Did Noah Go to Heaven? The Bible Calls Him an Heir of Righteousness

Summary

The Bible does not say where Noah is now. Genesis 9:29 records that he died at 950, and unlike Enoch and Elijah he was not taken up.
Genesis calls Noah “a just man and perfect in his generations,” Ezekiel names him with Daniel and Job, and Hebrews 11:7 says he “became heir of the righteousness which is by faith.”
Catholic teaching holds that the just who died before Christ awaited him in “Abraham’s bosom” and that he freed them when he descended to the dead (Catechism 633, 637).
The Orthodox Church’s Easter icon shows Christ leading Adam and the Old Testament righteous out of Hades, and the Orthodox Church in America keeps “Righteous Noah” on the Sunday of the Holy Forefathers in December.
Reformed teaching, in the Westminster Confession, holds that believers before Christ were saved by faith in the promised Messiah and that the souls of the righteous go to heaven at death; some evangelicals have taught that the Old Testament saints waited until Christ’s ascension.
Christians read 1 Peter 3:19–20, where Christ preaches to “the spirits in prison” of Noah’s day, in at least four ways, from Christ’s descent to the dead to hostile angelic powers.
In the Epic of Gilgamesh the flood survivor finds “eternal life” among the gods; Genesis says of Noah only “and he died.”

The Bible does not say where Noah is now, but it names him among the righteous. Genesis calls him “a just man and perfect in his generations,” and Hebrews says he “became heir of the righteousness which is by faith.” The Orthodox Church honors him as a saint, and the churches differ over where his soul went when he died.

Was Noah righteous in God’s eyes?

Noah’s story runs from Genesis 5 to Genesis 9. Before the flood, “Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD” (Genesis 6:8), and the next verse describes him: “Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God” (Genesis 6:9). “Perfect” here means blameless, the word the Catholic New American Bible uses. When God called him into the ark, he gave the reason: “for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation” (Genesis 7:1).

Later Scripture keeps him among the righteous. Through Ezekiel, God names him with two others to show how little one person’s goodness can save others when judgment falls on a land: “Though these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job, were in it, they should deliver but their own souls by their righteousness” (Ezekiel 14:14). Second Peter calls him “a preacher of righteousness” and says God “saved Noah the eighth person” (2 Peter 2:5), meaning Noah and seven others, the eight people in the ark. Hebrews gives the fullest verdict: “By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house; … and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith” (Hebrews 11:7).

Genesis does not make him flawless. After the flood he planted a vineyard, “and he drank of the wine, and was drunken” (Genesis 9:21), and the trouble that followed is told in what Ham did to Noah. Hebrews still sets him among the faithful.

Did Noah die, or was he taken up like Enoch and Elijah?

Noah died. Genesis closes his story in two verses: “And Noah lived after the flood three hundred and fifty years. And all the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years: and he died” (Genesis 9:28–29). It gives no cause of death and no burial place, only the count of his years; how Noah lived 950 years is a question of its own.

Scripture tells of two men who left the world without dying in the ordinary way. Enoch, Noah’s great-grandfather, “walked with God: and he was not; for God took him” (Genesis 5:24), and Hebrews adds that he did not “see death” (Hebrews 11:5). Elijah “went up by a whirlwind into heaven” (2 Kings 2:11). Genesis uses the same words of Enoch and of Noah, both men who “walked with God” (Genesis 5:24; 6:9), and ends their stories differently. Scripture records no taking up for Noah.

Where did Noah go when he died?

The Old Testament speaks of the dead going down to Sheol, the realm of the dead, which the New Testament calls Hades. In Jesus’ parable of the rich man and Lazarus, the poor man “was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom,” and “a great gulf” separates him from the rich man in torment (Luke 16:22–26). Hebrews says of all the faithful it has named, Noah among them, that they “received not the promise: God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect” (Hebrews 11:39–40). From these verses the churches have drawn different pictures of what happened to the righteous who died before Christ.

Catholic teaching

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that the righteous who died before Christ waited for him in the realm of the dead, and that he freed them when he died. It explains that Scripture calls that realm “hell,” Sheol in Hebrew or Hades in Greek, “because those who are there are deprived of the vision of God,” and that this held “for all the dead, whether evil or righteous, while they await the Redeemer.” Then: “It is precisely these holy souls, who awaited their Saviour in Abraham’s bosom, whom Christ the Lord delivered when he descended into hell” (Catechism 633). “He opened heaven’s gates for the just who had gone before him” (637). On this teaching Noah did not enter heaven at death; he waited among the just until Christ came to them. The passage names no one, but elsewhere the Catechism lists Noah, with Daniel and Job, among the “great figures among the Gentiles” whom the Bible venerates (58). The Apostles’ Creed confesses the same event in the words “He descended into hell” (636).

