Rainbows and the number eight

With seven each of creatures clean;

Of unclean, two -- yet I have 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 sons, my wife, my sons' three wives --

He saved their five-too-many lives!

-- Yes and No

Early this morning I was reading in a coffee shop, as is my wont. I read the two Epistles of Peter and then turned to The Eighth Tower by John Keel.

Both Epistles mention Noah as one of eight survivors of the Flood: "the ark . . . wherein few, that is eight, souls were saved" (1 Pet. 3:20), and "saved Noah the eighth person" (2 Pet. 2:5). The story of the Flood is, among other things, a just-so story about the origin of the rainbow.

The Eighth Tower has that word eighth in its title, and the cover illustration shows the seven traditional colors of the rainbow plus an eighth color, black:

The author's name as given on the cover -- John A. Keel -- contains an anagram of Noah. (John A. is also an anagram of that other nautical prophet, Jonah.) A keel is part of a ship.

In the book, Keel provides a diagram of part of the electromagnetic spectrum -- including eight "colors" -- and then discusses how UFOs often appear first as red or violet and then move through the spectrum:

Just as I was reading this, the background music in the coffee shop was a song called "Inside a Rainbow":

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."