhabitants of the island; where should we be if our fleets happened to be overpowered and the supply of food from other countries were cut off? But what need of multiplying illustrations! We are helplessly in the hand of God.

"Happy is he that hath the God of Jacob for his refuge,"

and helpless is he that hath God for his enemy.

Seasons 2. 50