What was the name of Noah’s wife?

Five mentions, no name

Noah’s wife is in the story from the first instructions. She is part of God’s promise before the rain (Genesis 6:18), she goes into the ship with Noah (7:7), and she steps out beside him onto dry ground (8:16, 18). On the day the flood begins, the narrator counts her in:

In the same day Noah, and Shem, Ham, and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah’s wife and the three wives of his sons with them, entered into the ship

Five mentions, and never a name. Her three daughters-in-law are nameless too. The silence stands out because Genesis has just named three women in Cain’s family, Adah, Zillah and Naamah (4:19–22), and because these four, in the story’s own terms, are the mothers of everyone born after the flood. The New Testament keeps only the count: “eight souls, were saved through water” (1 Peter 3:20).

Emzara, in Jubilees

The oldest name comes from the Book of Jubilees, a Hebrew retelling of Genesis written around 160 BC and still part of the Bible of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. It calls her Emzara and makes her a woman of Noah’s own family (Jubilees 4:33). The Book of Tobit, from about the same age, agrees on that point: it names Noah among the fathers who “took wives of their kindred” (Tobit 4:12). A Dead Sea Scroll, the Genesis Apocryphon, also names her Emzara, and Jubilees goes on to name the three daughters-in-law as well. Centuries later the Muslim historian al-Tabari gives an echo of the same name: Amzurah.

Naamah, in the midrash

Genesis 4 ends Cain’s family tree with a half-line about a woman who never appears again.

Zillah also gave birth to Tubal Cain, the forger of every cutting instrument of bronze and iron. Tubal Cain’s sister was Naamah.

Why mention her at all? One rabbi in Genesis Rabbah (23:3) answered that she became Noah’s wife, and that her name, which means pleasant, matched her deeds. Others in the same passage disagreed. Rashi, the great medieval commentator, repeated the identification on Genesis 4:22, and Naamah became the best-known name in Jewish tradition. If it is right, a daughter of Cain’s line rode out the flood. Darren Aronofsky’s film Noah (2014) borrowed it, as Naameh, for the character played by Jennifer Connelly.

A crowd of other names

• Haykêl, in the Syriac Cave of Treasures, from late antiquity.
• Barthenos, in the Panarion of Epiphanius, about AD 375.
• Norea, in Gnostic writings described by Epiphanius.
• Nemzar or Noyemzar, in Armenian tradition.
• Percoba, in an Old English poem on Genesis.

The Quran takes a different path. It names no one, but it holds up the wife of Noah, with the wife of Lot, as an example of unbelief (66:10), and some Muslim commentators said she drowned in the flood.

The wife who would not board

Medieval England gave her a personality instead of a name. In the mystery plays that town guilds staged at Chester and Wakefield, Noah’s wife refuses to get on the ship. She would rather stay ashore with her friends, and she holds out until the last moment, until she is hauled aboard and lets Noah feel her temper. Audiences loved the scene. It is the opposite of Genesis, where she says nothing at all and does exactly what the others do: she goes in, she waits a year, and she walks out into a new world.