Genesis9chapter 9

Genesis 9:1-3

Be fruitful, and multiply: The blessing spoken over Adam in 1:28 is said again over Noah, in places word for word, so the world after the water restarts on the old commission. What drops out is the language of subduing and having dominion, and what takes its place is the fear and dread of man on every beast, with every moving thing now given for food. Noah stands at the head of a second beginning, and the paragraph that follows runs the same beats Eden ran, a planting, a fruit, a nakedness, a covering, and a curse spoken over a son.

Genesis 9:4

One thing is held back from the grant, flesh with the blood still in it, and the reason given is that the blood is the life. Leviticus 17:11 puts that same ground under the altar when it says God gave the blood to make atonement for the soul, and Clarke reads the prohibition here as guarding what would become the instrument of expiation. This word stands centuries before Israel exists and is spoken to all mankind through Noah, and the council at Jerusalem in Acts 15 keeps it for Gentile believers who were bound by nothing else in the law of Moses.

Genesis 9:5-7

God requires the life of a murderer at the hand of every man's brother, and the word brother reaches back to chapter 4, where Cain killed Abel and was marked for protection instead of put to death. The reason attached is not deterrence but the image of God in man, which the fall damaged and the flood did not cancel. Hebrews sets Abel's blood, still crying out of the ground, against the blood of Jesus that speaketh better things. The paragraph then closes where it opened, with the charge to be fruitful and multiply.

Genesis 9:8-11

The word covenant first enters the Bible at 6:18, spoken to this same man before the ark was built, and here it is established on the far side of the water. It runs one way: God binds himself, asks nothing back, and names the parties as Noah, his seed after him, and every living creature that went out of the ark. The promise is narrow and exact, that all flesh shall not be cut off any more by the waters of a flood, which forecloses this judgment rather than judgment itself.

Genesis 9:12-13

The token is announced a verse before it is described, and then the bow appears. The older writers make much of the shape, that a bow is a weapon and this one hangs in the cloud with its arc turned away from the earth. Clarke notes that the Greeks and the Romans, like the Hebrews, already took the rainbow for a sign sent from heaven, so God gave a token the nations were reading before they were told what it meant.

Genesis 9:14-17

God says twice that he will look on the bow and remember, which lays the keeping of the covenant on the one who made it rather than on the men who received it. Remember is the same verb used at 8:1, God remembered Noah, and again at 19:29 for Abraham and 30:22 for Rachel, and in each place it marks God moving on a promise rather than calling something back to mind. The sign is set to appear when the cloud comes, which is the moment the old fear would return.

Genesis 9:18-19

The narrator stops in the middle of a genealogy to say who Ham is, the father of Canaan, and says it again in verse 22, which tells the reader where the next paragraph is aimed before it begins. These three names carry the whole earth, and the generations of the sons of Noah open at 10:1 with the table of nations built out of them. Canaan's line is set down there as Sidon, Heth, the Jebusite, the Amorite, the Girgasite and the Hivite, which is the roll of nations Israel meets in the land.

Genesis 9:20-23

The first thing recorded of the new world is the man called perfect in his generations lying drunk and uncovered inside his tent. The beats run as they ran in Eden, a planting, a fruit, a nakedness and a covering, and the garment Shem and Japheth carry in on their shoulders answers the coats of skins God made for Adam in 3:21. Ham sees and goes out to tell his two brethren, while the other two walk in backward with their faces turned away and do not look. Clarke observes that nothing in the text dates the episode, and that it may fall many years after the ark, since Canaan has already been born.

Genesis 9:24-25

The curse falls on Canaan and not on Ham, and Noah speaks it rather than God. Justin Martyr read the shift as deliberate, that the word could not fall on a son God had blessed by name in verse 1, so it settled on the line that came out of him, and Gill takes Noah to be prophesying here rather than speaking in temper. What is said concerns one people, the Canaanite nations Israel would later meet, and Genesis 15:16 puts their judgment on their own iniquity rather than on this word. The verse was used for centuries to defend the enslaving of whole races, and it names no race, no skin and no descent outside this single line.

Genesis 9:26-27

Noah does not bless Shem; he blesses the God of Shem, which puts the honour on the God who attached his name to that line. The line runs from Shem through the genealogy of 11:10-26 to Abram, and out of Abram comes the promise that all families of the earth will be blessed. Japheth is given room and then a place in the tents of Shem, which Henry and the older writers read as the nations coming in under a blessing that was not theirs by birth.

Genesis 9:28-29

Noah lives three hundred and fifty years after the water, and then the refrain of chapter 5 closes over him, and he died. The man who walked through the judgment still comes under the sentence, and the formula that ran ten times before the flood runs once more after it. Jerome reads the figure as showing that the hundred and twenty years of 6:3 were a term of warning given to that generation rather than a new limit set on human life.