Chapter Five: The Curse of the Son

Abstract

Noah is a renewed Adam, the first man after the deluge, and with his sons, he will rebuild humanity, according to God’s fantastic plan, which is engraved in the covenant. Since Noah was created in the image of Adam, who was created in the image of God, who could be a kind of father, we may ask what is similar about his status as a father in this story to the status of God as the father of human beings? Incidentally, what does God’s status as a father have to do with his being ambivalent when he sees the maternal function of the earth, which creates the world from its womb, the faculty of mercy (ra h amim in Hebrew, connected etymologically to the word for womb, re h em) and not the faculty of judgment (to use terms from the Kabbalah). In her book, Vayoled [and he fathered], the biblical scholar Pnina Galpaz-Feller suggests that Noah is trying to recreate the status of God the father without success, and for that reason, he falls. But we emphasize that God, too, is a failed representation of this lost status.