When and Where Was Noah Born? 1,056 Years After Creation, Place Unknown

Noah was born when his father Lamech was 182, and the Bible never says where. Adding up the ages in Genesis 5 puts his birth 1,056 years after Adam’s creation, by the Hebrew numbers, or about 2948 BC on Ussher’s count. The Greek Septuagint makes it 1,642 years. Genesis names neither his birthplace nor his mother.

Where does the Bible tell of Noah’s birth?

In two verses of Genesis 5, the chapter that lists the ten generations from Adam to Noah: “And Lamech lived an hundred eighty and two years, and begat a son: And he called his name Noah, saying, This same shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground which the LORD hath cursed” (Genesis 5:28–29). Lamech’s is the only entry in the chapter that records anyone’s words.

Noah’s name comes back in the other genealogies of Scripture. Chronicles opens with the same line of fathers and sons: “Adam, Sheth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalaleel, Jered, Henoch, Methuselah, Lamech, Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth” (1 Chronicles 1:1–4). Luke traces the ancestry of Jesus back through him: “which was the son of Noe, which was the son of Lamech” (Luke 3:36). Noe is the Greek form of the name.

When was Noah born?

Genesis gives each father’s age when his son was born, so the years can be added from Adam onward. By the Hebrew text, Noah was born in the year 1056 counted from Adam’s creation.

The Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, gives several of these fathers different ages. Its Lamech is 188 when Noah is born, and the sum comes to 1,642 years. Augustine, whose copies of Genesis carried the Greek numbers, noticed the gap at exactly this point: “For before he begot his son, who was called Noah, six years fewer are given to him by the Hebrew manuscripts than by ours.” Of the list as a whole he wrote that there is “a discrepancy for which I cannot account between our manuscripts and the Hebrew,” yet the two agree on the length of every life from Adam to Methuselah. Lamech’s is the one total that differs: the Hebrew gives him 777 years and the Greek 753, a gap Augustine also noted.

Turning these years into dates BC depends on which chronology one follows, and the Hebrew and Greek numbers already differ by 586 years before Noah’s birth; Smith’s Bible Dictionary, for one, puts his life at 2948 to 1998 BC.

Genesis then passes over Noah’s first five centuries. The next thing it tells is that “Noah was five hundred years old: and Noah begat Shem, Ham, and Japheth” (Genesis 5:32). Since “Shem was an hundred years old, and begat Arphaxad two years after the flood” (Genesis 11:10), Noah was about 502 when Shem was born. Genesis does not say how old Noah was when he built the ark, only that he was 600 when the flood came (Genesis 7:6).

Did Noah know Adam?

By the Hebrew or the Greek numbers, no. Adam died at 930 (Genesis 5:5), and in the Hebrew count that was 126 years before Noah was born; Seth died 14 years before. Noah’s father, Lamech, born in the year 874, shared 56 years with Adam, so in the Hebrew count Noah is the first man in the line of Genesis 5 born after Adam’s death.

On the Hebrew numbers, six of the nine men before him were still alive at his birth: Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, his grandfather Methuselah and his father Lamech. Enos lived until Noah was 84, and Jared until he was 366. On the Greek numbers the count is four: Mahalaleel, Jared, Methuselah and Lamech. Enoch was not among them. He “walked with God: and he was not; for God took him” (Genesis 5:24), 69 years before Noah was born.

Where was Noah born?

Genesis does not say, and no other book of the Bible fills the gap. The chapters before the flood name few places: Eden, whose river “was parted, and became into four heads,” one of them the “Euphrates” (Genesis 2:10–14), and the city Cain built and named “after the name of his son, Enoch” (Genesis 4:17). Neither is tied to Noah. After the flood the ark came to rest “upon the mountains of Ararat” (Genesis 8:4), and later the people “journeyed from the east” and “found a plain in the land of Shinar” (Genesis 11:2). Those verses say where the ark landed and where Noah’s descendants settled. They do not say where he was born, or where he lived while he built the ark.

Later writers say little more, and they do not agree. Josephus, the Jewish historian of the first century, says Noah was troubled by what the people around him were doing and afraid they would kill him and his family, “so he departed out of that land.” He does not name the land. The Cave of Treasures, an ancient Syriac retelling of Bible history from Creation to Christ, does give a place: it puts the descendants of Seth on a holy mountain beside Paradise. When the rest went down to live among Cain’s descendants, it says, only “Methuselah, Lamech, and Noah” remained on the “Mountain of the Triumphant Ones.”

Mesopotamia had flood stories and king lists of its own, and Christians read the likeness two ways. The notes in the Catholic New American Bible say the biblical story “ultimately draws upon an ancient Mesopotamian tradition of a great flood”; Answers in Genesis, writing of the Sumerian King List, judges it “more likely that the Sumerian King List was composed using Genesis for numerical information.” Neither says where Noah was born.

Who were Noah’s parents?

His father was Lamech, the son of Methuselah. Genesis has two men of that name. The first, a descendant of Cain, “took unto him two wives: the name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other Zillah” (Genesis 4:19). Noah’s father belongs to the line of Seth. The Catholic notes observe that “most of the names in the series are the same as the names in Cain’s line,” Lamech among them, and that Genesis 5 traces the line “through Seth rather than through Cain.”

