Women of the Bible: Mrs. Noah married righteous man, trusted him to follow God
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I miss Jean-Luc Picard.
When I think of truly great male role models, my mind always goes back to Captain Jean-Luc Picard, the captain of the USS Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Above and beyond my run-of-the-mill, nerdy Star Trek fascination, Picard stands out in my mind as the last great male role model on prime-time television. His character was an impeccable balance between strength and human vulnerability, emotion and restraint, intellect and action and confidence and humility. His closest confidant was Dr. Beverly Crusher, the ship's chief medical officer. It seems he ate breakfast with her every morning because he valued the opinions and perspectives of a woman. There sat in the captain's chair a man who was competently and unapologetically in command of the ship, using his authority always to accomplish the mission set by his superiors and for the good of his crew simultaneously.
Where have men like that gone?
This is the question that drones on in columns in The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, TV Guide and numerous other entertainment publications. Two years after Star Trek: The Next Generation began on CBS, NBC started running Seinfeld. The former, featuring a quintessential man, enjoyed some success and ran for seven seasons. The latter — the show created to be about nothing featuring an unapologetically selfish lout — ran for nine seasons and was named the greatest television show of all time by TV Guide. The trend has continued that way ever since. Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin replaced Andy Griffith and Ward Cleaver. The stability, restraint and diplomacy of the Enterprise's captain in the 90s was replaced with a hot-tempered, fatherless bar hooligan by the end of the 2000s. The men of pop culture have either became fools or jerks.
No wonder the Christian view of marriage has eroded over the decades. In a Christian home, the man's place at the head of the house comes with the responsibility of acting in the best interest of everyone under his headship, forsaking his own. Ephesians 5:25 commands husbands, in loving their wives, to "give himself up for her" the same way Christ laid down his life for the church. But when we look at the world, we see it populated by men who are either incapable of doing so because they are fools or unwilling to do so because they are jerks.
But God's word offers a different picture. The next noteworthy woman in the Bible after Eve is Noah's wife. She isn't named, and it doesn't seem that God ever talks to her directly, but it would be awfully sexist to ignore her because of that.
Admittedly, Noah seems to be the main human character in Genesis 6-9. God comes to Noah rather than his wife to command him to build an enormous ark to house at least two of every kind of living animal to preserve life on earth from the impending worldwide flood. It takes Noah 100 years to do it. In 2 Peter 2:5, there is an implication that along with building, he was telling everyone he could that his ark would be the only way they could be safe, but only he and his family — including his wife and his sons' wives — were saved from the flood that killed every other person on the planet.
With a little bit of sanctified imagination and knowledge of what the rest of the Bible says about marriage, I think we can do a good job at fleshing Mrs. Noah out a bit more and learn something about marriage and the role of women in the Bible.
The first praiseworthy thing to note about Mrs. Noah is that she was married to the only godly man in the whole world. In Genesis, men who force women into marriage with them tend to be painted as villains. Laban is consistently presented as a bad guy because he got Jacob drunk and tricked him into marrying Leah, whom he did not love. Shechem and his whole city suffered a crushing and humiliating attack because he raped Dinah and tried to marry her afterward. By contrast, Abraham's servant and Bethuel were both conscientious to obtain Rebekah's explicit consent before she married Isaac, and Genesis paints them as good guys.
We can guess, then, that Mrs. Noah recognized Noah's righteousness and married him for it. As a pastor, I see things go the other way too often wherein a woman chooses an decidedly ungodly man. Maybe no one ever told them they were worth being treated better. Maybe they've grown up watching the fools and jerks on TV and decide the jerk is the lesser of the two evils.
Not so with Mrs. Noah. In a world with a much less favorable fool and jerk to godly man ratio, Mrs. Noah held to a higher standard.
Second, she trusted her trustworthy husband. We have to infer that at some point Noah and Mrs. Noah had a conversation about what he was building in the backyard. My own amazing wife barely tolerates the small wood shop in our garage. I can't imagine her reaction to a 450-foot-long wooden box. For good or for ill, the Bible is usually pretty good at highlighting contentious wives (I'm looking at you, Michal. See 2 Samuel 6:16-23). While it's an argument from silence, we don't see Mrs. Noah pushing back on the idea. Most dramatizations show her helping and participating alongside.
Instead of berating him, Mrs. Noah trusted her husband. He might have told her, "Honey, this is what God has told me to do. I know it sounds crazy, but I want to follow God." It seems she might have replied, "OK, let's get to work." First she married a righteous and godly man. Then she trusted him to follow God, and she followed along with him.
Finally, we have the result. She lived. She trusted God's activity in her husband's life. She supported that activity and she allowed her husband to lead her to the supreme blessing of being one of only eight people to survive a worldwide catastrophe.
We are all too used to ignoring the women behind the scenes, but Mrs. Noah here seems to exhibit wisdom for our age. Where we find ourselves settling for fools and jerks in our age, Mrs. Noah didn't when it was much more tempting to settle in her own age. Where we don't trust men to accomplish the mission and care for others both completely at the same time, Mrs. Noah did. In that regard, I pray my own home looks more like Noah's ark. May I be less of a fool and may my own wife see my trustworthiness as it grows. I pray the same for your home, too.