And Noah lived after the flood three hundred and fifty years.
Genesis ends Noah's story with a number: 350 years after the flood. What filled those long years, and why does Scripture tell us so little about them?
The number in this verse is large, but the record attached to it is thin. One writer sets the two side by side:
After the flood, God gave mankind a fresh start under Noah. But as under Adam, so again, failure and sin quickly followed. We have plenty of testimony that Noah was a godly man who found grace in the sight of the Lord. He lived for no less than 350 years after the flood, as the end of our chapter tells us. Yet only one thing about him is on record in all those years. He planted a vineyard and made wine. Self-indulgence trapped him, and he drank himself unconscious. The man now most responsible to control others lost control of himself. The age of patriarchal government broke down at the very start, even in the hands of a godly man.
Noah does not die here and vanish. He drops out of the story long before he dies, and the same happened earlier with Adam:
Noah lived on for centuries afterwards, but the history mentions him no more. Adam disappears in the same way after his sin, and Cain's crime led to Seth being given instead of Abel.
Those years were not quiet ones. Noah lived long enough to see what the world did with its fresh start:
Noah — whose name means rest, repose, comfort — lived some 350 years after the judgment of the flood. That was long enough, sadly, for him to see rebellion against God break out everywhere. He also saw idolatry rise and spread over the inhabited earth of that time.
Human lifespans start to fall right after Noah. One writer follows the numbers through the generations that come next:
Compared with his father Noah and those before him, Shem's years mark the growing decline of human age after the flood. Yet before he came near the end of his six hundred years, it was given to him to live into the days not only of Abram but of Isaac. Peleg, the fifth in this series, did not reach half the limit of Shem's term; and Nahor, the father of Terah, dwindled to a hundred and forty-five years. So in God's providential arrangements man was coming by rapid steps to the span of years that has been ordinary since the prayer of Moses in Psalm 90.
The world was new, but man was not. One writer sets Noah beside another figure who closed one era and opened the next:
Noah — like John the Baptist — closed one scene and opened another. He died in that new scene, just as those of the old order before him had died. In man nothing had changed, though his circumstances and even his guilt had changed a great deal. For man had now sinned against blessing and grace.
One writer ties the closing lines of Noah's record to the prophecy that came before them:
So it was to be, according to this earliest prophecy. And so it has happened, exactly to the letter. No human foresight could have expected it. This closes the divine account of Noah: "After the flood Noah lived 350 years. All the days of Noah were 950 years, and he died."
- Years. 350 after the flood, 950 in all — a long life given to a godly man who had found grace.
- Silence. Those years hold one recorded incident, and then the history drops Noah, just as it dropped Adam after his fall.
- Decline. His age is the high point. After him the years fall fast, generation by generation, toward the ordinary human lifespan.
- Death. A fresh start changed Noah's circumstances, not his nature. He died as everyone before him died.
- Word. What outlasts him is the earliest prophecy on record, which history has confirmed to the letter.
And all the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years; and he died.
Genesis 9:29 closes the story of the man who came through the flood: a total of years, then the same three words that end every life in Genesis 5. Commentators ask why a man saved through judgment gets so short an epitaph, and what he leaves behind when he dies.
One writer sees the same pattern here as with Adam. The record turns to the sons, and the father drops out of the story.
The list of Noah's sons comes in the right place, after Noah's fall and its remarkable consequences. It is like Genesis 5, where the genealogy of Adam's sons followed his sin and Cain's sin, which had led to the revealed state of the world before the flood. Noah lived on for centuries afterwards, but the history never mentions him again, just as Adam disappears after his sin.
His death is also a handover. Everything the race had gained stood in one family.
The human race was completely one at the beginning, and in effect it was one again in Noah after the flood. Mankind's outward progress must have been all the greater because people lived so long. Whatever that progress was, the sons of Noah had all of it for their new start.
The number in the verse is large. The record inside it holds almost nothing.
After the flood, God gave mankind a fresh start under Noah. But as under Adam, so again, failure and sin soon followed. We have had plenty of testimony that Noah was a godly man who found grace in the sight of the Lord. He lived for no less than 350 years after the flood, as the end of our chapter tells us. Yet in all those years the record holds one thing only about him. He planted a vineyard, made wine, was trapped into self-indulgence, and became unconscious in drunkenness. The man now most responsible to control others lost control of himself. The age of patriarchal government broke down at the very start, even in the hands of a godly man.
His name promised one thing. The years he lived to see brought another.
Noah's name means rest, repose, comfort. He lived some 350 years after the judgment of the flood. That was long enough, sad to say, to see a general outbreak of rebellion against God, and the rise and spread of idolatry over the whole inhabited earth of that time.
Those last words are not about Noah's health. They are about the whole human race, and one writer points to where death came from.
There is no sound reason at all to doubt the long lifespans credited here to people before the flood. God made man to live, not to die; his death came in through sin… The span of years may seem long beside Psalm 90, where the prayer of Moses lays down the ordinary rule of human life. Even so, they were only the "days" of Adam, or of anyone else recorded here. After Adam they were born, and they had children; they lived and they died.
One writer sets that repeated phrase against a word that runs the other way.
The words "and he died" are repeated so many times in this chapter. They give us a striking contrast to the words "And He shall live," written about David's Son and Lord in Psalm 72:15.
(The ESV renders Psalm 72:15 "Long may he live.")
God brought Noah safely through the flood, but Noah still died. One writer sets his end beside Enoch, who never died at all.
"By faith Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death, and he was not found, because God had taken him" (Hebrews 11:5). "He was not, for God took him" (Genesis 5:24). We cannot help contrasting his outcome with that of Noah, another herald of the coming judgment. God did not remove Noah from the scene. In mercy He kept him safe through the ordeal, and then settled him in the cleansed earth. He took Enoch away before the judgment fell.
- Rescued. God brought Noah through the flood alive and set him over a cleansed earth. He can save a man out of a world under judgment.
- Silent. Of his 350 years after the flood, Scripture records only the vineyard and the drunkenness. The man responsible to control others could not control himself.
- Superseded. The history never mentions him again. He drops out after his fall, as Adam did, and everything passes to his three sons.
- Shadowed. He lived long enough to watch rebellion against God break out again. Idolatry spread across the earth he had inherited.
- Sentenced — and answered. "He died" is the verdict that closes every life from Adam onward, because death came in through sin. The answer is not a longer life. It is the Son of David, of whom Psalm 72 says, "He shall live."