Noah, the eighth

With seven each of creatures clean,

of unclean two. And here is seen

how mercy doth prevail in Heaven:

Though man's an unclean creature, seven

the Lord permitted to embark

along with me into the ark.

My wife, my sons, my sons' three wives:

He saved their five-too-many lives!

-- Yes and No

We read in 2 Peter 2:5 that God "spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly."

This is typically interpreted as a reference to the fact that "eight souls were saved by water" (1 Pet. 3:20) in the ark, and "the eighth" (person is not there in the Greek) means in this case "one of eight." It would be more natural, though, for a reader to take as meaning that Noah was "the eighth" in the same sense that Enoch was "the seventh from Adam" (Jude 1:14) and think that Noah was the eighth in line of descent from Adam.

In fact, in Genesis 5 as we have it now, he was the tenth. In the parallel genealogy given in Genesis 4, though (see "City of Enoch"), it is the eighth place which corresponds to Noah.

In the Genesis 4 genealogy, Lamech is the seventh generation from Adam, heads a family of seven (he takes two wives, each of whom bears two sons), and says, "If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold" (Gen. 4:24).

In Genesis 5, Lamech is the ninth generation and the father of Noah -- but he lives for 777 years, a strong hint that he may originally have been identical to the Lamech of Genesis 4, who is so closely associated with the numbers 7 and 77. That would make Noah "the eighth."