# How Many Wives Did Noah Have? Just 1, and the Bible Never Names Her

Source: https://christianpure.com/learn/how-many-wives-did-noah-have/
Publisher: Christian Pure (https://christianpure.com/)
Published: 2024-05-24
Updated: 2026-10-16

Noah had one wife. Genesis mentions her in five verses, always in a list beside her husband and their sons, and never gives her name. She was one of the eight people saved in the ark: Noah, his wife, their three sons and the sons' three wives.

Later readers filled the silence. The Book of Jubilees calls her Emzara. One rabbi in Genesis Rabbah identified her with Naamah, a woman Genesis names in Cain's family. And the mystery plays of medieval England turned her into a stubborn, comic wife who will not get into the ark.

## How many wives did Noah have according to the Bible?

One. When God tells Noah to build the ark, he names who will go in with him: "thou shalt come into the ark, thou, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons' wives with thee" (Genesis 6:18). The word is "wife," not wives, and it stays singular every time she appears. On the day the rain began, Genesis counts the household again: "In the selfsame day entered Noah, and Shem, and Ham, and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah's wife, and the three wives of his sons with them, into the ark" (Genesis 7:13).

The New Testament gives the total. Peter writes that in the ark "few, that is, eight souls were saved by water" (1 Peter 3:20), and his second letter calls Noah "the eighth person" (2 Peter 2:5). Four men and four women make eight, so there was no room in the count for a second wife. The early Church Father Theophilus of Antioch read it the same way: Noah's three sons "had three wives, one wife each; each man and his wife," and "eight human beings were preserved in the ark."

| Person in the ark | Named in Genesis? | Name in the Book of Jubilees |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Noah | Yes | Noah |
| Noah's wife | No | Emzara (Jubilees 4:33) |
| Shem | Yes | Shem |
| Shem's wife | No | Sedeqetelebab (Jubilees 7:16) |
| Ham | Yes | Ham |
| Ham's wife | No | Ne'elatama'uk (Jubilees 7:14) |
| Japheth | Yes | Japheth |
| Japheth's wife | No | 'Adataneses (Jubilees 7:15) |

The Jubilees spellings are those of R. H. Charles's 1913 English translation.

## What does the Bible say about Noah's wife?

Very little, and all of it in lists. She appears as "thy wife," "his wife" or "Noah's wife" in Genesis 6:18, 7:7, 7:13, 8:16 and 8:18, and the rest of Scripture mentions her only in Peter's count of eight. She never speaks, and Genesis records nothing she did apart from going into the ark and coming out of it.

What the text does say is that she was saved with her husband and for his sake. God called Noah's whole household in because of Noah: "Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation" (Genesis 7:1). The Letter to the Hebrews remembers that Noah, warned by God, "prepared an ark to the saving of his house" (Hebrews 11:7). Genesis also never says in so many words that she was the mother of Shem, Ham and Japheth. It is the natural reading, since she is Noah's only wife, and Jubilees states it outright: she bore him Shem, then Ham, then Japheth.

Some readers find her once more, after the flood. When Ham "saw the nakedness of his father" (Genesis 9:22), Augustine, Calvin and many modern commentators take the words as they stand: Ham looked at his drunken father and told his brothers. In 2005 the scholars John Bergsma and Scott Hahn argued instead that the phrase echoes the Law, "The nakedness of thy father's wife shalt thou not uncover: it is thy father's nakedness" (Leviticus 18:8), so that Ham's sin was against Noah's wife herself. Genesis does not say so, and the case on each side is set out in [what Ham did to Noah](https://christianpure.com/learn/what-did-ham-do-to-noah/).

### Why does Genesis list the men and the women separately?

Careful readers noticed the order of the names. Going in, the men are listed first and the women after: "And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons' wives with him, into the ark" (Genesis 7:7). Coming out, God's command names Noah and his wife side by side: "Go forth of the ark, thou, and thy wife, and thy sons, and thy sons' wives with thee" (Genesis 8:16). The next verses, telling how they actually left, return to the first order (Genesis 8:18).