Orthodox teaching

The Orthodox Church tells of Christ’s descent into Hades in an icon and in song. The icon it uses at Easter shows that descent. The Orthodox Church in America describes Christ “standing on the shattered gates of Hades. With arms outstretched He is joining hands with Adam and all the other Old Testament righteous whom He has found there. He leads them from the kingdom of death.” In a hymn of the Vesperal Liturgy of Holy Saturday, Hades itself cries out: “As God, He raised the souls I had held captive.”

Protestant teaching

Reformed Protestants set out their answer in the Westminster Confession of Faith, the confession of Presbyterian churches such as the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. It holds that the faithful before Christ were saved through him: the believers of the Old Testament were built up “in faith in the promised Messiah, by whom they had full remission of sins, and eternal salvation.” John Calvin, writing on Hebrews 11:7, said Noah’s righteousness had to rest on faith, because “the life of no one, however holy it may be, when tried by the rule of God’s law, can please him without pardon being granted.”

Protestants differ over what happened to the Old Testament faithful at death. The Westminster Confession holds that at death “the souls of the righteous, being then made perfect in holiness, are received into the highest heavens,” and that Scripture knows no third place for the dead; on that reading Noah went to God when he died. Some evangelicals have taught instead that the Old Testament saints waited in Sheol until Christ ascended, reading “he led captivity captive” (Ephesians 4:8) as Christ leading them into heaven. The Baptist pastor W. A. Criswell described that view in a 1971 sermon, noted that the first edition of the Scofield Bible taught it and the new edition had dropped it, and preferred his own reading: Christ “led captive those who had tried to make Him captive,” meaning sin, death and Satan.

Who were the “spirits in prison” in 1 Peter 3?

Peter mentions Noah in a passage that has puzzled readers since the early church. Christ, he writes, was “put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit: By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison; Which sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing” (1 Peter 3:18–20). “Quickened” means made alive, and “sometime” means once. Christians have read the verses in at least four ways.

The Catechism reads them of Christ’s descent: he went to the dead “as Saviour, proclaiming the Good News to the spirits imprisoned there” (632). Fr. Steven Kostoff of the Orthodox Church in America writes that “the Fathers found a clear allusion of this descent into hades” in these verses.
Augustine, in a letter of 414 to a fellow bishop, admitted that the passage perplexed him. Some, he reported, believed that Christ in his descent freed “Abel, Seth, Noah and his house, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the other patriarchs and prophets.” Augustine argued that Abraham’s bosom “is not to be believed to be a part of hell,” and leaned toward another reading: Christ preached in the Spirit in Noah’s own day, to people who would not listen. As he put it in passing, “the building of the ark was itself in a certain sense a preaching of mercy.”
Calvin rejected the descent reading (“the words mean no such thing”) and read them of the righteous dead: “the manifestation of Christ’s grace was made to godly spirits.” He suggested that the Greek word for prison could mean a watchtower, so that “godly souls were watching in hope of the salvation promised them, as though they saw it afar off.”
The notes of the Catholic New American Bible say “it is not clear just who these spirits are.” They may be “the spirits of the sinners who died in the flood, or angelic powers, hostile to God, who have been overcome by Christ.”

Whoever the spirits were, Peter places Noah’s household among the rescued, the ark “wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water.” In the next verse he makes that rescue a figure of baptism: “The like figure whereunto even baptism doth also now save us” (1 Peter 3:21), one of the verses behind what the ark symbolizes in Christian teaching.

Is Noah a saint?

The Orthodox Church honors him as one, with the title Righteous. The Orthodox Church in America keeps “Righteous Noah” on the Sunday of the Holy Forefathers, the Sunday that falls between December 11 and 17, and names “the righteous Noah, son of Lamech” again on the Sunday before Christmas. The Forefathers’ hymn begins, “By faith You justified the Forefathers,” in the language of Hebrews 11. The Catholic Catechism speaks more generally: “The patriarchs, prophets and certain other Old Testament figures have been and always will be honoured as saints in all the Church’s liturgical traditions” (61).

How is Noah’s end different from the flood hero of Gilgamesh?

An ancient Mesopotamian poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, has its own flood survivor, Uta-napishti, often spelled Utnapishtim. On the eleventh tablet Gilgamesh asks him, in a translation after A. R. George: “How was it that you attended the gods’ assembly, and found eternal life?” His answer is the story of the flood. The poem’s survivor has escaped death. Genesis ends Noah’s story with the refrain it uses for Adam and his descendants in Genesis 5: “and he died.”

Will we see Noah in heaven?

Christians hope so. Jesus said that “many shall come from the east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 8:11). He does not name Noah, but Hebrews sets Noah in Abraham’s company and ends its roll of the faithful by tying their future to ours: God provided “some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect” (Hebrews 11:40). Calvin took the verse to mean that God wished “that we might be united together with them in the body of Christ.”

Then the letter turns to its readers: “Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight … and let us run with patience the race that is set before us” (Hebrews 12:1). The man who built an ark “to the saving of his house” stands in that cloud.