Episode 35: Blameless and Righteous?

In our very first real episode for the second Torah portion of the Bible, we immediately see that Noah was righteous and blameless—in his generation… Is that a compliment or not? And what do these words mean? As they are very important to understanding the Bible, we’re going to explore them.

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel.

(Parents, all Scripture comes from the CSB this week, the Christian Standard Bible)

So, welcome to the beginning of Torah portion Noach, or Noah, which is what observant Jewish families study during the second week of the Torah study year, when they go through the first five books of the Bible in 52 weeks. As opposed to us, where it took us 34 weeks just to get to the second part. And this Torah portion will take us through the story of the flood, the Tower of Babel, and we will be introduced to Abraham and Sarah. And it actually won’t take us nearly as long to get through this Torah portion because you won’t need nearly as much background information. You guys know an awful lot now about how people in the ancient world thought about things and how they communicated with one another and how God communicated with them. You know what words like good, or tov in Hebrew, mean. You know some things about ziggurats and temples and what it means to rest. And all that will be very important in the future but today we are going to have to talk about two more important Bible words—righteous and blameless. They probably don’t mean what you might think they mean. But once you know, whenever they pop up in the Bible you can say, “Hey! I totally understand that!”

So, the Hebrew word translated as righteous is tsaddiq. And that funny sound at the beginning of the word, that “ts” sound—well I bet you already say it all the time. When you say “pizza” that’s the same sound as the double z in that word. Peetsa—and when you take out the rest of the word, it’s just a “ts” which is now very easy for you to learn to say, I bet. Pizza—tsaddiq (tsah-deek). Easy peasy, hot and cheesy. You just learned a very important Hebrew word. It is a word that means someone who does what it right in the eyes of God.  A tsaddiq is almost always a person.

But, where does this word tsaddiq come from? I hinted at it just a bit last week. It is a legal word, the kind of word you would hear in an ancient courtroom where a judge finds out who is innocent and who is guilty. When a judge hears a court case, and there are two people saying different things, the judge is supposed to figure out who is telling the truth and who is lying. He has to figure out who is righteous in that case and who is unrighteous—who is innocent and who is guilty. Now, a person who is wrong and terrible 90% of the time is still right 10% of the time and if they go to court and the judge figures out that this is one of the 10% of the time that he or she did good, then they would be called righteous. All that means is, on that day, they were found to be in the right or justified. It certainly doesn’t mean that they are what we would call a good person all the time. So, the word righteous can be a bit complicated and we always have to look at the context. Let me give an example:

Gertrude the thief was on her way back from a bank robbery when someone slammed into her car after running the red light. Total bummer, eh? And so, there were two trials—because they found the stolen money in her car when the ambulance used the jaws of life to cut open the car door and pull her out. The first trial was about the bank robbery. All the people at the bank recognized her as the person who had robbed them. They point at her and say, “She did it!” And after looking over all the evidence, and the video tape footage and lifting fingerprints and all that, the judge declares her guilty, or, in the ancient world, he would have called her unrighteous—not tsaddiq.  But then, a few months later, Gertrude comes back to the exact same courtroom and sits in front of the exact same judge and that judge looks at the videotape evidence from the store across the street from the stop light. He takes a look at the cars and how they were damaged. He listens to the testimony of other drivers at the intersection and, after looking over all the evidence, declares Gertrude to be in the right, not guilty of the accident. In the ancient world, she would have been declared righteous–tsaddiq.

But how can this be? How can Gertrude the thief ever be called righteous? That doesn’t make any sense to us because we define righteousness differently now. But remember that the Bible was written to make more sense to Moses and the children of Israel and their descendants than it does to us. They knew a bad person could be righteous sometimes, declared innocent of something or to be right, and they knew that a decent person could be guilty sometimes, or unrighteous. You guys might want to spend some time thinking about how this has worked in your own lives. Do you know people who are usually good who have been in the wrong? How about people who are usually bad who have been right about things? Of course, you do! No one always does good or bad all the time. We all make mistakes or choose the wrong thing from time to time and even a broken clock is right twice a day. Unless it is a digital clock and then if it is broken then the numbers are not lit up and it is never right. Darnit, soon we’re going to need a new saying!

