God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, “Be fruitful, multiply, and replenish the earth. The fear of you and the dread of you will be on every animal of the earth, and on every bird of the sky. Everything that moves along the ground, and all the fish of the sea, are delivered into your hand. Every moving thing that lives will be food for you. As I gave you the green herb, I have given everything to you. But flesh with its life, that is, its blood, you shall not eat. I will surely require accounting for your life’s blood. At the hand of every animal I will require it. At the hand of man, even at the hand of every man’s brother, I will require the life of man. Whoever sheds man’s blood, his blood will be shed by man, for God made man in his own image. Be fruitful and multiply. Increase abundantly in the earth, and multiply in it.”
God spoke to Noah and to his sons with him, saying, “As for me, behold, I establish my covenant with you, and with your offspring after you, and with every living creature that is with you: the birds, the livestock, and every animal of the earth with you, of all that go out of the ship, even every animal of the earth. I will establish my covenant with you: All flesh will not be cut off any more by the waters of the flood. There will never again be a flood to destroy the earth.” God said, “This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: I set my rainbow in the cloud, and it will be a sign of a covenant between me and the earth. When I bring a cloud over the earth, that the rainbow will be seen in the cloud, I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh, and the waters will no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. The rainbow will be in the cloud. I will look at it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” God said to Noah, “This is the token of the covenant which I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.”
The sons of Noah who went out from the ship were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Ham is the father of Canaan. These three were the sons of Noah, and from these the whole earth was populated.
Noah began to be a farmer, and planted a vineyard. He drank of the wine and got drunk. He was uncovered within his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers outside. Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it on both their shoulders, went in backwards, and covered the nakedness of their father. Their faces were backwards, and they didn’t see their father’s nakedness. Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his youngest son had done to him.
He said, “Canaan is cursed. He will be a servant of servants to his brothers.”
He said, “Blessed be Yahweh, the God of Shem. Let Canaan be his servant.
May God enlarge Japheth. Let him dwell in the tents of Shem. Let Canaan be his servant.”
Noah lived three hundred fifty years after the flood. All the days of Noah were nine hundred fifty years, and then he died.
John Calvin 1540 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 15, 18, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28 1. And God blessed Noah. We hence infer with…
1. And God blessed Noah. We hence infer with what great fear Noah had been dejected, because God, so often and at such length, proceeds to encourage him. For when Moses here says, that God blessed Noah and his sons, he does not simply mean that the favor of fruitfulness was restored to them; but that, at the same time, the design of God concerning the new restitution of the world was revealed unto them. For to the blessing itself is added the voice of God by which he addresses them. We know that brute animals produce offspring in no other way than by the blessing of God; but Moses here commemorates a privilege which belongs only to men. Therefore, lest those four men and their wives, seized with trepidation, should doubt for what purpose they had been delivered, the Lord prescribes to them their future condition of life: namely, that they shall raise up mankind from death to life. Thus he not only renews the world by the same word by which he before created it; but he directs his word to men, in order that they may recover the lawful use of marriage, may know that the care of producing offspring is pleasing to Himself, and may have confidence that a progeny shall spring from them which shall diffuse itself through all regions of the earth, so as to render it again inhabited; although it had been laid waste and made a desert. Yet he did not permit promiscuous intercourse, but sanctioned anew that law of marriage which he had before ordained. And although the blessing of God is, in some way, extended to illicit connections, so that offspring is thence produced, yet this is an impure fruitfulness; that which is lawful flows only from the expressly declared benediction of God.
John Calvin's Commentaries (1540-1563) — public domain. Text from the Calvin Translation Society English edition (1840s-50s) via the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (ccel.org). Calvin's coverage is partial (roughly two-thirds of the Bible); uncommented books and verses are honest gaps, never fabricated. The 19th-century editor's footnotes and remarks are omitted so the notes are faithfully Calvin's own voice.
Geneva Bible translators 1599 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 13, 15, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27 God increased them with fruit, and declared unto them…
God increased them with fruit, and declared unto them his counsel as touching the replenishing of the earth.
Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain.
John Trapp 1656 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29 Gen 9:1 And God blessed Noah and his sons,…
Gen 9:1 And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.
Ver. 1. Be fruitful and multiply.] Here God reneweth the world by the same word wherewith he had created it; and being reconciled to mankind, he blesseth them in like manner as before the fall. Sin once pardoned, is as if it never had been committed. Christ tells his returning Shulamite, that she was as amiable in every point as she had been before her relapse, {Son 4:1} her hair, teeth, temples, all as fair and well-featured as ever.
