The Door Shut From Outside

Methuselah died in the year the flood came.

He had lived nine hundred and sixty-nine years, longer than anyone has ever lived, before or since. For two hundred and forty-three of those years Adam had still been alive, and Methuselah might have sat at the first man's feet as a boy and heard the story of the garden from the man himself. Now that long thread was cut. Noah's father Lamech was gone too, a few years before. All the old ones were in the ground.

And Noah was six hundred years old.

On the tenth day of the second month, God spoke to him.

"Come into the ark," God said, "you and your whole household. For I have seen that you are righteous before Me, in this generation."

Come, He said. Not go. The way you say it to a friend standing on your doorstep in the rain.

"Take with you seven pairs of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and one pair of every kind that is not clean. And seven pairs of every kind of bird, male and female, to keep their kinds alive on the earth.

"In seven days I will send rain on the earth, forty days and forty nights of it, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living thing I have made."

Seven days. After a hundred and twenty years of warning, God gave them one week more. One more week for anyone, anywhere, to turn round.

The door stood open.

And then the animals came.

Noah did not have to go out and fetch them. They came to him.

And they went up into the ark, one pair after another, and found their places in the dark.

People came out to watch, as they always had. They stood about in little groups at the bottom of the hill, and pointed, and talked, and some of them laughed, though the laughter sounded thinner than it used to.

And then they went home. They ate their suppers and drank their wine and talked about the weather, which was fine. There was a wedding that week in the next village; there was music late into the night. Fields were ploughed. Children were put to bed.

The sky was perfectly clear.

On the seventeenth day of the second month, Noah went in.

He went in with his sons, Shem and Ham and Japheth. After them came his wife Emzara, and his sons' three wives. The men went in together, and the women went in together, and they would keep apart like that all the time they were inside the ark. It was not a time for beginning families, while the whole world was ending.

Eight people, out of all the people in the world.

Noah was the last one in. He stood in the doorway for a moment and looked back: at the hillside, and the fields, and the roofs of the houses, and the thin smoke going up from the cooking fires into the still evening air. At the people still standing at the bottom of the hill, looking up at him.

Then he turned and went inside.

And the LORD shut the door.

Not Noah. Noah did not pull it closed behind him. God shut it, from the outside.

Think what it would have been, otherwise. Noah would have had to stand there at the last, with his hand on the door, looking out. He would have seen the first drops fall on the faces turned up towards him, and watched them begin to understand. And then he would have had to push the door shut on them, with his own hands, and bar it.

God did not ask that of him. God shut the door Himself, from outside, and sealed it, so that the old man would not have to see; and so that nobody, when the water came, could break it down.

It was the seventeenth day of the second month. Long ago, on the seventeenth day of the second month, a voice had spoken to a woman among the trees.

That night, the world began to come undone.

You remember the second day, when God spread out the roof of the sky and lifted half the waters above it, and the third day, when He gathered the waters below into one place and the dry land came up out of them.

On the seventeenth day of the second month, God let all of it go.

Under the earth, the great deep broke open. Every spring and well and crack in the ground burst at once, and the old dark water that had lain beneath the world since before the first light came roaring up. Seven great mouths it came out of, from the bottom of the world.

And above the earth, the windows of heaven opened, and the water that had been held up over the roof of the sky since the second day came down. Seven floodgates opened in the sky. It did not fall like rain. It fell like the sea falling.

And it went on falling.

It rained for forty days and forty nights.

God could have done it all at once. He could have drowned the world in a single hour and been finished. He did not. He let it come slowly, day by day, so that on every one of those forty days there were people still alive somewhere who could see what was happening, and understand, and turn to God, even then, even at the very end.

The water rose. It covered the fields and the roads and the low roofs of the villages. It filled the streets of Cain's old city and climbed its walls and went over them. It put out the fires in the forges where the swords had been made, and drowned the scales where everything had been counted and weighed. It rose up the sides of the hills, and the people climbed higher, and the water followed them.

And somewhere in the middle of it all, the ark lifted.

There was a great shudder through the whole length of it, and a long groan from every beam, and the animals cried out in the dark. And then, gently, the weight of it came free of the ground, and it floated.

Once before, in the very beginning, something had moved upon the face of the waters, over a dark and empty world: the Spirit of God, brooding over the deep, waiting for the light. Now the world had gone back to darkness and water. And once again there was something moving on the face of it: a box, with eight people in it, and every kind of living thing, and the whole of the future.

Everything else died.

Every bird and every beast and every creeping thing, and every man and woman and child on the face of the earth: everything that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. The breath God had once breathed into Adam, bending over the red clay, went out of the whole world.

And the water stood over the earth for a hundred and fifty days.

Inside the ark, it was dark, and it smelled of animals and pitch, and it rocked.

They could feed what was with them. They could not steer the ark, or find the land, or make the waters fall. They did not know where they were, or how long it would be.

But the door had been shut by Someone who knew exactly where they were, and who had not forgotten them.