Jewish and Christian interpreters both drew a meaning from it. The medieval commentator Rashi, drawing on Genesis Rabbah, explained that in the ark the families lived as "The men separately and the women separately, because they were forbidden to live together as man and wife since the world was living in a state of distress." When God named husband and wife together at the end of the flood, "now He allowed them to resume family life." Augustine saw a figure of the Christian life. He pointed to "the men and the women being spoken of separately" going in as a sign of the present struggle of flesh and spirit, and to their leaving together as a sign that "in the resurrection of the just, the body will be united to the spirit in perfect harmony." His reading matches the Greek Septuagint, the translation from which the first Latin Bibles were made. There the departure itself pairs husband and wife: "And Noe came forth, and his wife and his sons, and his sons' wives with him" (Genesis 8:18, in Brenton's English).

## Is Noah's wife named in the Bible?

No. Neither the Old Testament nor the New gives her a name, and the same is true of the wives of Shem, Ham and Japheth. Every name you will meet for her comes from writings outside the Bible.

## What are some traditional names given to Noah's wife?

### Emzara, in Jubilees and the Dead Sea Scrolls

Two ancient Jewish books call her Emzara. The Book of Jubilees, a retelling of the stories of Genesis written in the middle of the second century before Christ, says that Noah married Emzara, "the daughter of his father's brother," so that she was his cousin (Jubilees 4:33). Translations give her father's name differently: R. H. Charles has Râkê'êl, and James VanderKam, in his 2018 translation, Barakiel.

The Genesis Apocryphon, an Aramaic retelling found among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, has Noah say in his own voice, "I went and took Emzara ... as my wife." The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization explains the name as literally "mother of seed."

### Naamah, in Genesis Rabbah

Genesis does name a Naamah before the flood: "the sister of Tubalcain was Naamah" (Genesis 4:22), in the family of the Lamech who descended from Cain. In Genesis Rabbah, Rabbi Abba bar Kahana identified her with Noah's wife: "Naama was Noah's wife. Why did they call her Naama? It is because her actions were pleasing." The name plays on the Hebrew word for pleasing. The other rabbis in the same passage disagreed, saying "Naama was someone else," named for the way "she played the tambourine pleasantly ... for idol worship." Sefaria's translation explains their objection in a note: as a descendant of Cain, she "must have perished in the Flood, and could not have been Noah's wife." Rashi took the first view and wrote simply, "She was Noah's wife."

So the two traditions disagree about where she came from. Jubilees makes her Noah's cousin, from his own family line. Rabbi Abba bar Kahana makes her a descendant of Cain. That is the difficulty the note points to: Genesis says that "Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark" (Genesis 7:23), so a woman of Cain's family could have lived on only as one of the eight.

## Why isn't Noah's wife mentioned more in the Bible story?

Genesis does not say why, but her silence is not unusual in these chapters. Between Eve and Sarai, Genesis names only three women, all in one family: Lamech's wives Adah and Zillah, and Naamah, the sister of Tubalcain (Genesis 4:19–22). The long genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 follow fathers and sons and mention the rest only as "sons and daughters." The flood story itself names the four men and none of the four women.

Garrett P. J. Epp, editing the medieval Towneley plays, notes that Noah's wife is "unnamed and barely mentioned in the biblical account." The Posen Library adds that the silence left "an opportunity for later writers to provide this information themselves."

## Did Noah have multiple wives or just one?

Just one, and nothing in Scripture suggests otherwise. The first man the Bible names with more than one wife is a different Lamech, Cain's descendant: "And Lamech took unto him two wives: the name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other Zillah" (Genesis 4:19). Noah's own father, also named Lamech, belongs to the line of Seth traced in Genesis 5 (Genesis 5:28–29).

Nor does Genesis give Noah another wife after the flood. It says only, "And Noah lived after the flood three hundred and fifty years" (Genesis 9:28), and it traces every later nation to his three sons: "These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole earth overspread" (Genesis 9:19). Noah's one marriage matches the pattern set at creation, that a man "shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh" (Genesis 2:24), which Jesus repeated when he was asked about divorce: "they twain shall be one flesh" (Matthew 19:5). How Christians have judged the many wives of later figures such as Jacob and David is a separate question, taken up in [whether polygamy is a sin](https://christianpure.com/learn/is-polygamy-a-sin/).