How about the other word we are going to see describing Noah? What does blameless mean? First of all, that’s the Hebrew word tammim, (ta-meem), which is way easier to say than tsaddiq. And you might be saying, “hey, isn’t that the same word that means sea monsters in Genesis 1?” Well, it sounds close but that is tannin. Tammim, on the other hand, is a really complicated word that means all sorts of things based on how you use it. Usually, it means that something is complete, or whole in some way—but what does that even mean? Sometimes, the word is translated as perfect but we can’t think of that as having no flaws or problems at all. I want you to think of an orange or an apple. A tammim orange or apple will have no bites taken out of it. It might not be the best tasting fruit you have ever had, but no chunks are gone out of it, no one has cut it in half or anything. And that’s important because probably the main way tammim is used is to describe the lambs that were used for sacrifice at the Tabernacle and Temple. They had to be perfect on the outside. Now, I am not tammim, myself, according to that standard. I have a few scars on my belly where the doctor cut me open last month. Did Noah have no scars? Well, he was hundreds of years old by this time so probably that is not the right definition. It’s one thing to be a year-old fluffy critter without any scars or damage and quite another thing to survive many hundreds without being damaged.

What it probably meant is that Noah was a pretty balanced, reliable kind of guy who could be depended on. People knew where they stood with Noah. He wasn’t crazy and unpredictable—the kind of guy you had to watch your back around all the time. Now, what that doesn’t mean is that he never sinned. Abraham was commanded by God to be tammim as well, and he had trouble being patient and sometimes lied when he didn’t trust God. King David told everyone at the end of his own life that he had been tammim and we know he had some times in his life where he did very bad things. Jacob was described with a very similar word, tam, and he could be pretty sneaky and dishonest when it suited him. So, tammim means perfect, but it doesn’t mean that perfect! Only God is truly perfect but we can become the kinds of people who are tammim too—and it means that people will be able to depend on us to be reasonable, peaceful, trustworthy and reliable. Just not and never completely without sin. Only Jesus can do that.

So, what happens when you are tammim and you sin? Well, when you come to your senses, it means that you make things right. When you know that you have done wrong, you stop dead in your tracks and get right with God and the people you have hurt. Really, since we can’t take back what we have done, that’s our only good option. It isn’t always easy, and we can never make things the way they were before, but we do whatever we can do.

Now that we have all that out of the way, let’s look at today’s verses and see what we can understand about what God is trying to tell us about Noah.

These are the family records of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless among his contemporaries; Noah walked with God. 

Whoa—did you notice that? We have a toledot coming! Remember what a toledot is? It’s a genealogy! Here we see it translated as family records. But we’ll talk about that later. The Bible says here that Noah was a tsaddiq ish, or a righteous man, and tammim, blameless or complete—but what’s the rest of this? He’s like this, but it is only when compared to the other people in the earth—that’s what it means when it says that he was righteous and blameless among his contemporaries—and those are the people who were alive at the same time he was. Remember that the other people on earth were wicked all the time, from cradle to grave. And that the earth was ruined because of them. Well, this says that compared to those guys, Noah was like Mary Poppins, practically perfect in every way. Now, he wasn’t described that way before he found favor with God and so we have to wonder if Noah was always like this, as some like to assume, or if God made him this way later. We just don’t know for sure. It’s kind of heartwarming to think that God was looking at the whole kit and kaboodle of wicked humans and found just one single solitary wonderful guy but is it really very likely? If everyone is evil, then where would Noah learn to be like this? Enoch was long gone and he’s the only person that Genesis has really spoken well of up to this point. But, like I said, Enoch was gone, and so was Seth, by the time Noah was born—and so that leaves them out. Although there are a lot of stories written up right before the time of Jesus and after about Noah always being a good guy, we just have no proof. As far as we know, Noah was just like everyone else and when God got ahold of Noah, He changed him into someone who was tsaddiq, and tammim—at least compared to everyone else on the planet.

