Noah is named as the rest-bringer for the human race. And he does just that, not simply by enduring the flood but by offering righteous worship on the holy mountain after the flood. 

Yahweh initially repents that He made “the man”; in the end, He has a change of heart and promises not to destroy the earth, even though “the man” has an evil imagination from youth (Morales, The Tabernacle Pre-Figured, 187).

E. van Wolde points out how this is brought out by the word-play on Noah’s name throughout the flood narrative: “The offering of Noah is soothing to God, brings about in God a state of appeasement. The consequence of the first autonomous action of Noah is that God comes to rest, to nwch. He causes God to chance from nacham and machah to nacham and nch, in other words from nacham in the sense of regret, avenge, execute wrath or will to change to nacham in the sense of compassion, comfort, rest, or non-change. . . . . Through his nachoch offering, [Noah] brings God to nwch. . . . Noah makes God chance his program from destruction to continuing creation (8.21-9.17). . . . Noah turns out to be a more important character than a narrative analysis might lead us to believe: the real transformation of the story is made by him” (quoted in Morales, 188).

Morales calls Noah a “flood hero” and suggests that the story is less about the judgment of the world and more about “how it was that Noah was saved from judgment.” Or, more emphatically, in the words of WM Clark, the flood narrative shows that God chose Noah for the salvation of mankind: “Noah is the potential saddiq on whose subsequent actions depends the salvation of mankind” (191). The story is about the salvation of the world from wrath through the actions of righteous Noah.