John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Poole 1685 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29 God renewed the old blessing and grant made Gen…
God renewed the old blessing and grant made Gen 1:28, which might seem to be forfeited and made void by man's sin, and by God's judgment consequent upon it.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Matthew Henry 1710 · Public Domain On vv1, 8, 12, 18, 24, 28 We read, in the close of the foregoing chapter,…
We read, in the close of the foregoing chapter, the very kind things which God said in his heart, concerning the remnant of mankind which was now left to be the seed of a new world. Now here we have these kind things spoken to them. In general, God blessed Noah and his sons (Gen 9:1), that is, he assured them of his good-will to them and his gracious intentions concerning them. This follows from what he said in his heart. Note, All God's promises of good flow from his purposes of love and the counsels of his own will. See Eph 1:11, Eph 3:11, and compare Jer 29:11. I know the thoughts that I think towards you. We read (Gen 8:20) how Noah blessed God, by his altar and sacrifice. Now here we find God blessing Noah. Note, God will graciously bless (that is, do well for) those who sincerely bless (that is, speak well of) him. Those that are truly thankful for the mercies they have received take the readiest way to have them confirmed and continued to them.
Now here we have the Magna Charta - the great charter of this new kingdom of nature which was now to be erected, and incorporated, the former charter having been forfeited and seized.
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I. The grants of this charter are kind and gracious to men. Here is,
1. A grant of lands of vast extent, and a promise of a great increase of men to occupy and enjoy them,. The first blessing is here renewed: Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth (Gen 9:1), and repeated (Gen 9:7), for the race of mankind was, as it were, to begin again. Now, (1.) God sets the whole earth before them, tells them it is all their own, while it remains, to them and their heirs. Note, The earth God has given to the children of men, for a possession and habitation, Psa 115:16. Though it is not a paradise, but a wilderness rather; yet it is better than we deserve. Blessed be God, it is not hell. (2.) He gives them a blessing, by the force and virtue of which mankind should be both multiplied and perpetuated upon earth, so that in a little time all the habitable parts of the earth should be more or less inhabited; and, though one generation should pass away, yet another generation should come, while the world stands, so that the stream of the human race should be supplied with a constant succession, and run parallel with the current of time, till both should be delivered up together into the ocean of eternity. Though death should still reign, and the Lord would still be known by his judgments, yet the earth should never again be dispeopled as now it was, but still replenished, Act 17:24-26.
2. A grant of power over the inferior creatures, Gen 9:2. He grants, (1.) A title to them: Into your hands they are delivered, for your use and benefit. (2.) A dominion over them, without which the title would avail little: The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast. This revives a former grant (Gen 1:28), only with this difference, that man in innocence ruled by love, fallen man rules by fear. Now this grant remains in force, and thus far we have still the benefit of it, [1.] That those creatures which are any way useful to us are reclaimed, and we use them either for service or food, or both, as they are capable. The horse and ox patiently submit to the bridle and yoke, and the sheep is dumb both before the shearer and before the butcher; for the fear and dread of man are upon them. [2.] Those creatures that are any way hurtful to us are restrained, so that, though now and then man may be hurt by some of them, they do not combine together to rise up in rebellion against man, else God could by these destroy the world as effectually as he did by a deluge; it is one of God's sore judgments, Eze 14:21. What is it that keeps wolves out of our towns, and lions out of our streets, and confines them to the wilderness, but this fear and dread? Nay, some have been tamed, Jam 3:7.
3. A grant of maintenance and subsistence: Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you, Gen 9:3. Hitherto, most think, man had been confined to feed only upon the products of the earth, fruits, herbs, and roots, and all sorts of corn and milk; so was the first grant, Gen 1:29. But the flood having perhaps washed away much of the virtue of the earth, and so rendered its fruits less pleasing and less nourishing, God now enlarged the grant, and allowed man to eat flesh, which perhaps man himself never thought of, till now that God directed him to it, nor had any more desire to than a sheep has to suck blood like a wolf. But now man is allowed to feed upon flesh, as freely and safely as upon the green herb. Now here see, (1.) That God is a good master, and provides, not only that we may live, but that we may live comfortably, in his service; not for necessity only, but for delight. (2.) That every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, Ti1 4:4. Afterwards some meats that were proper enough for food were prohibited by the ceremonial law; but from the beginning, it seems, it was not so, and therefore is not so under the gospel.