But look, this verse also says that Noah walked with God. That’s only said about two people in the Bible—Noah and Enoch. So, that’s another interesting clue in our mystery about Noah. I am not exactly sure what it tells us because it is never actually explained, but I am sure it means something. A lot of people have a lot of theories. But anyway, being righteous and blameless in Noah’s generation wasn’t really that much of an accomplishment. Just think of being the nicest guy in the Gestapo in Nazi Germany—it still meant you were pretty messed up and not really a loving person. Sure, compared to Adolf Hitler, the guy might be a real peach, but not compared to Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Corrie ten Boom or Irena Sendler (I could not find a link to children’s materials on Sendler, so this can be a disturbing story for children) who truly lives as righteous heroes during World War II.

So, we have a few possibilities. One, Noah was either raised to be righteous—but then we have to wonder how, since God said that everyone was wicked, and God used him or the whole thing about absolutely every thought of everyone being wicked was hyperbole, an exaggeration, which the Bible does a lot in order to make points. We talked about hyperbole and especially in the teachings of Jesus last week, like shoving a camel through the eye of a needle or even swallowing one or needing to hate your family. We learned that ancient Jewish sages would shock their audiences with exaggeration in order to teach them important concepts. So, maybe not absolutely everyone was wicked. Or, Noah was just an oddball in an evil age and lived as a decent man even without anyone teaching him. Or, after he found favor with God, walking with God made him into a waaaaay better guy than everyone else, even though before God called him, he was just like everyone else with wicked thoughts continually all the time. Now, you can look at the Bible for yourselves and think about it and maybe you can even come up with another option. Because the Bible doesn’t tell us, we can make a lot of “what if” guesses. However, the only things we know for sure about Noah are things that happen after he finds favor with God so…guess what? That’s right, that’s what the Bible wants us to focus on! And like I always remind you—it’s okay to notice questions about the Bible, and to ask them, and it’s also okay when we don’t have the answers. What are we? God? Only He knows everything!

And we will start in with the story next week, of seeing what kind of a guy Noah was and wasn’t based on what he did and didn’t do. You know, no one in the Bible except Jesus is completely perfect and good, they just aren’t, so we are going to see really good things about him and some really bad things too. And that’s okay. People in the Bible are real—if they were fake then they could just do everything right all the time or everything wrong, but that would get really boring really quick because no one is like that in real life and we all know it. We all do good and we all do bad.

But is it good enough to just be better than everyone around us? Is that what it means to walk with God? I mean, it’s certainly better than nothing but it sure isn’t good! The truth is that there are a lot of different people who believe in God who are in a lot of different places about how kind or honest they are depending on where they started out—and that can be frustrating. Part of the message of the Bible is how when we walk with God closely, He begins to rub off on us. Have you ever heard that expression before? How about “bad companions breed bad character?” The truth is that we tend to act like whoever we hang out with. People with honest friends don’t usually find many reasons for thinking they need to lie. When your friends study hard, you probably will end up studying harder than you do. Very few people who hang out with folks who are kind feel comfortable acting like jerks. But, a person who is honest who starts hanging out with a bunch of liars is going to get used to the idea of that being okay. Hanging out with people who don’t care about school or working hard at their jobs might make them think that slacking off isn’t such a big deal. One kind person spending time with a bunch of bullies is either not going to be able to stand it anymore or will start being meaner too. That’s what it means to have someone else “rub off on you.”

So, what happens when someone who is terrible finds favor with God? Do they immediately become perfect? Ha! I wish! What they become is better, bit by bit. Sometimes they take huge leaps! Sometimes only small steps. Sometimes it can seem like they are even going backward. Want to know what happened to me? My coworkers noticed it right away. I used to swear—a lot. I mean, the really horrible bad words. Not just the kinda borderline bad words. I wasn’t treating anyone any nicer than I used to, but about two weeks after I got saved, one of my coworkers said, “So, I noticed you stopped swearing.” And I was so surprised. I hadn’t noticed. I hadn’t even tried. It was literally the only thing about my life that had changed at that point. God was starting to rub off on me! I told them what had happened and they were very surprised because I was not really acting much like a Christian should at that point. But it was a sign and even a miracle because there was nothing else to explain the change in my life.

