What Did Noah Look Like? The Bible Never Describes Him

The Bible never says what Noah looked like. Genesis gives his age, his work and his character, but not his height or his face. The fullest ancient description comes from 1 Enoch, part of a Jewish literature about Enoch that began as early as the third century BC, and it gives the newborn Noah a body “white as snow.”

Nothing at all. Genesis records who Noah’s father was, why he was given his name, how old he was at each turn of the story and what work he took up after the flood, and it never stops to describe him. Other books of the Bible do describe people when their looks bear on the story. Saul was so tall that “from his shoulders and upward he was higher than any of the people” (1 Samuel 9:2), and David “was ruddy, and withal of a beautiful countenance, and goodly to look to” (1 Samuel 16:12). Noah is given no such line, though Genesis records a good deal else about him.

What Genesis says about Noah	Where
His father Lamech named him, “saying, This same shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands”	Genesis 5:29
He was five hundred years old when Genesis first names his sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth	Genesis 5:32
He was “six hundred years old when the flood of waters was upon the earth”	Genesis 7:6
After the flood he “began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard”; a husbandman is a farmer	Genesis 9:20
He lived 950 years in all	Genesis 9:29

Those numbers are the nearest Genesis comes to a physical detail. By its count Noah was already an old man when the rain began, and he lived three hundred and fifty years after the flood (Genesis 9:28).

Scripture gives its own reason for caring less about faces. When Samuel went to anoint a king from among Jesse’s sons and his eye fell on Eliab, the Lord told him, “Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature,” and then gave the reason: “man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7).

Genesis does not give Noah’s height, and none of the early Jewish or Christian retellings of his story gives it either. From 1 Enoch and Josephus, a Jewish historian born in AD 37, to the rabbis of the Talmud and the Christian Book of Adam and Eve, they describe his birth, his warnings and his ark without measuring the man.

Genesis 6:4 is the verse that raises it: “There were giants in the earth in those days.” Genesis never counts Noah among the giants, and the old retellings take care to set him apart from them. In 1 Enoch the giants are the children of fallen angels who “united themselves with women,” and the story of Noah’s birth turns on Enoch’s assurance that the child “is in truth his son,” Lamech’s own (1 Enoch 106:14, 18). Josephus writes that the sons of those angels “did what resembled the acts of those whom the Grecians call giants,” and that “Noah was very uneasy at what they did.”

Augustine read Genesis 6 differently. He set aside the Enoch writings’ “fables about the giants, saying that their fathers were not men,” and took the “sons of God” in Genesis to be men of Seth’s family line. The giants, in his reading, were simply people of unusual size, and he drew a lesson from them: God made them “that it might thus be demonstrated that neither beauty, nor yet size and strength, are of much moment to the wise man” (City of God 15.23).

Where Genesis is silent about Noah’s body, it is plain about the man: “Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God” (Genesis 6:9). “Perfect” here does not mean sinless. The Talmud’s English translators render the same Hebrew word “wholehearted,” and Augustine took it as perfection “in so far as they can be perfect in their sojourn in this world” (City of God 15.26). When the flood was near, God told Noah, “thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation” (Genesis 7:1).

The rest of Scripture keeps the same portrait. Noah obeyed in full: “Thus did Noah; according to all that God commanded him, so did he” (Genesis 6:22). Ezekiel sets him beside two other righteous men: “Though these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job, were in it, they should deliver but their own souls by their righteousness” (Ezekiel 14:14). Hebrews puts him in its roll call of faith, saying that Noah, “being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house” (Hebrews 11:7). Peter calls him “a preacher of righteousness” (2 Peter 2:5).

Genesis does not hide his weakness. After the flood, “he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent” (Genesis 9:21). What his son Ham did next, and the curse that fell on Canaan, is a story of its own.

Genesis puts grace first. Before it calls Noah just, it says that “Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord” (Genesis 6:8). Jewish and Christian readers have explained his choosing in their own ways.

The rabbis argued over the words “in his generations.” In the Talmud, Rabbi Yoḥanan says, “Relative to the other people of his generation he was righteous and wholehearted, but not relative to those of other generations.” Reish Lakish answers that Noah was righteous “despite being surrounded by bad influences; all the more so would he have been considered righteous and wholehearted in other generations” (Sanhedrin 108a). Rashi, the medieval French commentator, records both readings. Another teaching in the same Talmud passage holds that Noah’s fate had been sealed with the rest of his generation, and that he was spared “through the kindness of God due to the fact that he found favor in the eyes of God.”

The Christian reading starts from Hebrews, which says Noah “became heir of the righteousness which is by faith” (Hebrews 11:7). John Chrysostom, preaching on that verse, pointed out that nothing in the sky warned of a flood: “the air was clear, there were no signs [of change]: but nevertheless he feared.” Noah’s righteousness, he said, lay in trust: “by his believing God he was shown to be righteous.”