II. The precepts and provisos of this character are no less kind and gracious, and instances of God's good-will to man. The Jewish doctors speak so often of the seven precepts of Noah, or of the sons of Noah, which they say were to be observed by all nations, that it may not be amiss to set them down. The first against the worship of idols. The second against blasphemy, and requiring to bless the name of God. The third against murder. The fourth against incest and all uncleanness. The fifth against theft and rapine. The sixth requiring the administration of justice. The seventh against eating of flesh with the life. These the Jews required the observance of from the proselytes of the gate. But the precepts here given all concern the life of man.
1. Man must not prejudice his own life by eating that food which is unwholesome and prejudicial to his health (Gen 9:4): "Flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof (that is, raw flesh), shall you not eat, as the beasts of prey do." It was necessary to add this limitation to the grant of liberty to eat flesh, lest, instead of nourishing their bodies by it, they should destroy them. God would hereby show, (1.) That though they were lords of the creatures, yet they were subjects to the Creator, and under the restraints of his law. That they must not be greedy and hasty in taking their food, but stay the preparing of it; not like Saul's soldiers (Sa1 14:32), nor riotous eaters of flesh, Pro 23:20. (3.) That they must not be barbarous and cruel to the inferior creatures. They must be lords, but not tyrants; they might kill them for their profit, but not torment them for their pleasure, nor tear away the member of a creature while it was yet alive, and eat that. (4.) That during the continuance of the law of sacrifices, in which the blood made atonement for the soul (Lev 17:11), signifying that the life of the sacrifice was accepted for the life of the sinner, blood must not be looked upon as a common thing, but must be poured out before the Lord (Sa2 23:16), either upon his altar or upon his earth. But, now that the great and true sacrifice has been offered, the obligation of the law ceases with the reason of it.
2. Man must not take away his own life: Your blood of your lives will I require, Gen 9:5. Our lives are not so our own as that we may quit them at our own pleasure, but they are God's and we must resign them at his pleasure; if we in any way hasten our own deaths, we are accountable to God for it.
3. The beasts must not be suffered to hurt the life of man: At the hand of every beast will I require it. To show how tender God was of the life of man, though he had lately made such destruction of lives, he will have the beast put to death that kills a man. This was confirmed by the law of Moses (Exo 21:28), and I think it would not be unsafe to observe it still. Thus God showed his hatred of the sin of murder, that men might hate it the more, and not only punish, but prevent it. And see Job 5:23.
4. Wilful murderers must be put to death. This is the sin which is here designed to be restrained by the terror of punishment (1.) God will punish murderers: At the hand of every man's brother will I require the life of man, that is, "I will avenge the blood of the murdered upon the murderer." Ch2 24:22. When God requires the life of a man at the hand of him that took it away unjustly, the murderer cannot render that, and therefore must render his own in lieu of it, which is the only way left of making restitution. Note, The righteous God will certainly make inquisition for blood, though men cannot or do not. One time or other, in this world or in the next, he will both discover concealed murders, which are hidden from man's eye, and punish avowed and justified murders, which are too great for man's hand. (2.) The magistrate must punish murderers (Gen 9:6): Whoso sheddeth man's blood, whether upon a sudden provocation or having premeditated it (for rash anger is heart-murder as well as malice prepense, Mat 5:21, Mat 5:22), by man shall his blood be shed, that is, by the magistrate, or whoever is appointed or allowed to be the avenger of blood. There are those who are ministers of God for this purpose, to be a protection to the innocent, by being a terror to the malicious and evildoers, and they must not bear the sword in vain, Rom 13:4. Before the flood, as it should seem by the story of Cain, God took the punishment of murder into his own hands; but now he committed this judgment to men, to masters of families at first, and afterwards to the heads of countries, who ought to be faithful to the trust reposed in them. Note, Wilful murder ought always to be punished with death. It is a sin which the Lord would not pardon in a prince (Kg2 24:3, Kg2 24:4), and which therefore a prince should not pardon in a subject. To this law there is a reason annexed: For in the image of God made he man at first. Man is a creature dear to his Creator, and therefore ought to be so to us. God put honour upon him, let not us then put contempt upon him. Such remains of God's image are still even upon fallen man as that he who unjustly kills a man defaces the image of God and does dishonour to him. When God allowed men to kill their beasts, yet he forbade them to kill their slaves; for these are of a much more noble and excellent nature, not only God's creatures, but his image, Jam 3:9. All men have something of the image of God upon them; but magistrates have, besides, the image of his power, and the saints the image of his holiness, and therefore those who shed the blood of princes or saints incur a double guilt.
Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible (1708–1710) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Gill 1763 · Public Domain On vv1–28 And God blessed Noah and his sons,.... With temporal…
And God blessed Noah and his sons,.... With temporal blessings, not spiritual ones; for though some of them were blessed with such, yet not all, particularly Ham:
and said unto them, be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth; depopulated by the flood: this is a renewal of the blessing on Adam, a power and faculty of propagating his species, which was as necessary now as then, since there were so few of the human race left in the world; and the renewal of this grant was the rather necessary, if, as has been observed, Noah and his sons were restrained from cohabiting with their wives while in the ark: but though these words are not an express command for the propagation of their species, yet more than a bare permission, at least they are a direction and instruction to it, and even carry in them a promise of fruitfulness, that they should multiply and increase, which was very needful at this time.
John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Wesley 1765 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 11, 13, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27 In this chapter is,
In this chapter is,
I. The covenant of providence settled with Noah and his sons, ver. 1-11. In this covenant, (1.) God promiseth them to take care of their lives; so that,
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1. They should replenish the earth, ver. 1-7.
2. They should be safe from the insults of the brute creatures, which should stand in awe of them, ver. 2.
3. They should be allowed to eat flesh for the support of their lives, only they must not eat blood, ver. 3, 4.
4. The world should never be drowned again, ver. 8-11. (2.) God requires of them to take care of one another's lives, and of their own, ver. 5, 6.
II. The seal of that covenant, viz. the rainbow, ver. 12-17.
III. A particular passage concerning Noah and his sons, which occasioned some prophecies that related to after-times. (1.) Noah's sin and shame, ver. 20-21. (2.) Ham's impudence and impiety, ver. 22. (3.) The pious modesty of Shem and Japheth, ver. 23. (4.) The curse of Canaan and the blessing of Shem and Japheth, ver. 24-27.
IV. The age and death of Noah, ver. 28, 29.
And God blessed Noah and his sons - He assured them of his goodwill to them, and his gracious intentions concerning them. The first blessing is here renewed, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and repeated, ver. 7; for the race of mankind was as it were to begin again. By virtue of this blessing mankind was to be both multiplied and perpetuated upon earth; so that in a little time all the habitable parts of the earth should be more or less inhabited; and tho' one generation should pass away, yet another generation should come, so that the stream of the human race should be supplied with a constant succession, and run parallel with the current of time, 'till both be swallowed up in the ocean of eternity.
John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.
Adam Clarke 1810 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 13, 17, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 29 God blesses Noah and his sons, 1.
CHAPTER IX
God blesses Noah and his sons, 1.
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The brute creation to be subject to them through fear, 2.
The first grant of animal food, 3.
Eating of blood forbidden, 4.
Cruelty to animals forbidden, 5.
A man-slayer to forfeit his life, 6.
The covenant of God established between him and Noah and the
whole brute creation, 8-11.
The rainbow given as the sign and pledge of this covenant, 12-17.
The three sons of Noah people the whole earth, 18, 19.
Noah plants a vineyard, drinks of the wine, is intoxicated,
and lies exposed in his tent, 20, 21.
The reprehensible conduct of Ham, 22.
The laudable carriage of Shem and Japheth, 23.
Noah prophetically declares the servitude of the posterity of
Ham, 24, 25;
and the dignity and increase of Shem and Japheth, 26, 27.
The age and death of Noah, 28, 29.
NOTES ON CHAP. IX
Verse 1. God blessed Noah] Even the increase of families, which appears to depend on merely natural means, and sometimes fortuitous circumstances, is all of God. It is by his power and wisdom that the human being is formed, and it is by his providence alone that man is supported and preserved.
Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Joseph Benson 1811 · Public Domain On vv1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 11, 13, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29 Gen 9:1. God blessed Noah and his sons —…
Gen 9:1. God blessed Noah and his sons — He assured them of his good- will to them, and his gracious intentions concerning them. The first blessing is here renewed, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and repeated, Gen 9:7; for the race of mankind was, as it were, to begin again. By virtue of this blessing mankind were to be both multiplied and perpetuated upon earth; so that in a little time all the habitable parts of the earth should be more or less inhabited; and though one generation should pass away, yet another generation should come, so that the stream of the human race should be supplied with a constant succession, and run parallel with the current of time, till both should be swallowed up in the ocean of eternity.
Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Albert Barnes 1834 · Public Domain On vv1, 8, 18 - The Blessing of Noah
- The Blessing of Noah
2. מורא môrā', “fear, reverence, awful deed.” חת chat, “dread, breaking of the courage.”
