What Did the Flood Actually Accomplish?

Q. It seems to me that the flood accomplished nothing as we see that even in the ark there was a misdeed in that the son of Noach had relations there. Then, after the flood, we go right into the drunkenness incident and straight to the Tower of Bavel situation. So the world wasn't purged of badness for even a minute. I’ve been struggling with this since yeshiva, which was a long time ago.

A. Thanks for your question. The Talmud in Sanhedrin (108b) says that Cham had relations on the ark. Rashi on 5:32 cites the Midrash from Bereishis Rabbah on why Noah didn't have children until he was 500 years old. This was so his children wouldn't yet be 100 at the time of the flood, 100 being the age of culpability in those days (see Isaiah 65:20). So, Cham was legally an "impetuous youth" in the ark. Having relations with his own wife would be an indiscretion, not a perversion.

Keep in mind that Noach lived 350 years after the flood. When was the incident with the vineyard? It had to be at least a few years because Noach had to cultivate the soil, plant the vines, grow the grapes, make the wine.... For all we know, the vineyard was 100 or 200 years after the ark!

Similarly, the Tower was built more than 300 years after the flood. That's longer than the entire history of the United States so far!

People make this same mistaken assumption about sefer Shoftim. They read about things that happened, which are recorded in rapid succession, and they assume that the time of the Judges was a lawless anarchy. However, the period of Shoftim was also hundreds of years, so what you have is a noteworthy incident followed by 75 or 80 years of quiet. The Navi doesn't record all the times that nothing happened!

So, what we have here is that Cham (a legal "minor") had relations with his wife on the ark (an indiscretion but not an act of evil), Noach got drunk at some point in the subsequent three centuries (an error in judgment but also not evil), and the Tower of Babel (actually evil but, again, more than three centuries after the ark). If that's all the noteworthy stuff that happened in a 350-year span, I'd say that's actually pretty good!

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