I added a new book to my library this week, and thought I should share it. So first, I took it to church yesterday to share with the children. It was a good fit with Earth Day, and also a nice lead-in to some community gardening work that we’re hoping to do later in the spring. But I want to share it with you, too, because it is an excellent resource and a great story to boot.
Noah’s Wife: The Story of Namaah traces the flood narrative from a more feminine perspective. Noah’s wife is a bit of an anonymous presence in the Biblical text, but author Sandy Eisenberg Sasso takes a sparse mention and fleshes it out beautifully. Sasso was the second woman rabbi and the first rabbi to become a mother. I first heard her speak on an onbeing.org podcast about the spirituality of parenting. She has also written several children’s books – books that speak across faith boundaries and are used in Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic congregations. A wise and wonderful woman.
Sasso calls Noah’s Wife a modern midrash. Midrash are stories that flesh out the Biblical story. They are extra stories that add to Biblical tradition by asking some wondering questions and imagining new answers. Sasso imagines that Noah’s wife was named Namaah and that God had invited her to collect a garden for the ark. Two of every living plant, of course. She wears a magnificent apron covered in pockets for seeds and seedlings, and she collects red clay pots of flowers and wide baskets brimming with fruit and vegetables. The illustrations, by Bethanne Andersen, are lovely and lush, and the kids at church vigorously elbowed and kneed their way closer and close to take a good look at the pages.
Seasick lions with green manes, dandelions almost left off the ark, and water, water everywhere, but never enough for a bath…
Sasso writes that, at first, the raven did not want to do Noah’s bidding and look for land, but that Namaah offered him words of comfort.
Do not be afraid. It is God who has chosen you to be a messenger. Take this olive seed and when you see even a small patch of dry land, let it fall to the earth.
I love this imaginative commissioning moment. It adds a richness to the text, and allows us to wonder with children about how God might be at work in the actions of other people.
I have a soft spot for midrash, I confess. My postgraduate work in theology was dealing with midrash in contemporary secular fiction. I looked at a fairly wide range of authors who retell and embroider biblical narrative. We might respond to this kind of creative work by saying that it changes the Bible’s account – that it isn’t true to the text – that it diminishes what is there in some way. But I prefer to honour artists who delve into this imaginative fabric of our Bible. To question, perhaps, but also to listen. These writers and artists take the time to sit with the text, so I would choose to take time to sit with them and wonder with them about what else might be said in the spaces between the stories.
I believe that there is space within our faith traditions to wonder and to imagine other answers. These might be more new parables. Maybe these are stories that could enrich our understanding of how other people reach for God from the context of their own lives. And in that reaching – as in all reaching for God – God is present. So perhaps, if we listen, we might catch an echo of God.