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Noah is saved from the deluge. His life is twice given to him by God. He had found grace in the sight of the Lord, and now he and his family have been graciously accepted when they approached the Lord with burnt-offerings. In him, therefore, the race of man is to be begun anew. Accordingly, as at the beginning, the Lord proceeds to bless him. First. The grant of increase is the same as at first, but expressed in ampler terms. Second. Dominion over the other animals is renewed. But some reluctance on their part to yield obedience is intimated. “The fear and dread of you.” These terms give token of a master whose power is dreaded, rather than of a superior whose friendly protection is sought. “Into your hand are they given.” They are placed entirely at the disposal of man.
Gen 9:3
The grant of sustenance is no longer confined to the vegetable, but extended to the animal kinds, with two solemn restrictions. This explains how fully the animals are handed over to the will of man. They were slain for sacrifice from the earliest times. Whether they were used for food before this time we are not informed. But now “every creeper that is alive” is granted for food. “Every creeper” is everything that moves with the body prone to the earth, and therefore in a creeping posture. This seems to describe the inferior animals in contradistinction to man, who walks erect. The phrase “that is alive” seems to exclude animals that have died a natural death from being used as food.
Gen 9:4
The first restriction on the grant of animal food is thus expressed: “Flesh with its life, its blood, shall ye not eat.” The animal must be slain before any part of it is used for food. And as it lives so long as the blood flows in its veins, the life-blood must be drawn before its flesh may be eaten. The design of this restriction is to prevent the horrid cruelty of mutilating or cooking an animal while yet alive and capable of suffering pain. The draining of the blood from the body is an obvious occasion of death, and therefore the prohibition to eat the flesh with the blood of life is a needful restraint from savage cruelty. It is also intended, perhaps, to teach that the life of the animal, which is in the blood, belongs not to man, but to God himself, who gave it. He makes account of it for atonement in sacrifice; otherwise it is to be poured on the ground and covered with dust Lev 17:11-13.
Gen 9:5-6
The second restriction guards human life. The shedding of human blood is sternly prohibited. “Your blood of your lives.” The blood which belongs to your lives, which constitutes the very life of your corporeal nature. “Will I require.” I, the Lord, will find the murderer out, and exact the penalty of his crime. The very beast that causes the death of man shall be slain. The suicide and the homicide are alike accountable to God for the shedding of man’s blood. The penalty of murder is here proclaimed - death for death. It is an instance of the law of retaliation. This is an axiom of moral equity. He that deprives another of any property is bound to make it good or to suffer the like loss.
The first law promulgated in Scripture was that between Creator and creature. If the creature refuse to the Creator the obedience due, he forfeits all the Creator has given him, and, therefore, his life. Hence, when Cain murdered his brother, he only displayed a new development of that sin which was in him, and, being already condemned to the extreme penalty under the first transgression, had only a minor punishment annexed to his personal crime. And so it continued to be in the antediluvian world. No civil law is on record for the restriction of crime. Cain, indeed, feared the natural vengeance which his conscience told him his sin deserved. But it was not competent in equity for the private individual to undertake the enforcement of the penalties of natural law. So long as the law was between Creator and creature, God himself was not only the sole legislator, but the sole administrator of law.
The second law is that between creature and creature, which is here introduced on the occasion of giving permission to partake of animal food, as the first was published on that of granting the use of vegetable diet. In the former case, God is the administrator of the law, as he is the immediate and sovereign party in the legal compact. In the latter case, man is, by the express appointment of the Lord of all, constituted the executive agent. “By man shall his blood be shed.” Here, then, is the formal institution of civil government. Here the civil sword is committed to the charge of man. The judgment of death by the executioner is solemnly delegated to man in vindication of human life. This trust is conveyed in the most general terms. “By man.” The divine legislator does not name the sovereign, define his powers, or determine the law of succession. All these practical conditions of a stable government are left open questions.
The emphasis is laid solely on “man.” On man is impressively laid the obligation of instituting a civil constitution suited to his present fallen condition. On the nation as a body it is an incumbent duty to select the sovereign, to form the civil compact between prince and people, to settle the prerogative of the sovereign and the rights of the subjects, to fix the order of succession, to constitute the legislative, judicial, and administrative bodies, and to render due submission to the constituted authorities. And all these arrangements are to be made according to the principles of Scripture and the light of nature.