Nothing in the Bible says so. The idea comes from the story of Noah’s birth in 1 Enoch, and the passage reads less like a medical record than like a sign from heaven. In R. H. Charles’s translation, the newborn’s “body was white as snow and red as the blooming of a rose, and the hair of his head and his long locks were white as wool, and his eyes beautiful. And when he opened his eyes, he lighted up the whole house like the sun” (1 Enoch 106:2). Then he “arose in the hands of the midwife” and “conversed with the Lord of righteousness.”

In the rest of the story of Noah’s birth, his father Lamech fears that an angel fathered the child until Enoch assures him the boy is his own, and the Genesis Apocryphon, a Dead Sea Scroll dated to between the third and first centuries BC, tells it again in Lamech’s voice.

The medical label has at least one named modern author: in 1958 the British Medical Journal published an article by Arnold Sorsby titled “Noah—an Albino.” Readers who see albinism here are reading two real details in the text, a body “white as snow” and hair “white as wool.” People with oculocutaneous albinism, as the U.S. National Library of Medicine describes it, “typically have very fair skin and white or light-colored hair,” and usually vision problems, among them “increased sensitivity to light (photophobia).” The rest of the description is another matter: the same child is rose-red as well as snow-white, his eyes fill the house with light, and he blesses God on the day he is born.

The words match the Bible’s own language for heavenly glory. Daniel saw the Ancient of days, “whose garment was white as snow, and the hair of his head like the pure wool” (Daniel 7:9). John saw the risen Christ: “His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire” (Revelation 1:14). When Moses came down from Sinai, “the skin of his face shone” (Exodus 34:29). George W. E. Nickelsburg of the University of Iowa, writing on the Genesis Apocryphon and 1 Enoch, says that “Noah’s glorious appearance powerfully evokes the imagery of divine epiphany,” and that it “does not indicate divine conception” but is “a sign of his divinely appointed function.” His appearance, Nickelsburg adds, reflects “his role as the remnant figure at the time of the Flood.”

How much weight the description carries depends on the church. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church counts Enoch among the 46 books of its Old Testament, so for its members this story of Noah’s birth is Scripture. The church itself notes that its canon “differs both in the Old and New Testament from that of any other churches.” In the New Testament, the Letter of Jude quotes a prophecy of “Enoch also, the seventh from Adam” (Jude 1:14). Augustine accepted that Enoch wrote something but kept the book out of the canon: “We cannot deny that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, left some divine writings, for this is asserted by the Apostle Jude in his canonical epistle. But it is not without reason that these writings have no place in that canon of Scripture …” The writings that circulated under Enoch’s name, he concluded, “are properly judged by prudent men to be not genuine” (City of God 15.23).

Very little, and most of it concerns his age. In the Talmud, the people who watched him build mocked him: “Old man, why are you building this ark?” (Sanhedrin 108b). In Genesis Rabbah they call him “contemptible old man” (30:7). The Ethiopic Book of Adam and Eve, a Christian work that its translator, S. C. Malan, thought was written by an Egyptian in the fifth or sixth century, has them laugh at “that twaddling old man.” It adds a small wonder of its own: through the hundred years he worked on the ark, “the shoes on his feet were neither changed, nor worn, nor grown old,” and “the hair of his head neither increased nor grew less.”

Josephus describes Noah’s conscience, not his face. Noah tried to persuade the people around him “to change their dispositions and their acts for the better,” and left the land when they would not listen, afraid for his life. “God loved this man for his righteousness,” Josephus adds. Augustine’s chapters on Noah in The City of God are about his righteousness and the ark as a figure of the Church, not his appearance.

Artists had to decide what Genesis left open, and the earliest Christian ones made Noah young. His story has been illustrated “since at least the 3rd century and possibly the 2nd,” according to Richard Stracke of Augusta University, who catalogs Christian iconography. In the catacomb paintings and on fourth-century sarcophagi, the stone coffins of the period, artists showed one scene again and again, the return of the dove with the olive branch. Noah “is always the sole figure shown in the ark, which is visualized as a square chest with a lid.” Stracke explains the chest by the Latin word arca, which “means precisely a chest or a safe.” In the catacombs he stands in the posture of prayer known as the orant and usually faces the viewer. “The Noah of the catacombs is always young and beardless, but in the sarcophagi he almost always has a short, square beard like St. Peter’s. Later images will keep the beard but without the resemblance to Peter’s.”

Michelangelo gave Noah three of the nine Genesis scenes on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, which was finished in 1512: the Sacrifice of Noah, the Flood and the Drunkenness of Noah. The Vatican Museums describe the Flood as a crowd scene, with people making for a hill under the weight of their belongings and others crowding onto a small island, while “in the background is the ark on which, through the will of God, Noah, his family and pairs of animals will be saved.”

The bearded patriarch of later art comes from the artists, beginning with the carvers of those sarcophagi. Genesis sums Noah up in four words: “Noah walked with God” (Genesis 6:9).

• How did Noah live for 950 years?
• A Christian’s guide to the Book of Enoch
• What did Ham do to Noah?
• Who helped Noah build the ark?
• Did Noah go to heaven?
• The Sistine Chapel and the measurements of Solomon’s Temple