The Death of Noah
Noah dies at the age of 950, three hundred and fifty years after the Flood, when Abraham was fifty-eight.
Noah lived nine hundred and fifty years—six hundred before the Flood and three hundred and fifty after. He saw the world before the catastrophe, survived its destruction, and watched the reborn human race in all its contradictions: the spread of nations, the first kingdoms, the Tower and the dispersion. Seder Olam places his death in 2006, when Abraham was fifty-eight, so their lives overlapped by nearly six decades. The Torah says of him only that he was "a righteous man, perfect in his generations," a phrase the sages have debated ever since: praise, if he stayed righteous among the wicked; or limitation, if he seemed righteous only by comparison. The difference shows in action—Noah built the ark for a hundred and twenty years but, unlike Abraham, never argued with God for the condemned. With Noah the last living witness of the antediluvian world disappears; his son Shem survives him into the days of Jacob.
How we know
Sources
Tanakh
- Bereishit 9:28–29 — “and all the days of Noach were nine hundred and fifty years, and he died”
Chazal: Mishnah, Talmud, midrash, Zohar
- Sanhedrin 108a — the dispute over “in his generations” — praise or qualification
- Tanchuma Noach 9 — the lion struck Noach in the ark — Shem brought his offering for him
- Seder Olam Rabbah 1 — the year of death, 2006 — Avraham was 58 that year
Rishonim
- Rashi on Bereishit 6:9 — both sides of the dispute over Noach’s righteousness against his generation
Basis: stated in the Tanakh.