Are the animals coming onto the ark by two’s or by fourteen’s and what’s all this about clean and unclean animals? Did Noah have to give them all baths or what?
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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 and we will be mostly in Genesis 6 and 7) 19 You are also to bring into the ark two of all the living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you. 20 Two of everything—from the birds according to their kinds, from the livestock according to their kinds, and from the animals that crawl on the ground according to their kinds—will come to you so that you can keep them alive. 21 Take with you every kind of food that is eaten; gather it as food for you and for them.” 22 And Noah did this. He did everything that God had commanded him.
So, everyone is familiar with the story of how all the animals came into the ark two by two. And as we can see, Noah didn’t have to go around gathering them up. Who would want to go gathering up predators like wild cats and other dangerous animals? “Here, kitty kitty…” doesn’t really work with the caracals and leopards that are common where Noah was living. And there were also bears. God told Noah not to worry about that sort of thing because the animals would come to him. I bet that was a huge relief, right? And they would come in groups of two, one male and one female. But did you know that not all animals arrived that way? There was a very special group of animals that came aboard not in groups of two, a male and a female so they could have babies and not go extinct, but in groups of fourteen, seven females, and seven males! Why were some animals more important than others? And what kinds of animals are we talking about and what about them is so special—maybe not what you think.
Then the Lord said to Noah, “Enter the ark, you and all your household, for I have seen that you alone are righteous before me in this generation. 2 You are to take with you seven pairs, a male and its female, of all the clean animals, and two of the animals that are not clean, a male and its female, 3 and seven pairs, male and female, of the birds of the sky—in order to keep offspring alive throughout the earth. (Gen 7)
So, what is a clean animal? Now, we might be tempted to say cats because they spend all their time licking themselves but that wouldn’t be correct. What about raccoons? Did you know that raccoons like to wash their food in water before they eat it? That’s pretty clean of them, but that doesn’t make them a clean animal. There are actually two entirely different kinds of clean animals in the Bible—animals that are clean for eating and animals that are clean for sacrificing to God on an altar. But how do we know what the clean animals were and which ones are being talked about here? Well, let’s put on our critical thinking caps. We find out about the animals that God says His people can eat in Leviticus 11, which includes cows, sheep, goats, deer, elk and moose, and even animals like giraffes. It’s kind of complicated and we won’t talk about that today but God told His people that there were animals that were acceptable and unacceptable as food—and that translates as clean, meaning okay to eat, and unclean, meaning not okay to eat. It has nothing at all to do with actually being clean. If that was true then I guess we could eat humans because we are always taking showers and baths, right? Great googly moogly, no! According to the Bible, cats and dogs are not okay to eat. They are unclean. Does that mean that we can’t have them in our houses as pets? Not at all. They are only unacceptable, or unclean, for eating. As long as they are alive, there is no problem. They can live with us and snuggle with us and it is all just fine.
And I know it can be confusing but clean and unclean are always about what is right and wrong to do in certain situations, and where certain things should and should not be. It isn’t about dirt. Not when the words clean and unclean are used in the Bible, anyway. I want you to think about it this way. Is dirt bad? Of course not. God made dirt and it is good for what it was created for. And dirt was created to be outside. Dirt is so useful. In the garden, we can grow fruit trees and vegetables and watermelons and all sorts of things. We can also grow flowers and grass. I want you to think for a minute what our lives would be like without dirt. Well, for one thing, we’d be dead pretty quick because we would have no food and you might be tempted to say, “Well, Miss Tyler, we could eat the animals,” and I would say that you are right except what do the animals eat? Uh oh. The animals eat plants. No plants. No animals. No us. And we’d run out of fish fairly quick if that’s all there was to eat!
