The Pleasing Aroma of Noah’s Sacrifice

How should we understand Noah’s sacrifice after the flood? What role does it have in the aftermath of the story of the flood? Far from only being the response of a thankful man, Noah’s sacrifice has a profound effect on how God responds to his creation. Let’s take a deeper look at Noah’s sacrifice with these comments from the New American Commentary.

Worship and the Word of Promise

Then Noah built an altar to the LORD and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it. The LORD smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: ‘Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done.

As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.”

Genesis 8:20–22

Contrasting God’s former resolve to destroy the earth (6:13–22), this section exhibits God’s determination to preserve the second creation. In response to the Lord’s deliverance, Noah built an altar for sacrifice. By this, Genesis testifies at its start to the human duty to acknowledge the Lord as Creator and Savior in sacrifice and worship. We have in Noah’s sacrifice a reminder that sinful humanity always required a mediation with God, as shown by the shadows of the past (Col 2:17; Heb 8:5; 9:9; 10:1). ‘Now, however, the manifestation of Christ has taken away these ancient shadows.’

An Altar and an Offering

Although worship was known from the days of Cain and Abel (4:3–4; also 4:26), this incident is the first account of an ‘altar’ erected for that purpose. Here Noah directs his worship specifically ‘to the LORD’. This same language describes the patriarchal custom of building an altar for worship wherever the fathers resided in their sojournings, especially Abraham, who constructed his altar ‘to the LORD’ (12:7–8; 13:18). Noah then was the pious forerunner of Israel’s fathers both in terms of physical ancestry and in veneration of Israel’s God, Yahweh.

The Sinai directives for constructing the tabernacle’s bronze ‘altar of burnt offering’ (mizbeah ha’ola) and for levitical sacrifice share the language of our passage: ‘altar’ (e.g., Exod 27:1–8; 38:1–7), ‘clean animals’ and ‘clean birds’ (e.g., Lev 20:25), and ‘sacrificed burnt offerings’ (e.g., Exod 24:5; 32:6; Lev 17:8; Deut 12:13–14). The horned altar of the tabernacle was commonly described as ‘the altar of burnt offering,’ making Noah a prototype of Moses, who made sacrifice in the wilderness.

The sacrifice of ‘burnt offerings’ (‘olot) is specifically ‘clean animals’ and ‘clean birds,’ foreshadowing the practice of later Israel. ‘Burnt offering’ usually occurs, as here, with the cognate verb ‘offered’ (ha’aleh; ‘sacrifice’), which means ‘ascent,’ referring to the smoke and its scent rising toward heaven. ‘Burnt offering’ is found again in Genesis, where God tests Abraham’s devotion by commanding him to offer up Isaac (22:2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 13). It would be viewed as the appropriate sacrifice for Noah, who presented it freely out of thanksgiving to God for sparing his life. ‘A spontaneous celebration, the result of salvation experienced, is just as much a part of the necessary life of worship as the permanent, regularly organized service.’ Noah sacrificed ‘some of all’ the clean animals, evidencing his overflowing gratefulness toward the Lord.

An Aroma that Soothes God’s Heart

The favorable response of the Lord shows his pleasure at Noah’s offering. Verse 21 echoes 6:5, where the Lord determined to destroy the earth as a result of human wickedness; now God resolves to spare the earth such further calamity. The mitigation of God’s former policy is plain when read against his antediluvian charges (6:5–7). Both 6:5 and 8:21 have the words ‘inclination,’ ‘his heart,’ and ‘evil,’ but 6:5 has the inclusive ‘every,’ ‘only,’ and ‘all.’ In 6:5 the emphasis is on the unprecedented pervasiveness of sin, which deserved divine retribution, and in 8:21 God acknowledges that sin is a given with humanity and has ruled the human heart from the outset (i.e., Adam’s sin).

Noah’s worship soothed the broken ‘heart’ (v. 21) of God, which had been injured by man’s wickedness (6:6). ‘Pleasing aroma’ (reah hannihoah) is another sound allusion to the narrative’s motif of ‘rest’ (nuah) and ‘Noah’ (noah; cf. 5:29). The translation ‘soothing aroma’ (NASB, REB) best reflects the idea of ‘rest’ or ‘appeasement.’ Here we have the several sound plays on the name ‘Noah’ brought together.

Through the ‘soothing’ offering (nihoah), God is brought to ‘rest’ (nuah) by ‘Noah’ (noah). Thus by ‘Noah’ (noah) the divine ‘grief/regret’ (nhm) over human creation (6:6) and his decision to ‘wipe out’ (mhh; 6:7) all humanity is transformed into his ‘compassion’ (nhm) for postdiluvian humanity.”

As a result of Noah’s offering, God determines in ‘his heart’ (‘within himself,’ REB) to stay any future curse and destruction. By this the author invites us to hear the inner thoughts of the Lord (cp. 1:26; 3:22; 11:7), whose former meditations had called for destruction (6:7). Although his promises are not declared to Noah, they find their promissory character explicitly in 9:1–17.

Atonement and Appeasement

We have found that Noah’s sacrifice was an offering of thanksgiving, but was it also a propitiation for sin? From the example of the patriarch Job, ‘burnt offering’ was presented in earliest times as atonement for sin (1:5; cf. Lev 1:4). Noah’s sacrifice too was an appeasement on behalf of all postdiluvian humanity as well as an offering of thanksgiving. As Job mediated for his family, Noah was priest for the postdiluvian world. The role of Noah as the second Adam is coupled with the imagery of Moses, who mediates for the people of God (cf. Exod 32:32).

From the narrative it was Noah’s offering for atonement that prompted God to declare his new intentions toward the sinful earth, despite human propensity toward sin. But this was not a persuasion elicited solely by ritual, for it is a constant in Genesis 1–11 that the Lord’s favor overcomes and supersedes human wickedness (cf. Rom 5:15, 20–21). Moreover, Noah already had a faith relationship with God, for ‘he walked with God’ (6:9; 7:1; 8:1a; cf. Heb 11:7), and it was also out of this devotion that his sacrifice pleased God. Here we see God’s grace at work in accepting Noah’s sacrifice and establishing a new basis for the Lord’s relationship with the world.

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