A Bible question
Noah’s prayer in the Bible: did Noah pray?
Short answer: Genesis never records the words of a prayer by Noah. What it records is how he lived toward God: Noah “walked with God,” did everything God commanded, and the first thing he did after the flood was build an altar and worship. His life is the prayer the Bible shows us.
What Genesis says about Noah and God
Noah’s story runs from Genesis 6 to Genesis 9. In it, God speaks to Noah many times: the warning, the plans for the ark, the command to go in, the covenant afterward. Noah answers with actions rather than recorded words.
Noah, however, found favor in the eyes of the LORD. This is the account of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation; Noah walked with God.
— Genesis 6:8-9 (BSB)
So Noah did everything precisely as God had commanded him.
— Genesis 6:22 (BSB)
In the middle of the flood the story turns on God, not on Noah’s words:
But God remembered Noah and all the animals and livestock that were with him in the ark. And God sent a wind over the earth, and the waters began to subside.
— Genesis 8:1 (BSB)
The altar: Noah’s worship after the flood
When Noah stepped out onto dry ground, before building a house or planting a field, he worshiped:
Then Noah built an altar to the LORD. And taking from every kind of clean animal and clean bird, he offered burnt offerings on the altar.
— Genesis 8:20 (BSB)
This is the closest the story comes to a prayer scene. Genesis doesn’t give Noah’s words at the altar; it gives God’s response, the promise that “seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall never cease,” and then the covenant sealed with the rainbow (Genesis 9:8-17).
Did Noah ever speak to God?
The only words of Noah that Genesis records come late in the story, after the vineyard (Genesis 9:20-27). He curses Canaan and blesses his sons, and in the middle of it he praises God:
He also declared: “Blessed be the LORD, the God of Shem! May Canaan be the servant of Shem.
— Genesis 9:26 (BSB)
So the Bible has no “prayer of Noah” the way it has the prayer of Jabez or the prayer of Hannah. Books and websites that offer one have written it themselves, which is fine as long as they say so.
What the rest of the Bible says about Noah
Later writers remember Noah for his faith and righteousness, the qualities his obedience showed:
By faith Noah, when warned about things not yet seen, in godly fear built an ark to save his family. By faith he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness that comes by faith.
— Hebrews 11:7 (BSB)
Peter calls him “a preacher of righteousness” (2 Peter 2:5), Ezekiel names him with Daniel and Job as men known for righteousness (Ezekiel 14:14), and Jesus compares the days before His return to the days before the flood (Matthew 24:37-39).
A prayer from Noah’s story
If you want to pray with Noah’s story, the turning point of Genesis 8:1, “God remembered Noah,” is a good place to start. We wrote a short prayer on it, with a voice to pray along:
Noah’s questions, briefly
How many people were on the ark?
Eight: Noah, his wife, his sons Shem, Ham and Japheth, and their three wives (Genesis 7:13; 1 Peter 3:20).
How long was Noah on the ark? How many days?
One year and ten days by the calendar Genesis uses. The flood began in the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month (Genesis 7:11), and the earth was fully dry by the twenty-seventh day of the second month of the next year (Genesis 8:13-14). The rain itself fell for forty days and forty nights (Genesis 7:12), and the waters prevailed on the earth for 150 days (Genesis 7:24).