The reason why retribution is exacted in the case of man is here also given. “For in the image of God has he made man.” This points on the one hand to the function of the magistrate, and on the other to the claims of the violated law; and in both respects illustrates the meaning of being created in the image of God. Man resembles God in this, that he is a moral being, judging of right and wrong, endowed with reason and will, and capable of holding and exercising rights. Hence, he is in the first place competent to rule, and on his creation authorized to exercise a mild and moral sway over the inferior creatures. His capacity to govern even among his fellow-men is now recognized. The function of self-government in civil things is now conferred upon man. When duly called to the office, he is declared to be at liberty to discharge the part of a ruler among his fellow-men, and is entitled on the ground of this divine arrangement to claim the obedience of those who are under his sway. He must rule in the Lord, and they must obey in the Lord.
However, in the next place, man is capable of, and has been actually endowed with, rights of property in himself, his children, his industrial products, his purchases, his receipts in the way of gift, and his claims by covenant or promise. He can also recognize such rights in another. When, therefore, he is deprived of anything belonging to him, he is sensible of being wronged, and feels that the wrongdoer is bound to make reparation by giving back what he has taken away, or an equivalent in its place. This is the law of requital, which is the universal principle of justice between the wrongdoer and the wrong-sufferer. Hence, the blood of him who sheds blood is to be shed. And, in setting up a system of human government, the most natural and obvious case is given, according to the manner of Scripture, as a sample of the law by which punishment is to be inflicted on the transgressor in proportion to his crime. The case in point accordingly arises necessarily out of the permission to use animal food, which requires to be guarded on the one hand by a provision against cruelty to animals, and, on the other, by an enactment forbidding the taking away of human life, on the pain of death, by order of the civil magistrate. This case, then, turns out to be the most heinous crime which man can commit against his fellow-man, and strikingly exemplifies the great common principle of retributive justice.
The brute is not a moral being, and has, therefore, no proper rights in itself. Its blood may therefore be shed with impunity. Nevertheless, man, because he is a moral being, owes a certain negative duty to the brute animal, because it is capable of pain. He is not to inflict gratuitous or unnecessary suffering on a being susceptible of such torture. Hence, the propriety of the blood being shed before the flesh is used for food. Life, and therefore the sense of pain, is extinguished when the blood is withdrawn from the veins.
Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary 1859 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 13, 16, 18, 20, 21, 23, 25, 27, 29 Blessed, with fecundity. Barrenness was deemed a curse. (Calmet)
Blessed, with fecundity. Barrenness was deemed a curse. (Calmet)
George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).
Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures 1864 · Public Domain On v18 The Revelation of Sin and of Piety in Noah’s…
SECOND SECTION
The Revelation of Sin and of Piety in Noah’s Family—The Curse and the Blessing of Noah—The twofold Blessing, and the Blessing in the Curse itself.
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Gen_9:18-29
18And the sons of Noah that went forth of the ark were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth; and Ham is the father of Canaan. 19These are the three sons of Noah; and of them was the whole earth overspread. 20And Noah began10 to be a husbandman, and he planted a vineyard; 21And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent. 22And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without. 23And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness. 24And Noah awoke from his wine [his sleep of intoxication], and knew what his younger son had done unto him. 25And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants11 shall he be unto his brethren. 26And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem [Jehovah, God of the name, or who preserves the name]; and Canaan shall be his servant. 27God shall enlarge Japheth12 [one who spreads abroad], and he shall dwell13 in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. 28 And Noah lived after the flood three hundred and fifty years. 29And all the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years; and he died.
EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL
1. The Significance of this Jehovistic Section. This second event in the life of Noah after the flood is evidently of the highest meaning; as was the first, namely, Noah’s offering and God’s blessing and covenant. In the first transaction there are delineated the ground-features of the new constitution of the earth, as secured by the covenant of God with the pious Noah. In the present Section we learn the advance of culture, but we recognize also the continuance of sin in the new human race; still, along with the earlier contrast between piety and perverseness, there comes in now the new contrast of a blessed life of culture as compared with the religious life of a divine cultus, or worship. In what Noah says of his sons, we read the ground-forms of the new state, and of the world-historical partition of mankind. In Knobel’s representation of it, this higher significance of the Section is wholly effaced. In the curse upon Canaan (according to this view), and in his appointment to servitude, the Jehovist would give an explanation of the fact, that the Canaanites were subjugated by the Hebrews, and that Phænician settlers among the Japhethites14 appear to have had a similar fate. But that the curse was pronounced upon Canaan, and not upon Ham, was because other Hamitic nations, such as the Egyptians, etc., were not in the same evil case. Still, it is not Canaan, but Ham himself, who is set forth as the shameless author of the guilt, (?) because the writer would refer certain shameless usages of the Hamitic nations to their first ancestor. Now, on the simple supposition of the truth of the prediction, and of the connection between the guilt of the ancestor, and the corruption of his descendants, this construction must fall to the ground. Knobel cites it as “an ancient view,” that the cursings of those who are distinguished as men of God, have power and effect as well as their blessings.
