This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
View text chunked by:
[99]
When Noah had made these supplications, God, who loved the man for
his righteousness, granted entire success to his prayers, and said, that
it was not he who brought the destruction on a polluted world, but that
they underwent that vengeance on account of their own wickedness; and that
he had not brought men into the world if he had himself determined to destroy
them, it being an instance of greater wisdom not to have granted them life
at all, than, after it was granted, to procure their destruction; "But
the injuries," said he, "they offered to my holiness and virtue,
forced me to bring this punishment upon them. But I will leave off for
the time to come to require such punishments, the effects of so great wrath,
for their future wicked actions, and especially on account of thy prayers.
But if I shall at any time send tempests of rain, in an extraordinary manner,
be not affrighted at the largeness of the showers; for the water shall
no more overspread the earth. However, I require you to abstain from shedding
the blood of men, and to keep yourselves pure from murder; and to punish
those that commit any such thing. I permit you to make use of all the other
living creatures at your pleasure, and as your appetites lead you; for
I have made you lords of them all, both of those that walk on the land,
and those that swim in the waters, and of those that fly in the regions
of the air on high, excepting their blood, for therein is the life. But
I will give you a sign that I have left off my anger by my bow [whereby
is meant the rainbow, for they determined that the rainbow was the bow
of God]. And when God had said and promised thus, he went away.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.