## Who were the wives of Noah's sons?

Each of Noah's sons had one wife, "the three wives of his sons" of Genesis 7:13. Genesis never tells how they found their wives. They were already married when God gave Noah his instructions (Genesis 6:18), so the women came from the world before the flood, and their families go unrecorded. The sons were grown men: by the count of Genesis 11:10, Shem was nearly a hundred when the flood came. None of their children were in the ark: Genesis says that "unto them were sons born after the flood" (Genesis 10:1), and Peter's count of eight souls leaves no room for grandchildren aboard.

Jubilees names the three wives through the cities their husbands built after the flood near Mount Lubar, one of the mountains of Ararat. Ham named his city for his wife Ne'elatama'uk, Japheth named his for 'Adataneses, and Shem, who stayed near his father, named his for Sedeqetelebab (Jubilees 7:14–16).

## What role did Noah's wife play in building and living on the ark?

Genesis does not say. It gives the building to Noah alone, "Thus did Noah; according to all that God commanded him, so did he" (Genesis 6:22), and says nothing of what his wife or his sons' wives did in the year aboard. Pictures of her tending the animals or keeping house come from imagination, not Scripture. What Genesis does tell about the animals, their kinds and their food, is gathered in [how many animals were on the ark](https://christianpure.com/learn/bible-ark-animals/).

## Was Noah's wife a good woman?

The Bible does not judge her either way. Genesis saves her with her household for Noah's righteousness (Genesis 7:1), and Peter and Theophilus simply count her among the eight. Augustine read the whole saved family as a figure of the Church, "Noah, with his family is saved by water and wood, as the family of Christ is saved by baptism, as representing the suffering of the cross," but he says nothing of her character either. Later traditions do take sides, and they disagree. Rabbi Abba bar Kahana thought her deeds "pleasing."

The Qur'an, which tells the flood story in its own way, gives a darker picture. It names neither woman, but it holds up "the wife of Noah and the wife of Lot" as "an example of those who disbelieved" (Qur'an 66:10, Saheeh International translation). And in medieval England the stage made her a scold.

## Why is Noah's wife a comic figure in the old English plays?

The mystery plays were cycles of short plays on the Bible, from the Creation to the Last Judgment; at York, the pageant of the building of the ark was produced by the city's shipwrights. The cycles of York and Chester and the Towneley manuscript, sometimes linked with Wakefield because "Wakefeld" is written beside the title of its Noah play, all give Noah's silent wife a loud voice, and in all three she refuses to board the ark. Epp writes that the Towneley wife does so "with more force and less obvious reason" than the others, and that medieval writers, Chaucer in the Miller's Tale among them, often treat Noah's wife as "the archetypal shrewish wife."

In the Towneley play she sits spinning on the hill while the rain falls and climbs in only when the water reaches her, "For drede that I drone here," for fear of drowning. Husband and wife then come to blows until their children beg them to stop. In one fight Noah calls her "Gill," which, the editor notes, "may be the wife's name" or simply a contemptuous nickname. He adds that her distaff and one of Noah's insults recall Eve: "The distaff is also a traditional symbol of Eve." Before the waters go down she is at the tiller, answering Noah's "Wife, tent the stere-tre," that is, mind the tiller, while he sounds the depth.

In the Chester play her sons force her aboard. A stage direction in one manuscript, British Library MS Harley 2124, "records the blow struck by Noah's wife after her sons force her aboard the ark." The direction, notes Peter Whiteford of Victoria University of Wellington, is usually discussed alongside the misogynist humour found in other writing of the period.

## Related reading

- [Who helped Noah build the ark?](https://christianpure.com/learn/who-helped-noah/)
- [How did Noah live for 950 years?](https://christianpure.com/learn/noah-life-span/)
- [What the ark symbolizes in the Bible](https://christianpure.com/learn/ark-bible-meaning/)
- [The generations from Noah to Jesus](https://christianpure.com/learn/jesus-lineage-generations-noah/)
- [How the Bible defines marriage](https://christianpure.com/learn/how-does-bible-define-marriage/)
- [Bible verses about Noah and the flood](https://christianpure.com/learn/bible-verses-noah-and-the-flood/)

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