Lamech lived 595 years after Noah’s birth and died at 777 (Genesis 5:30–31). In those years he “begat sons and daughters” (Genesis 5:30), so Noah had brothers and sisters. Scripture names none of them, and none is among those who went into the ark with Noah: “his sons, and his wife, and his sons’ wives” (Genesis 7:7).

Noah’s grandfather Methuselah lived 969 years, the longest life in the Bible, and by the Hebrew numbers he died in the year of the flood. His great-grandfather was Enoch, whom Jude calls “the seventh from Adam” (Jude 14). Noah is the tenth.

His mother is not named in the Bible. The Book of Jubilees, an ancient Jewish retelling of Genesis, gives her a name and a family: Lamech “took to himself a wife, and her name was Betenos the daughter of Baraki’il, the daughter of his father’s brother” (Jubilees 4:28). In that account Noah’s parents were cousins, as Methuselah and his wife, “Edna the daughter of Azrial,” had been. The Genesis Apocryphon, an Aramaic retelling found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, calls her Bitenosh. The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization explains that the name means “daughter of man” and is “sometimes spelled Betenos or Betanosh.” Those names come from the later retellings; Genesis itself never gives one.

How do 1 Enoch and the Genesis Apocryphon tell Noah’s birth?

Both tell it as a wonder. The fuller account is near the end of the Book of Enoch, known as 1 Enoch, in chapters 106 and 107, which R. H. Charles’s translation heads “Fragment of the Book of Noah.” The Catholic notes say that writing about Enoch began “as early as the third century B.C.” 1 Enoch and Jubilees stand outside the Jewish, Catholic and Protestant Bibles, and the Catholic notes refer to “the apocryphal work 1 Enoch.” The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church counts both among the 46 books of its Old Testament. In 1 Enoch, Enoch himself tells the story: “my son Methuselah took a wife for his son Lamech, and she became pregnant by him and bore a son” (1 Enoch 106:1).

The child was strange to look at: “his 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.” When he opened his eyes, “he lighted up the whole house like the sun,” and “he arose in the hands of the midwife, opened his mouth, and conversed with the Lord of righteousness” (1 Enoch 106:2–3). Lamech was afraid. He told his father, “it seems to me that he is not sprung from me but from the angels,” and Methuselah went to Enoch “to the ends of the earth” to learn the truth. Enoch answered that “some of the angels of heaven transgressed the word of the Lord,” that a flood was coming, and that the boy was Lamech’s own son: “call his name Noah; for he shall be left to you, and he and his sons shall be saved from the destruction” (1 Enoch 106:13–18).

The Genesis Apocryphon tells the same story in Lamech’s voice. The scroll is badly damaged, but George Nickelsburg of the University of Iowa has traced its course. Lamech suspects that his wife conceived by one of the watchers, the angels who take human wives in 1 Enoch 6–11, and puts her under oath. She answers: “I swear to you by the Great Holy One, by the King of the Heavens: from you is this seed, and from you is this conception, and from you is the planting of this fruit; and not from any stranger, and not from any of the watchers, and not from any of the sons of heaven.” Lamech then asks his father Methuselah to go to Enoch, who in Nickelsburg’s summary “is at Parvaim,” and Methuselah comes back with the same assurance. Of the quarrel between husband and wife, Nickelsburg notes, there is “no hint in 1 Enoch 106-107, let alone Genesis 5.”

Genesis has none of this. It gives the birth two verses and spends its words on the name.

What does the name Noah mean?

Rest. The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia gives the Hebrew as “noach, ‘rest’” and adds: “Lamech here seems to derive the word from the nacham, ‘to comfort,’ but this is probably a mere play upon the name by Noah’s father.” The two words sound alike in Hebrew, and Lamech’s saying turns one into the other: “This same shall comfort us.” The New American Bible translates the verse “This one shall bring us relief from our work and the toil of our hands,” and its note explains that “the sound of the Hebrew word noah, ‘Noah,’ is echoed in the word yenahamenu, ‘he will bring us relief.’”

Lamech names the burden he hoped to be relieved of: “the ground which the LORD hath cursed.” That looks back to God’s word to Adam: “cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life” (Genesis 3:17). The ancient translations and retellings each heard the promise a little differently. The Septuagint has “This one will cause us to cease from our works.” Jubilees has “This one will comfort me for my trouble and all my work.” 1 Enoch explains the name “for he will comfort the earth after all the destruction” (1 Enoch 107:3).

Christian readers have heard more in it. Easton’s Bible Dictionary notes that Lamech’s words “have been regarded as in a sense prophetical, designating Noah as a type of Him who is the true ‘rest and comfort’ of men under the burden of life,” and points to the words of Jesus: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).

The note in the New American Bible hears two things in the name: the curse on the soil from Genesis 3, and “Noah’s success in agriculture, especially in raising grapes for wine.” Both return later in Genesis. After the flood the LORD says, “I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake” (Genesis 8:21), and Noah “began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard” (Genesis 9:20). A husbandman is a farmer.

Related reading

• How old was Noah when he died?
• Noah’s wife and her names in tradition
• What did Noah look like?
• The line from Noah to Jesus
• Bible verses about Noah and the flood