What is the story of Noah?

Answer 1

Another answer from our community:

The story of Noah can be found in every bible ever printed in the book of Genesis chapters 6 through 10. These chapters describe a wicked world ripe for judgement with only Noah and his immediate family being righteous. God destroyed the whole world with a flood and saved all kinds of animals and Noah and his family to repopulate the earth afterwards.

Answer 2

There are actually two stories of Noah's Ark in Genesis, written by two different authors and cleverly interleaved so that the result appears to be just one, rather complicated story. The Redactor who edited the final version of Genesis no doubt felt that he would face opposition if he removed either one of the stories, so skilfully interleaved them so that the proponents of either story would find familiar text, yet the existence of two stories is not apparent. So, for example, in Genesis 6:19-20, Noah is told to take two of every animal onto the Ark, clean or unclean, but in Genesis 7:1 he is told to take two of every unclean animal, but seven of every clean animal. We do not know the names of the two different authors of the biblical stories of Noah, and they are now called the Priestly Source and the Yahwist:

• The Flood verses attributed to the Priestly author are: Genesis 6:9-22, 7:6, 7:8-9, 7:11, 7:13-16a, 7:18-21, 7:24, 8:1-2a, 8:3b-5, 8:7, 8:13a, 8:14-19, 9:1-17.
• The verses attributed to the Yahwist are: Genesis 6:5-8, 7:1-5, 7:7, 7:10, 7:12, 7:16b-17, 7:22-23, 8:2b-3a, 8:6, 8:8-12, 8:13b, 8:20-22.