Continuing our series of texts on biblical couples, we find ourselves facing a real challenge. Next in line is Noah, the tenth biblical patriarch after Adam. However, the aim - and at the same time the challenge - of this text is to get to know Noah's life companion. Let us take things in order.

Noah's name comes from the Hebrew "Noach" (נוֹחַ), meaning "rest" or "comfort". Noah is a builder. He patiently builds the great ark, following the instructions God gives him, in order to save his family from the great flood. Noah's building is a symbol of obedient prayer that bears the fruit of salvation.

The time in which Noah lived was a hard one. "Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight, and the earth was filled with violence. (…) for all flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth." (Gen 6:11) Humanity was in a grave state of sin and wickedness, and was in need of "comfort", of "rest in God". Human sin had grown so great that its consequence was the great flood. The Book of Genesis tells us that Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. To be righteous in the biblical sense means one who lives in God's will, who seeks God, who lives by the law of God. "Noah found favour in the eyes of the LORD" (…) Noah walked with God". (cf. Gen 6:8-9). Righteousness or holiness is precisely this: to walk with God. Even when everything around us and within us is chaotic, anxious, meaningless.

However, God's gaze was directed at Noah's whole family. In order to save Noah, God also had to spare his wife, his children, his daughters-in-law and grandchildren, his animals. God had to save his whole environment, everything to which he was bound because of his righteousness. When we are righteous, when we walk with God, the whole "world" in which we live is under God's protection. The holiness to which I am called extends to others as well. Naturally, within Noah's world was also his wife, his "other half". Scripture states in several places that Noah's family entered the ark together with him: for instance Genesis 6:18: "you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons' wives with you."

Scripture and Jewish rabbinic sources will help us uncover the "identity" of Noah's wife. In Genesis 4:22 we find that among Cain's descendants there is Tubal-cain, the forefather of all who forge bronze and iron. "The sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah." Although Scripture does not state that she is indeed Noah's wife, Jewish tradition, drawing on the text Bereshit Rabbah, nonetheless says "The sister of Tubal-cain was called Naamah". Rabbi Abba bar Kanana says: "Naamah was Noah's wife. Naamah means 'lovely', 'beloved'." This rabbi asks why she was given such a name, and answers: "Because her deeds were lovely, good, righteous".

It is interesting how Scripture does not bring Naamah into a direct connection with Noah. Naamah seems hidden, invisible. She is "the wife". And yet she has a very important role. She is chosen to keep her "loveliness" beside "the one who comforts" in a hard time. For the Jews she is a new Eve, who saves the Remnant that will survive. For us she is an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary, wife of her Son. She who stands beside her Son and intercedes for humanity. For the Jews, Noah is a new Adam who, unlike the old Adam, listens to God, who commands him to build a great vessel. Noah is an image of Christ who, obedient to the Father, builds the wood of the Cross, which is "to us who are saved the power of God" (cf. 1 Cor 1:16)

The world was saved thanks to the ark, a vessel built according to the instructions given by the Lord, it was a kind of enormous ship. The way the ark is described in Scripture suggests to us that it was not entirely like a ship. Indeed, it was fitted with chambers, with rooms, built on three decks with doors." "Make yourself an ark of gopher wood; make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch. This is how you are to make it: the length of the ark three hundred cubits, its breadth fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits. Make a roof for the ark, and finish it to a cubit above; and set the door of the ark in its side; make it with lower, second, and third decks". (Gen 6:14-16) It seems to resemble a house more than a ship.

For this reason the building instructions require that the ark be covered inside and out with pitch (tar or resin). In the original Hebrew text, the word used for "inside" is the word "in the house". That is why Noah will need pitch "inside the house and outside". The words of the inspired biblical text show that God asks Noah to build a house. Only in this way will he save the world. This detail has not escaped artists, many of whom have depicted the ark as a house. For example, the mosaics in the cathedral at Monreale, in the baptistery in Florence, in the Basilica of St Mark in Venice, and in Michelangelo's painting in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican.

The house is exceptionally important for all of us. In the house we learn to look one another in the eye without fear as we speak, we learn to laugh, to trust other people, and from that trust we learn to stand on our own feet and walk, we learn to listen and to speak, we learn to receive tenderness and to give it. In the house we eat, and see that others eat too; in the house we rest and work, we care for the sick and see off the dying. "Let me die in my own house" is often people's last wish. If a house is "healthy", it frees us from the "cancer of the soul", which is fear. The house is an intimate, inward, hidden place, yet built of "outward material". Into the house we bring the outside world. But the house is above all an inner space, though equipped with a façade that faces outward. It is a place for the newly born, yet oriented towards the outside; that is why, sooner or later, one leaves the house for the street, goes out into the open of the city. Our whole environment in fact resembles one great house. Pope Francis's 2015 encyclical "Laudato si'" is dedicated to "care for our common home", which is our earth.

Naamah, Noah's wife, is descended from Cain, the fratricide: "And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand". (Gen 4:11) Cain bears a curse, yet from his line comes Naamah, "lovely, gracious", "a second mother of all mankind" as the Jewish teachers of the faith call her. The fact that she is saved tells us that not all of Cain's descendants are cursed and without hope of salvation. The rabbis explain: from what was good in Cain, the world was established, through this woman. Because of her family background, the old biblical tradition did not name her, yet she was in her husband's house. She was in the ark. Like the Virgin Mary in the new ark that is the Church. A woman in the house.

Today we once again have need of a house that is a new ark. The family as a new Noah's ark, in which husband and wife will each have their place. The husband caring for his wife and she for him. The house as a place of salvation for humanity. The woman is often invisible, nameless in her own house, in her work, beside her children, yet she has immeasurable worth. Noah and Naamah are an interesting couple. In a house that saves. Today we need Noah and Naamah and their communion in the house. In the Church. In the domestic Church. Chesterton said, more or less, that the world cannot be saved without a healthy atmosphere in the sitting room of a family home. He praises home life as a place of struggle against the spirit of the world and a place of the highest freedom. Freedom in love. In self-giving. A place of rest, of loveliness. Of life.