In the tenth book of his Genesis commentary, Benito Pererius pauses over a difficulty: Lamech named his son Noah — “rest” — saying, this same shall comfort us. Yet in Noah’s own days God’s anger drowned the world. How is he “rest”? According to the bare history, Pererius admits, the name does not fit very well. And then:

But according to allegory, it squares most beautifully with Christ the Lord: for our true rest and consolation was the remission of our sins, which he bestowed on us through his Baptism, of which that flood was a figure: for as in that [flood] the sinners perished, so in this [baptism] sins are blotted out. Our Noah, therefore, granted us a twofold rest: one from the works of our hands — that is, from sins — lest they disturb, disquiet, and harass our conscience; the other from the miseries and hardships to which, on account of sins, we are justly subjected in the land which God cursed.

The whole disputation reads the Ark the same way — pitch, window, door, and all — as a figure of the Church, with the Latin beside the English: the Twelfth Disputation, How the Ark of Noah, according to Allegory, was a figure of the Church of Christ.