81 And God remembered Noah, and every living thing, and all the cattle that was with him in the ark: and God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters assuaged; The fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained; And the waters returned from off the earth continually: and after the end of the hundred and fifty days the waters were abated.
4 And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat.
5 And the waters decreased continually until the tenth month: in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, were the tops of the mountains seen.
6 And it came to pass at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made:
7 And he sent forth a raven, which went forth to and fro, until the waters were dried up from off the earth.
8 Also he sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters were abated from off the face of the ground; But the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned unto him into the ark, for the waters were on the face of the whole earth: then he put forth his hand, and took her, and pulled her in unto him into the ark.
10 And he stayed yet other seven days; and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark; And the dove came in to him in the evening; and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf pluckt off: so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth.
12 And he stayed yet other seven days; and sent forth the dove; which returned not again unto him any more.
13 And it came to pass in the six hundredth and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from off the earth: and Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and, behold, the face of the ground was dry. And in the second month, on the seven and twentieth day of the month, was the earth dried .
It is recorded that G*D “remembered” Noah. An unasked question is whether Noah “remembered” G*D while the waters rose, at some indeterminate amount of time above the peaks, or during their long ebbing.
Through all of the flood, as before it was announced, there is no indication that Noah returns praise to G*D. Noah simply does what he understands as necessary. In the first place, Noah simply follows a command. Subsequently, Noah builds, gathers, boards, cares for, and comes to rest on a mountain top.
With Moses (yet another ’adam?), rituals will be instituted, but Noah appears to be a Jerzy Kosiński character from Being There, Chance the gardener. For now, the last offering we know about is that of Cain and Abel, and that didn’t turn out all that well.
The earth East of Eden has now been thoroughly washed and dried. Though the waters above and below abide, the surface of the earth is dry and ready for Creation 3.0.
In this prose telling there are two words used for “dry” in verses 13 and 14. In other poetic settings, they are used in parallel to suggest a drying up and then a complete dryness. This takes us back to Creation 2.0 in terms of structure. However, we are not at a complete remake. The genealogy that leads to Noah’s story still holds. We are still working with the same genetic material.
One implication of this restart is that G*D is also continuing outside of Eden and is as subject to evolution and learnings as is the rest of creation.
For now, G*D and Noah continue along parallel paths but are not interacting.
G*D has remembered. Will Noah remember and, if so, how will that be expressed?