But does that mean that dirt belongs everywhere just because it is good and God made it to be good? Nope. Dirt outside is awesome but dirt in the house is not where it belongs—except in flowerpots. So we sweep it up or wash it off and put it back outside where it belongs. I guess we can say that outside, dirt is clean and inside, dirt is unclean! When something is where it belongs and being used for what it should be used for, the Bible would call it clean and when it is not where it belongs and not being used for what it should be used for, the Bible calls it unclean. It’s a bit more complicated than that but for now, that’s a great starting place to understand about the animals in this week’s lesson. Later, we will talk about when people are clean and unclean and that is something different entirely—and it isn’t about being sinful or anything. Again, it’s just about where stuff belongs sometimes and usually just for a short period of time. Of course, people are always unclean for eating. We don’t eat people! Not ever! People don’t belong on the dinner table! Well, they do but only if they are sitting at it. You guys know what I mean.
And so, all the “two by two” animals were the kind that were unclean, but unclean for what? For eating? Wait a minute. That can’t be right because according to everything we have read so far, people aren’t eating animals yet! In fact, it won’t be until the ark sets down on the Mountains of Ararat that God will tell Noah and his family that they can eat critters at all. And that’s a year away still! Hmmm…this is why we have to put on our critical thinking caps because we have a genuine mystery on our hands! So, if these animals aren’t unclean for eating, what else is there? I mean, God hasn’t told Noah that there will be meat on the menu someday and so there is no way he would be thinking about food! So, if God was calling these animals unclean then Noah would already know exactly what it means so what does Noah know about that we don’t?
Hey, wait!–what is Noah going to do when they get off the ark? What’s the first thing he is going to do? Well, the first thing that happens once the flood dries up is that Noah will get out of the ark and sacrifice some critters to thank God for saving them—and we call that an offering because it is a present. Suffice it to say that God says He enjoys the smell and if you have ever been to a barbeque, you can totally understand that. A sacrifice is a barbeque for God, even though He doesn’t need to eat. And we already saw that Abel made an offering of a critter all the way back in Genesis 4, and God was pleased with that. Since Noah and Abel are from the same family, I am sure this information was passed down from father to son throughout all those generations—remember our teaching about toledot? That’s the word that means generations, which means all the people in a family tree. Your toledot is your mom and dad, grandparents, great-grandparents, and will also include your children and grandchildren –and you too! So, Noah would have known for a long time which kids of animals God wanted as gifts, as offerings. And since no one was supposed to eat meat yet, when the Bible is talking about which animals were in two’s and which were in groups of fourteens, or as the Bible says, seven pairs—which is 2×7 or 7+7. Well, to Noah that could only mean one thing. God wanted Noah to bring seven males and females of the types of animals He likes on His altar as burnt offerings—which is God’s barbeque.
What kinds of animals are those? Well, even though the Bible says that we can eat animals like deer and moose and elk and giraffes, God never said that those were okay on His altar as gifts. But He does like sheep, goats, and cows. And if someone was very poor, they could bring a pigeon or turtledove offering. So, on the ark, you would have two of everything except cows, sheep, and goats. Oh, and for some reason, they had to bring seven pairs of each kind of bird too. I honestly don’t know the answer why on that one. But that’s okay—the Bible doesn’t tell us why and so it either can’t be that important or the people Moses told the story to would have understood because of their context, something that we just don’t understand anymore. And that’s okay to not understand everything. As we go through the Bible, there’s going to be a lot of that stuff that we are totally clueless about!
Why was it important to have seven pairs of each of these critters? Why couldn’t he just bring two of each like all the others? Well, as we are going to see, at the end of the voyage Noah is going to sacrifice some of the clean critters. Now, think just a bit and ask yourself what happens when you only have two animals, one male, and one female, and you kill one of them? That’s right, you have an extinct species just as soon as the other one dies because there will be no baby animals! Extinct is a word that means an animal used to be alive on the earth but now there aren’t any more of them because they all died out—like the dinosaurs. Cows and sheep and goats would have gone the way of the Do-Do bird if there were only two of each and Noah sacrificed even one of each. I don’t know about you but I would sure miss hamburgers something fierce! And do you like milk, and cheese and do you like ice-cream???? No more of that either! I guess we can call this first rule of the two by two club—when you only have two of each kind of animals, don’t kill one of them! But when you have seven pairs, or fourteen animals each of cows, sheep, and goats, you can afford to offer a few to God in order to thank Him for saving your lives!
