As It Was in the Days of Noah: What Did Jesus Mean?

Ask a room of churchgoers what Jesus meant by "as it was in the days of Noah" and most will answer with violence, corruption, and a world grown so wicked that God had to end it.

That is what Genesis says. It is not what Jesus said here. The four things he names are eating, drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, and the fault he identifies is in the phrase that follows: "and knew not until the flood came". The problem in his version of the comparison is not depravity. It is ordinary life carried on by people with no idea what is about to happen. That difference changes what the passage is for.

The passage

But as the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. Matthew 24:37-39

Read that list again. Eating. Drinking. Marrying. Giving in marriage. None of the four is a sin. Three of them are commanded or blessed elsewhere in Scripture, and the fourth is dinner.

The weight of the sentence falls on "knew not". The people in the illustration are not defying a warning. They are unaware there is one.

What Jesus left out

Genesis is not shy about the state of the world before the flood, and it is worth putting the two lists side by side.

Jesus is not correcting Genesis. He is selecting from it. He has a specific point to make about the coming of the Son of man, and the feature of the flood story he reaches for is that it arrived on a population going about its week.

This is easy to miss because the popular use of the passage runs the other way. "As in the days of Noah" is normally quoted as a claim that the world has become as bad as it was then. That is a claim you can build from Genesis. It is not the claim being made in Matthew 24.

The Genesis 6 reading

A great deal of end times preaching does bring Genesis 6 into the picture, and it deserves a fair hearing rather than a dismissal.

The argument is that "the days of Noah" is a shorthand for the whole state of things described in Genesis 6, and that Jesus expects his hearers to know the chapter. Genesis 6 does say that "the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair", that "there were giants in the earth in those days", and that "the wickedness of man was great in the earth". The Hebrew word behind "giants" is nephilim, whose derivation is uncertain and is often connected to a root meaning to fall.

Who the sons of God were has been argued for two thousand years. The oldest identifiable reading, found across Second Temple Jewish writing and in Christian writers including Justin Martyr, Irenaeus and Tertullian, took them as heavenly beings who rebelled, and appealed to Jude 6 and 2 Peter 2:4. Augustine gave the alternative its most influential form in the early fifth century, reading the sons of God as the godly line of Seth intermarrying with the line of Cain, and that view dominated Western Christianity for centuries. A third reading takes them as dynastic rulers. In recent decades the heavenly beings reading has recovered ground through scholars such as Michael Heiser, John Day and Loren Stuckenbruck, who argue that the phrase bene elohim elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible always refers to heavenly beings.

All of that is a live debate about Genesis. The honest thing to say about Matthew 24 is narrower. Jesus cites none of it here. He could have. He named a meal and a wedding instead. Whether the wider Genesis background is fairly imported into his comparison is a judgement call, and readers should at least know they are making one.

Luke adds a second example

Luke's version of the same teaching puts a second city alongside the first.

Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded; But the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed them all. Luke 17:28-29

The shape is identical, and the second list is even more ordinary than the first. Buying, selling, planting, building. Commerce and agriculture and construction.

Sodom's wickedness is named plainly enough elsewhere, in Genesis 19 and in Ezekiel 16:49. Luke does not name it here either. He gives the same picture twice: normal life, right up to the day, and then the day.

Luke then adds "Remember Lot's wife", which sharpens it further. She was not one of the unaware. She had been warned, was already out, and looked back.

How the four views read it

The comparison itself is not the contested part. Where it lands is.

One detail is worth knowing because it cuts across the usual lines. Preterists do not all apply this section to AD 70. Kenneth Gentry, a partial preterist, argues that Matthew 24 changes subject at verse 36, so that verses 4 to 35 concern Jerusalem and verses 36 onward concern the second advent at the end of history. On that view the days of Noah are still future even for a preterist. Others, including full preterists, keep the whole chapter in the first century. So "the preterist reading" of this paragraph is not one thing.

What the passage is driving at

Look at what follows. Two in the field, one taken and one left, which is contested in its own right and covered in one taken and one left. Then this.

Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come. Matthew 24:42

Then a householder who would have stayed awake if he had known when the thief was coming. Then a servant put in charge of the household while the master is away, who either feeds the others or beats them because the master delays. Then, in chapter 25, ten virgins with lamps and three servants with money.

Every one of those is about conduct during a wait of unknown length. That is the direction the days of Noah are pointing. The comparison is not supplied so that readers can score the present age for wickedness and estimate how close it is. It is supplied because the flood arrived on a normal Tuesday, and the people at the table had no plan for it.

Which is why this passage is unusually hard to weaponise. It gives no date, no measurable threshold, and no test you can apply to anyone but yourself.

Where it sits in the larger argument is the question worth asking next. Jesus named three things in this discourse that the world would see, and the days of Noah sit between the second and the third. What each of those signs is, and how four traditions of reading trace them through the chapter, is the frame that determines what this comparison is finally about.