Annotatio LXIX

”He called his name Noah, saying: This one shall comfort us from the works and labors of our hands, in the land which the Lord hath cursed.” — Genesis 5:29

Francesco Giorgio, in the first volume, Problem 58, gathers from these words that the curse which God inflicted on the earth for Adam’s sin lasted until the birth of Noah, and, he living, was entirely removed.¹ This he makes persuasive from the fact that God — who never before the times of Noah willed to accept the oblation of the fruits of the earth, as may be known from Cain’s gifts — at length, from Noah himself and thereafter from his posterity, received most gratefully the oblations of the fruits of the earth. But it appears that an exposition of this kind is forced and violent: both because that old curse of the earth still remains² — which, unless it be cultivated by many and assiduous labors of men, denies sustenance to the human race — and because nowhere in the sacred letters is it read that Noah offered to God the fruits of the earth, but only cattle and birds.³ The true and genuine sense, therefore, of the proposed clause is that which Diodore, Bishop of Tarsus, brought forward — namely, that Noah, first of all, joined the beasts to the plough, and cut the earth with the ploughshare:⁴ by which salutary invention he wonderfully consoled the human race from the works and labors of [their] hands, because the hands of men it freed from the hard and heavy labors of digging the earth.