2. Gen_9:19. By them was the whole earth overspread.—A main point of our narration. “The second event in the life of Noah after the flood shows us the germs for the future development of the human race in a threefold direction, which is prefigured in the character of his three sons.” To this end the repetition of their names. The mention of Canaan introduces the mention of the land in the following verse, as used for the inhabitants of the land; as in Gen_10:25; Gen_11:1, and other passages in which cities and lands are frequently named instead of their population.” Keil.
3. Gen_9:20-21. Noah’s Work, his Indulgence and his Error. The translation: “and Noah began to be a husbandman” is rightly set aside by Delitzsch and Keil. The word for husbandman has the article, and is, therefore, in apposition with Noah. Noah, as husbandman, began to plant a vineyard. The agriculture that had been interrupted by the flood, he again carries on, and makes it more complete by means of the new culture of the vine. Armenia, where he landed with the ark, is an anciently known vine-land. “The ten thousand (Xen., Anab. 4, 4, 9) found in Armenia old and well flavored wines: even at this day the vine grows there, producing wine of great excellence, even at the height of four thousand feet above the level of the sea (Ritter: Geography, x. p. 554). That the culture of the vine came from Asia is well known. The Greek myth ascribes it to Dyonysus or Bacchus, representing it, sometimes, as derived from the Indians, and again, as belonging to the Phrygians, who were related to the Armenians (Diod. Sic. 362; Strabo, 10).” Knobel. The story designates a hill on the northwest, adjacent to the Great Ararat, and furnishing the means of its ascent, as the region where Noah set out his vine-plants. The village of Arguri (Agorri), which in 1840 was destroyed in an eruption of Ararat, stood upon the place referred to. Frequent projections of stones, and outpouring streams of lava and mud, have, in the course of time, destroyed all the fertile soil of Ararat (K. Koch, in “Piper’s Year Book,” 1852, p. 28).” Delitzsch. The wine-garden of Noah is a mild reflex of paradise in the world of the fallen human race; and this enjoyment, in its excessively sinful use, to which Noah led the way, although he was not aware of its effect, has become a reflex of Adam’s enjoyment of the tree of knowledge; with this difference, however, that Noah erred in ignorance, and not in the form of conscious transgression. Intoxication by wine makes men lax in respect to sexual sin; and this connection is gently indicated in the fact that Noah, as he lay unguarded in his tent, exposed himself contrary to the law of modesty. In the error of the father there reveals itself the character of the sons.
4. Gen_9:22-23. The Behavior of the Sons. Ham’s conduct was, at first, a sin of omission. He saw the nakedness (the shame) of his father, and neither turned away his eyes nor covered him; then he told it to his brethren without, and this was his sin of commission. His behavior had the character not merely of lustful feeling, but of utter shamelessness; whereas the act of the two brothers presents a beautifully vivid image of delicacy, being at the same time an act of modesty and of piety. Reverence, piety, and chastity, are, in children, the three foundations of a higher life; whereas in impiety and sensual associations, a lower tendency reveals itself. Out of the virtues and the vices of the family come the virtues and the vices of nations, and of the world. At the same time, the manner in which the two sons treat the case, presents a charming image of prudence and quick decision. They seize the first best robe that comes to hand, and that was the שִׁמְלָה, spread it out, and as they go backward with averted faces, lay it upon the nakedness of their father.
