Let's teach through this one the same way as Abraham — chapter by chapter, with the New Testament brought in wherever it actually picks something up, not as decoration afterward but as part of following the argument all the way through. This story gets treated in two lazy ways, worth avoiding from the start. One is to argue endlessly about whether it happened, which turns Scripture into a courtroom exhibit. The other is to turn it into a children's picture of animals in pairs, which strips out the theology entirely — this is one of the most severe and one of the most hope-laden passages in the whole Bible, and it deserves to be read as both at once. Where the New Testament interprets it, that carries real authority — Peter treats the flood as history in the same breath he treats it as typology, and that combination is worth noticing rather than picking one and dropping the other.
Here's the shape of it before we go section by section. Ten generations pass between Adam and Noah — the same number, not coincidentally, that will pass between Noah and Abraham. Noah is six hundred when the flood begins, six hundred and one when he leaves the ark. The waters prevail for a hundred and fifty days before receding. And the whole account is bracketed by two genealogies and a flood — it's the hinge between primeval history, chapters one through eleven, and the patriarchal promises that begin in chapter twelve. Everything about Noah's story is preparing you to read Abraham's.
The chapter opens strangely — "sons of God" taking "daughters of men" as wives, giants called Nephilim on the earth — and it's worth being honest about this rather than smoothing it into false certainty: this is one of the genuinely disputed passages in the Old Testament. Some read "sons of God" as fallen angelic beings (and Jude 6 and 2 Peter 2:4 both seem to allude to exactly this kind of angelic transgression, "the angels which kept not their first estate"); others read it as the godly line of Seth intermarrying with the ungodly line of Cain, blurring a distinction the text has been carefully maintaining since chapter four. The question stays open here rather than forced, because the text itself doesn't stop to explain — it moves straight past the mystery to the verdict.
And the verdict is total: "every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually." Notice what that phrase is actually claiming — not that every act was murder, but that the orientation of desire itself had turned. This is what later theology, centuries after, will call something like Augustine's account of a will structurally bent away from God rather than merely making occasional bad choices. And notice the word used for what this corruption produces: hamas, violence — not simply crime, but the unraveling of the created order itself, the world un-shaloming itself from the inside.
Then comes the verse that should stop you every time you read it: "it repented the LORD that he had made man... and it grieved him at his heart." Don't rush past this to explain it away. The text doesn't flatten God's emotion into something merely instructive for us; it says God grieved. Whatever else you think is true about God's unchanging nature, this passage insists that His relationship to a broken creation is not indifferent — He grieves with it, not merely over it from a safe distance. Kierkegaard's instinct about Abraham applies here too, earlier in the story than you'd expect: this is God risking creation itself, staying in relationship with something that has genuinely wounded Him, rather than simply overriding it by force from outside.
And then, in the middle of universal corruption, one sentence turns the whole story: "But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD." Grace — chen, favor — before a single word is said about Noah's character. That order matters as much as it mattered for Abraham in chapter fifteen. Whatever righteousness Noah has, it's a response to being found, not a cause of being chosen.