I think that’s what happened to Noah too. In 2 Peter 2:5, Jesus’s disciple Peter said that Noah was a “preacher of righteousness,” but what does that mean. Does it mean he was holding church services or standing on a street corner with a sign saying, “The End of the World is Nigh”? Not likely. That word translated as preacher doesn’t really get used very often but it means like someone who is a herald—who makes announcements. Now, we’re going to see that God is only going to tell him to make enough room in the ark for his immediate family. God never tells Noah to preach to people. He never tells Noah to warn anyone about the flood. Noah has no Bible to preach from because it hasn’t been written yet! So, why don’t we go back to what we learned about righteousness to see if we can figure out what Peter thinks Noah was doing. Certainly, Peter knew that Noah wasn’t doing what we think of when we think of what makes someone a preacher. If you remember, righteous means that someone is doing the right thing and not the wrong thing. It doesn’t mean that they do the right thing 100% of the time when we call someone righteous because only Jesus is perfect.

So, let’s put on our thinking caps and come up with some possibilities. Because we don’t have any answers in Scripture, it means that there is no right answer. There might be some really wrong answers, but there isn’t a right answer that we can prove is the only correct one. Maybe, as Noah continued to walk with God, he started noticing things that hadn’t ever bothered him before. Maybe violence started to really bother him and he would tell people, “Hey, you shouldn’t treat people like that!” Would that make Noah a preacher of righteousness in that kind of world? Absolutely! Even if he couldn’t teach them Proverbs 21:7, “The violence of the wicked sweeps them away because they refuse to act justly.” What if someone was trying to sell Noah a fish, and said it was fresh, but it smelled like it was caught a week ago and had sat in the sun and was covered in maggots? Noah might say, “It isn’t right to try and trick people like that! You need to be honest in your business dealings!” That would definitely be preaching righteousness. It isn’t like Noah could quote Proverbs 11:1 and say, “Dishonest scales are detestable to the Lord, but an accurate weight is his delight.” If he came across some kids disrespecting their parents, it isn’t like he could quote the Ten Commandments to them because they hadn’t been written down yet, “Honor your father and your mother so that you may have a long life in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” (Ex 20:12) And plus, if he did that, they’d say, “What land are you talking about?” because that promise was given to different people many hundreds of years later. What about if someone stole something from Noah? Or doing other terrible things? What could Noah do except tell them about all the things that were rubbing off on him from spending time walking with God?

Honestly, preaching is a whole lot easier now that we have Bibles. Was that what Noah was doing? Just telling them about how God’s ideas about right and wrong were changing him? That’s what I think. Maybe you have different ideas and as we read the story, you can see if those ideas make sense or not. You know what? If you come up with an idea and find out that it is wrong later, that’s perfectly alright. You will never have all the right answers and neither will I. But that doesn’t mean that we are bad or stupid or don’t love God—it means that we are human and because we know we can trust God and His mercy and kindness, we know that we can think and ask and even change our minds. When we think we are right, we can talk about why. When we find out we were wrong, we can admit it and still be absolutely loved by God. I have been wrong about a lot of things and I am still wrong about a lot of things. And if you ask me what I am wrong about, I will tell you that I don’t know! I still think I am right about those things! We’re all like that.

So, as we continue on in our stories about Noah, I want you to remember that Noah isn’t Jesus. Noah isn’t perfect. Noah is going to do wrong things just like the rest of us. We don’t have to believe that Noah is absolutely perfect when he does things that look really messed up to us. We don’t have to make excuses for Noah and try to find reasons why he is actually right when what he does looks pretty wrong. Noah is a human being who was righteous and blameless in his generation—not a human being who was righteous and blameless compared to Jesus! Always remember that the Bible tells us what people did. It isn’t a story full of perfect people who only did what they should have done. It’s okay to notice when they sin, when they are mean, and when they just flat out make the wrong choices.

I love you. I am praying for you. And I hope you have a wonderful week studying the Bible with the people who love you.

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