The praise that Noah is accorded is unparalleled anywhere in Tanakh.

He was, says the Torah, a righteous man perfect in his generations, Noah walked with God.

No such praise is given to Abraham or Moses or any of the prophets.

The only person in the Bible even to come close is Job described as blameless and upright he feared God

and shunned evil. Noah is in fact the only individual in the whole of Tanakh described as a

Tzaddik, as a righteous individual. Yet the man we see at the end of his life isn't the person we

saw at the beginning.

After the flood we read, Noah, a man of the soil, proceeded to plant a vineyard.

When he drank some of its wine, he became drunk, and lay uncovered inside his tent.

Chum, the father of Canaan, saw his father naked, and told his two brothers outside. But Sheam and Yafet took a garment and laid it across their shoulders.

Then they walked in backward and covered their father's naked body.

Their faces were turned the other way so that they couldn't see their father naked.

So the man of God has become a man of the soil.

The upright man has become a drunkard,

the man clothed in virtue now lies naked and unashamed. The man who saved his family from the flood

is now so undignified that two of his sons are ashamed to look at him. This is a tale of decline.

Why? Nowa is the classic case of someone

who's righteous but not a leader. In a disastrous age when all had been corrupted, when the

world was filled with violence, when even God himself, in the most poignant line in the whole

Torah, regretted that he had made man on earth and was pain to his very core.

Noah alone justified God's faith in humanity, the faith that led him to create mankind in the first place.

That's an immense achievement and nothing should detract from it.

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