And Noah is going to be told, after they land, that he and his families can stop being vegetarians and can begin to eat animals and we have this exact same situation. What happens if you eat an animal that there are only two of? Like, “Hmmmm…I wonder what that dog tastes like?” Well, come to find out it tastes like an extinct animal. And remember what extinct means—there are no more of them before too long. Especially if he thought it tasted good and ate the other one too! But even though Noah and his family could eat the cows and sheep and goats, there are only fourteen of each and so they have to be smart about it. They can’t eat meat very often. They have to wait until a whole bunch of critters start being born and even then they probably only ate the very old ones. In America, we eat a ton of meat but in the ancient world, animals were too valuable to eat. When they would eat an animal, it was either old or it was a male—so the bulls, rams, and billy-goats and not the cows or the ewes or the does. Cows and ewes and does are more valuable because they can have babies.
Have you ever been to a ranch or a farm where they have animals? Sometimes they will have fields and fields worth of female animals and only one male. Usually, when you eat beef or lamb or goat, and especially in the store, it’s a male animal. So, all you boys should be glad that you were born human beings, boy howdy. Because you would almost certainly end up slapped between a couple of buns at McDonalds!
Now, this isn’t the only place in the Bible where pairs, that’s two of something, are mentioned. In the garden, there was only one person until God saw what a bad idea that was, and then there were two. Moses and Aaron delivered God’s messages to Pharaoh. In the book of Joshua, two spies are sent out to scout out the Promised Land, and especially Jericho. But the most important pairs in Scripture were the groups of disciples sent out by Jesus to preach the Good News, the Gospel, of the Kingdom of God to all of Israel. Now, why is it so important to send people out in groups of two? Well, here’s our archaeology lesson for the day. And you guys know how much I love to teach history and archaeology whenever I can and the farther and farther we get into the Bible, the more of it I can teach because we have more evidence of what people were doing. From ancient writings of people like the Egyptians, Hittites, Babylonians, and Assyrians, Persians, Greeks and Romans, and others, we can learn a lot about how Israel’s neighbors did things—and because Israel did a lot of these things the exact same way, it really helps us to understand that world of the Bible.
Now, in the ancient world, if a king had a very important message to send to another king, how do you think he would send it? Would he whisper it into the ear of one guy and send him off on the journey and just hope that the message gets delivered accurately? No way! Have you ever played the telephone game? Where you sit in a circle and someone whispers a message to the person next to them and everyone tries to say it perfectly to the next person but by the time you get all the way around the message is usually just crazy nonsense? Well, that’s one good reason not to do that. But what if the messenger was made to practice and practice so he wouldn’t make any mistakes? You could do that and that would be a great idea and as long as you could really trust the person, that worked. We’ll get back to that in a bit. But what if it was just a regular messenger? If a messenger wanted to make trouble, or if he wanted to start a war when his king wanted peace, or just whatever—then he could give a wrong message. And when you don’t have telephones or telegraphs or the mail, or email, then a lot of bad things can happen to a good message to turn it into a bad message. Of course, some cultures had developed writing and so they could send a clay cuneiform tablet sealed with the king’s seal, and that really helped. But your best bet would be to send out two messengers, because, between the two of them, they would keep each other honest. No one would really want to deliver a message and have the other guy say, “Nuh-uh, that is so totally not what Kings Hasenpfeffer said. He said such and such.” Because then someone is getting executed. “Off with his head!” If he’s lucky! Those ancient kings were nasty people and they had some creative ways of making folks suffer.
