THE GENERATION OF THE FLOOD
When God created man, He granted him a neshama, a soul: his intelligence. The ability to think, analyze and make choices. The Biblical text defined these faculties as “the image and likeness of God”. Unlike all living beings, humans were conceived as supernatural beings endowed with free will. That is the possibility of choosing good and evil, following the word of God or the drives of their earthly instincts.
Ten generations after being created, man chose the path of evil. Humanity began to decline. The Tora tells us that rape and corruption became widespread in that generation. The stronger abused the weak (Genesis 6). And the law of the land was the law of the jungle: the survival of the strongest. Man degraded himself, forgot his Divine image, and followed his instincts. This tenth generation after Creation is known as Dor haMabbul, a corrupt generation that deserved to be erased from the face of the Earth by the Flood. But this Flood did not mean the end of humanity. A man named Noah turned out to be the exception to the rule. Noah was an individual who, concerning the rest of the world (or despite widespread corruption, according to another opinion) behaved with integrity and lived conscious of God’s existence, something other humans chose to ignore.
God saved Noah to save humanity, giving us a second chance. Noah builds the ark and, together with his wife, their three children, and their wives – 8 people – survives the devastating Flood.
FIRST LAW
When Noah descends from the ark, he builds an altar and offers sacrifices to God in an unmistakable gesture of gratitude for saving his life. God blesses Noah, tells him to reproduce and repopulate the Earth, and presents him with a code that contains two explicit laws. The first law has to do with animals. God allows Noah and his children to eat animal flesh (Genesis 9: 3), which until then was not allowed since the diet that God indicated to the first man consisted solely of plants: seeds, vegetables, and fruits. Now God will enable humans to kill animals for food. However, the Creator establishes a prerequisite that must be fulfilled before consuming animal flesh. Men can not mutilate a living animal to consume its meat, as carnivorous predators do with their prey.
Before consuming its meat, the animal should be slaughtered.
SECOND LAW
The second law that God commands Noah is about murder, killing another human being. This law is formulated in a very basic way. Instead of the “You shall not kill” that we find in the 10 Commandments, this law determines that murder will be punished with execution. “If a man sheds the blood of another man, his blood will be spilled, because the human being has been created in the image of God. “(Genesis 9: 6). This law mentions again that man was created in the image and likeness of God. A reference to the widespread corruption that the Tora denounced in Genesis 6, explaining that powerful men (bene elohim) were abusing the weaker men (adam). God reminds Noah that every human, regardless of social status, deserves to be treated with respect for having been created in the image and likeness of God.
THE COVENANT BETWEEN GOD and NOAH
In the next verses (Genesis 9: 8 to 9:17) God establishes a covenant with Noah and his children. God promises not to bring another flood. The rainbow will be the reminder that rain will eventually stop and God will never again erase humanity from the face of the Earth. We can see then that the covenant between God and Noah establishes, on the one hand, that human beings will respect the life of other human beings and the right of an animal to a dignified death. And the Creator, on the other hand, commits Himself not to bring another flood, a universal cataclysm that would destroy humanity.
To summarize: the Divine formula to prevent future corruption of humanity and its own destruction is the establishment of Law and Order. These two basic laws are part of what is known as the seven universal laws.
Let’s clarify that according to Jewish tradition, God had already ordered Adam, the first man, six basic laws. In the times of Noah, God made from these Laws a covenant, adding the law that regulates the consumption of animal flesh and establishing the death penalty for murder. The Seven Laws of the Children of Noah (which also include: the prohibition of idolatry, blasphemy, theft, incest, and the commandment to set courts of justice) constitute the first Biblical code of the Divine Law that God conceived for humanity.
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