THE STORY OF NOAH AND THE ARK

After Abel was slain, and his brother Cain had gone into another land, again God gave a child to Adam and Eve.  This child they named Seth; and other sons and daughters were given to them; for Adam and Eve lived many years.  But at last they died, as God had said they must die, because they had eaten of the tree that God had forbidden them to eat.

By the time that Adam died, there were many people on the earth; for the children of Adam and Eve had many other children; and when these grew up they had other children; and these had children also.  These men and women and children lived in tents.  They owned sheep and cattle, and they moved about with them, wherever they could find pasture.  The children played around the tent doors, and sat beside the camp-fires in the evenings, where they all sang together, and the older people told them stories.  And after a time this land where Adam’s sons lived began to be full of people.

It is sad to tell that as time went on more and more of these people became wicked, and fewer and fewer of them grew up to become good men and women.  All the people lived near together, and few went away to other lands; so it came to pass that even the children of good men and women learned to be bad, like the people around them, and no longer did what was right and good.

And as God looked down on the world that he had made, he saw how wicked the men in it had become, and that every thought and every act of man was evil and only evil continually.

But while most of the people in the world were very wicked, there were some good people also, though they were very few.  The best of all the men who lived at that time was a man whose name was Enoch.  He was not the son of Cain, but another Enoch, who came from the family of Seth, the son of Adam, who was born after the death of Abel.  While so many around Enoch were doing evil, this man did only what was right.  He walked with God and God walked with him, and talked with him.  And at last, when Enoch was a very old man and weary with life, God took him away from earth to heaven.  He did not die, as all the people have since Adam disobeyed God, but “he was not, for God took him.”  This means that Enoch was taken up from earth without dying.

All the people in the time of Enoch were not shepherds.  Some of them had learned how to make rude bows and arrows and axes and plows.  And after a long time they melted iron, and they made knives and swords and dishes to use in their homes.  They sowed grain in the fields and reaped harvests, and they planted vines and fruit trees.  But God looked down on the earth and said: 

“I will take away all men from the earth that I have made; because the men of the world are evil, and do evil continually.”

But even in those bad times God saw one good man.  His name was Noah.  Noah tried to do right in the sight of God.  As Enoch had walked with God, so Noah walked with God, and talked with him.  And Noah had three sons; their names were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth.