Noah's Wife: Or, What's in a Name?

I WISH to say a word for Noah’s wife. For all I know to the contrary, she has waited 4269 years (according to Archbishop Ussher’s computation) for a sympathetic voice to be raised in her behalf. For this very considerable period there has been a shadow upon her reputation, due to no fault of hers; and it is high time that the grounds of this injustice be looked into.

I became interested in Noah’s wife, more years ago than I can say, by way of her husband. Noah was my earliest hero. Almost every Christmas I received a Noah’s Ark, with a red roof, half of which was hinged along the ridgepole like a lid, and with a row of windows painted on each side, out of which peered a variety of goggle-eyed animals. Lifting the roof I drew forth, first, Noah and his wife, and Shem, Ham, and Japhet. For some mysterious reason, Noah’s daughters-in-law were never present. Father, mother, and the three sons comprised the human passengers — all dressed in bodices and long skirts, and wearing hats like those worn by Chinese coolies, and all standing stiff as grenadiers.

After them, I lifted out the animals, twenty or thirty of them, violently striped or spotted, and smelling of paint. One could tell the horse, cow, and deer apart by the horns. I think that Christimas held no joy quite comparable to this of pulling the slightly sticky beasts out, one after another, guessing at their species, matching them up, and arranging them two by two on the hearthrug, while Noah and his wife supervised the shipment from the quarter-deck, and Shem, Ham, and Japhet shooed the animals in from behind.

I thought then, and I think still, that Noah’s doings were the most remarkable in history. The Ark, we are told, was made of gopher wood, every plank and joist of which he had to fell, cut, and finish, himself. He had then to assemble his lumber, according to specifications that had been given him, into a seaworthy structure, 300 x 50 x 30 cubits or, as I estimate it, about 525 x 87 x 52 feet, built in three stories, with one door and one window . Meanwhile, he had to collect the animals, sort them out, arrange them in couples and sevens, drive them into the Ark, and — most appalling of all — live with them for one hundred and fifty days, before he even made Mount Ararat. And at this time he was six hundred years old! Even for a man much younger, this would have been the most difficult undertaking in all history.

About the Old Testament characters, however, there is an air which I find hard to describe. I can perhaps suggest what I feel about them by saying that they are always doing the most surprising things in the most matter-of-fact way. There is nothing just like this in any other book, I think. The labors of Hercules or Jason or Jack-the-GiantKiller, though remarkable, were still represented as laborious; but these Old Testament worthies thought nothing of undertaking to do, and of doing, things that would have made even Hercules or Jack resign his commission in despair. And they did these things calmly and competently, and without wasting any breath in talking about them.

Noah seems to have gone about catching the animals, for example, quietly, methodically, and modestly. Not a word is said about any difficulties he may have had. And yet anyone who has ever tried to catch an unwilling hen, or drive a pig through a gate, or keep a grasshopper or a frog in a box, or put salt on a bird’s tail, must have wondered what his method was; how this astonishing man went about collecting his beasts, birds, and creeping things, arranging them in rank and file, and persuading them to march decorously up the gangplank; and one can only echo the words of an old French writer, who concludes an examination of this incident with the following reflection: ‘There are many persons who have spoiled a good deal of paper trying to discover the truth of this affair; but there is no one who has been able to arrive at a perfect assurance or certitude.’

When I was a little boy, although my playmates and I were lost in admiration of Noah, we paid little attention to the ladies of the party. We early noticed, nevertheless, that his wife had no name, and she quickly became associated in our minds with lot’s wife, who suffers from the same anonymity. Now, this linking of Noah’s wife with Lot’s wife seems to have been constant throughout history, and furnishes a bit of evidence of the importance of a name that escaped even the researches of Mr. Shandy. For Lot’s wife’s reputation has never been any better than might be; and the shadow that rests upon her namelessness has been extended by the unthinking to cover the only other matriarch who seems to have had no given name. Poor Noah’s wife! And this in spite of the fact that, though she had a much better reason than Lot’s wife for casting a longing, lingering look behind, there is no evidence whatever that she did so. As a boy I felt sorry even for Lot’s wife, and could never see that she was guilty of anything deserving a fate so disagreeable. I heard ministers explain her saline conclusion more than once; but their explanation explained so little that it became grouped in my mind with other ‘wingy mysteries in divinity, and airy subtleties in religion,’ such as Balaam’s ass and Elisha’s bears and Jonah’s whale, about which we children had many rationalistic controversies. I lived for years in the hope that a preacher might some Sunday explain the Flood, and drop a hint concerning the anonymity of Noah’s wife; but none ever did; and it was only after a long while that I began to suspect that preachers were accustomed to skip rather lightly over these matters.

But the story of Noah was such a good one that, despite some difficulties in the higher criticism, it engaged my imagination for many a day. The world of waters, and the lonely Ark with its unique tonnage floating upon it, the windows of heaven being opened and closed, the flight of the raven and the dove, the lifting-up of the cover of the Ark and, above all, the disposition of the animals and the daily routine that must have been gone through to keep them all healthy and happy — these furnished materials for a good many hours of pleasant daydreaming. It was my earliest sea-story, and no other story in the world can hold a candle to a good sea-story. Some details bothered me; particularly how the Ark was lighted, since it had only one window. I had never read the Koran, and therefore did not know that there was a gigantic carbuncle suspended from the rooftree; nor did I know several other facts about which the Koran is explicit — such as that Noah’s wife had a name, and that it was Wahela, and that the Ark sailed clear around the earth six times. Anyway, this information is clearly heterodox, and therefore not worthy of much notice.