But there was also something called the Royal Messenger, and we learned about this from the Hittites. Not only were they Israel’s northern neighbors, living in modern-day Turkey if you want to look on a map, but the Hittites even were living in the Promised Land during the time of Abraham. His grandson Esau married two Hittite women whose families were living there. Now, all of these fears about messengers giving a bad message sort of went away if you could instead send a trusted member of your family. Like, the King might send a very close relative with the message, someone he trusts not only with his life but with his kingdom. He might do that if a message was very, very important and he didn’t think he could risk sending it through anyone else. That sort of messenger is called a Royal Messenger because he wouldn’t be just an ordinary person and when another kingdom got a message through someone who is royalty, they know it is very serious business.
Who can you think of in the Bible who was a Royal Messenger? Not Moses. Now, Moses was very special and God did send Moses and Aaron to deliver messages to Pharaoh but Moses wasn’t related to God so even though he was raised by Pharaoh’s daughter in the palace in Egypt, when he served God he was just an ordinary shepherd. What about the prophets? No, they weren’t royal either. Hmmm…maybe we ought to go more into the future than the prophets…
But, of course, you know that God had a very close relative to send messages through. Messages that didn’t need to be written down because God could absolutely trust this Messenger to deliver them perfectly. And He could trust Him because they had been together since the beginning and according to the Gospel of John, everything that had been created was created through this Messenger. John said that this Messenger was that Creative Word of God—Jesus. Jesus who never sinned, not even once. Jesus who did absolutely everything God ever told Him to do, no matter how difficult or painful. Jesus who loved people so much that He wanted to save them no matter what. Jesus who healed people of sickness. Jesus who made broken bodies work perfectly again. Jesus who battled demons and won every battle. Jesus who taught people what the Kingdom of Heaven was really like. And so, Jesus could be trusted with God’s message all by Himself. But Jesus wasn’t going to stay on earth forever, He needed to go back up to the Father. So, He had to prepare more messengers and the message hadn’t been written down yet! And there were no printing presses or kindles or anything like that!
So, they needed two messengers to go out together throughout the land because the message they were delivering was too important for anyone to mess up! I mean, just think if they had sent out Judas alone, right? I am betting he would have been like charging money for his services instead of just preaching and healing people for free and accepting hospitality in people’s homes. But, in the ancient world, people didn’t like to trust a message that only came from one person. It seemed suspicious to them and I suppose that’s a good idea even today. There are a lot of people who get all worked up by something that only one person says and before they know it, they are scared and angry! I am going to tell you a story about something that happened to me when I was at my very first job but because it was a lot like what happens to people in school or even in churches, it is important to share it.
Have you ever been around someone who gossips? A gossip is a person who is always telling stories about other people. Sometimes they are true, or partly true, and sometimes they are lies. But the strange thing about gossips is how many people believe them. There are way too many people who just assume that when someone is sharing a negative story about someone else, it can’t possibly be made up. But, sometimes gossips are spiteful people who exaggerate and “fill in the blanks” of a story they heard from someone else, with their own personal opinions, and the next time the story gets told, by whoever heard the gossip, those personal opinions get told as facts.
Well, at my first job I was working part-time in the lab and part-time in research and development at an aerospace company. And there was a huge meeting with the boss and all of the research department but because I was only part-time at that point, I wasn’t at the meeting. Well, one of the head researchers tape-recorded a meeting and as I was getting ready to start my half-day in their department, I walked by as they were all huddled together and he was holding up his tape recorder. Of course, I had no clue why he was doing that and didn’t find out for another year. For all I knew, they were about to listen to music. I really didn’t care. But, a few days later, someone told the boss about the tape recording. And someone blamed me. And before I knew it, no one trusted me. Of course, I had no idea what was wrong for about a year. People would make comments to me not to “spill the beans” when I overheard something but I had no idea why until the head researcher was talking to me in his office one day and told me why no one trusted me. I was shocked. I hadn’t done it but I couldn’t prove it. One person had decided I did it and told everyone else. And the person who did do it, let me take the blame. No one ever saw me do it, of course. But because of one lying messenger, it made a lot of trouble for me. So, always be careful to not just go believing everything you hear—even if the person who told it to you believes it. They may not have any proof either. Best just not to listen to gossips at all.
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.
Context for Kids will be taking a break until 2022–see you then!