A good many years later, I was amused to discover that Noah’s family had engaged the curiosity of others, and that there had grown up a tradition even round Noah’s wife. Among the Mohammedans, I learned, there was a notion abroad that, like Lot’s wife, she was a freethinker, and in the Middle Ages it was the general opinion that she was a shrew, as Chaucer records: —

It was whispered also that she deceived her husband regarding her secret views on many subjects; that she tried to persuade the neighbors that he was crazy; and that, finally, as the old mystery plays relate, she refused flatly to go into the Ark, and had in the end to be carried in bodily, kicking and squalling.

This is a damaging indictment, if there is any evidence to support it; but there is no doubt in my mind that an estimable woman has been done a grave injustice, and for no reason whatever except that the narrator of the Flood incident either forgot to record, or did not know, her name. He was equally careless regarding her three daughtersin-law; but, so far as I know, no one has ever gossiped about them. They are simply Shem’s, Ham’s, and Japhet’s wives, and posterity has been willing to let them go at that; but their poor mother-in-law has been singled out for obloquy merely, so far as the testimony indicates, because she enjoyed a certain social prominence as the wife of the first and most remarkable of skippers.

The mediæval legend is, it is true, an excellent bit of irony, quite in the vein of Anatole France, intimating as it does that the man who could manage all the rest of animate creation with such efficiency could not manage his wife — that he was, in fact, henpecked. But we need not give too much credence to it on the score of its plausibility; for in the Middle Ages, when humor was a robuster growth than it is nowadays, men never hesitated to rationalize the Scriptural stories and to embroider them with amusing suggestions. They handled the story of Balaam and his ass so freely that they, or the ass at least, became the most ribald fun-maker of the age, and they seem never to have tired of spinning new yarns about Jonah and his whale. Even the Devil, afraid as they were of him, struck them as funny; and they knew no joke quite so good as Beelzebub pitchforking sinners out of this world into a warmer. Finally, they had a theory that Satan somehow got into the Ark, possibly disguised as an animal, and that he made trouble throughout the voyage. Such a story is quite in character, if we are to believe Milton, who says that Satan first got into Eden by using the same ruse.

In the light of such inventions, what they said about Noah’s wife need not cause us much perturbation. Since I have grown up and have observed the attitude of her descendants of her own sex toward such experiences as were hers, I have come to sympathize with her wholeheartedly. Think of having to watch a taciturn husband neglecting his business for years, to build a boat on dry land, miles from any water; think what impressions must have been hers, as he went to and fro collecting animals that smelled unpleasantly, most of which she of course detested; think of her premonitions when she was invited to enter the Ark, still on dry land, and to permit herself to be shut in with all the creeping things in their kinds there were in the world! And after she was in the Ark — to live almost a year in a box, in which there was only one window to look out at, and nothing to see even from that except water; to have nobody to talk to except her sons, who seem to have taken after their father, and her daughters-in-law, who seem to have been women of no importance; to walk for exercise between interminable rows of snorting, snuffling, growling creatures; and to wake in the small hours of the morning, wondering how many of the creeping things might have got into the bedroom! Where is there an instance of feminine heroism comparable to this?

Noah can hardly have been much in the way of company for her, because he had to feed the animals. I cannot see how he ever had a moment to sit down, or how, if he ever did sit down, there was anything to talk about except the animals — the last subject a woman wants to talk about. Was ever woman subjected to such an ordeal? And yet, is there a single indication that she added to Noah’s worries, that she complained, scolded, moped, or wept? Not one. On the contrary, all the evidence available suggests that she went, through her trying experience as calmly as her husband. She could not have been a high-strung, nervous woman, or a woman with a temper, or a woman full of the irrational fears usually ascribed to her sex; for, if she had been any of these, she would have jumped overboard after the first week. No. I am convinced that she was rather a quiet, self-possessed body, with a sense of humor, fond of flowers, which she cultivated on the sill of her only window, and gifted with unusual intellectual resources. Probably she played on the harp, mended the bodices and skirts of her family, scratched the noses of the less ferocious animals, fed the birds, and kept a diary; a silent, self-effacing woman, who knew how to milk the cows and goats, and make butter and cheese, and keep things tidied up in the cabin. She was, I have no doubt, loved by her husband and her sons, and even by her daughters-in-law.

I am led to these conclusions, not only by the Anglo-Saxon principle of justice, that a person is innocent until proved guilty, but also on grounds of general probability. For, if Noah’s wife had been what is known as a strongminded woman, is there any doubt that her name would have come down to us? Is it not at least likely that she would have been careful to see that it did? Or, if she had been noted for a bad temper or a shrewish tongue, is it not almost certain that some of her sayings or doings would have been recorded? The evil that men (and women) do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.

An Additional Note. — After I had written my purely impulsive defense of Noah’s wife, I discovered that, according to certain rabbinical legends, she had a name. She was Naamah, and she was the daughter of the saintly Enoch. But, more noteworthy than this, I also discovered that she was called the ‘pious Naamah’! Noah, the legends intimate, really did not deserve to be saved, but was somewhat less wicked than the rest of mankind. It is very gratifying to have one’s intuitions ratified by the facts. The pious Naamah, on whose account, in all probability, the entire family was saved, and therefore the animals, has come down in history merely as ‘Noah’s wife,’ and Noah has received all the credit. Many of my feminine readers will exclaim, ‘Now is n’t that just like a man!’