5. Gen_9:24-29. Noah’s Curse and Blessing. His end.—And Noah awoke from his wine; that is, the intoxication from wine (see 1Sa_1:14; 1Sa_25:37).—And knew.—This seems to suppose that his sons had told him, which, however, may have been occasioned by his asking about the robe that covered him. The whole proceeding, however, must have come to light, and that, too, to his own humiliation.—His younger son (literally, his son, the little, or the less; see Gen_5:32).—The effect upon him of the account is an elevated prophetic state of soul, in which the language of the seer takes the form of poetry.—Cursed be Canaan.—The fact that he did not curse the evil-doer himself, but his son, is explained away, according to Origen, in a Hebrew Midrash, which says that the young Canaan had first seen his grandfather in this condition, and told it to his father—clearly an arbitrary exegesis. According to Hävernik and Keil, all the sons of Ham were included in the curse, but the curse of Ham was concentrated on Canaan. Keil and Hengstenberg find, moreover, a motive in the name כְּנַעַן, which does not mean, originally, a low country, but the servile. “Ham gave to his son the name of obedience, a thing which he himself did not practise.” Hengstenberg supposes that Canaan was already following his father’s footsteps in impiety and wickedness. According to Hofmann and Delitzsch, Canaan had the curse imposed upon him because he was the youngest son of Ham (Gen_10:6), as Ham was the youngest son of Noah. “The great sorrow of heart which Ham had occasioned to his father was to be punished in the suffering of a similar experience from his own youngest son.” Rightly does Keil reject this. The exposition of Knobel we have already cited; according to it the later condition of the Canaanites was only antedated in the prophecy of Noah. Before all things must we hold fast to this, that the language of Noah is an actual prophecy; and not merely an expression of personal feeling. That the question has nothing to do with personal feeling is evident from the fact, that Ham was not personally cursed. According to the natural relations, the youngest grandchildren would be, in a special manner, favorites with the grandfather. If now, notwithstanding this, Noah cursed his grandchild, Canaan, it can only he explained on the ground that in the prophetic spirit he saw into the future, and that the vision had for its point of departure the then present natural state of Canaan. We may also say, that Ham’s future was contained in the future of Canaan; the future of the remaining Hamites he left undecided, without curse and without blessing, although the want of blessing was a significant omen. Had, however, Noah laid the curse on Ham, all the sons of Ham would have been denoted in like manner with himself; even as now it is commonly assumed that they were, though without sufficient ground (see Delitzsch, p. 281). There is no play upon the name Canaan, as upon the name Japheth—a thing which is to be noted. But that in the behavior of Canaan Noah had a point of departure for his prophecy, we may well assume with Hengstenberg.—A servant of servants; that is, the lowest of servants. If the language had had in view already the later extermination of the Canaanites, it must have had a different style. The form of the expression, therefore, testifies to the age of the prophecy. We must also bear in mind, that the relation of servant in this case denotes no absolute relation in the curse, or any developed slave relation, any more than the relation of service which was imposed upon Esau in respect to Jacob. There even lies in it a hidden blessing. The common natures must, of themselves, take a position of inferiority; through subordination to the nobler character are they saved, in the discipline and cultivation of the Spirit.—Blessed be Jehovah, God of Shem.—The blessing upon Shem has the form of a doxology to Jehovah, whereby, as Luther has remarked, it is distinguished as a most abundant blessing, which finally reaches its highest point in the promised seed. “If Jehovah is the God of Shem, then is Shem the recipient and the heir of all the blessings of salvation which God, as Jehovah, procures for humanity.” Keil.—And Canaan shall be his servant.—The word לָמוֹ (regularly לָהֶם) is taken by Gesenius as a poetical expression for לוֹ; Delitzsch refers it, as plural, to both brothers—Keil and Knobel to their descendants. The descendants, however, are represented in the ancestor, and, therefore, the explanation of Gesenius gives the only clear idea.—God shall enlarge Japheth, [or, as Lange renders it], God give enlargement to the one who spreads abroad.—In the translation we retain the play upon the word, and the explanation of the name Japheth. Keil explains the word (meaning literally, to make room, to give space for outspreading) as metaphorical. To make room is equivalent to the bestowment of happiness and prosperity. It must be observed, however, that the name Shem, and the blessing of Shem, denotes the highest concentration; whilst in opposition to this the name Japheth and the blessing of Japheth, denotes the highest expansion, not only geographically, but also in regard to the spread of civilization through the earth, and its conquest both outwardly and intellectually. This is the spiritual mission of Japhethism to this day—namely, the mental conquest of the world. The culture life of Japheth, as humanitarian, scientific, stands in harmonious contrast with the cultus, or religionism, of Shem. Therefore, too, must Japheth’s blessing come from Elohim.—And he shall dwell in the tents of Shem.—The words, he shall dwell, are by some (Onkel, Dathe, Baumgarten) referred to Elohim. But this had already been expressed in the blessing of Shem, and had therefore nothing to do with the blessing of Japheth. What is said relates to Japheth; and that, too, neither in the sense that the Japhethites shall settle among the Shemites, or that they shall conquer them in their homes (Clericus, Von Bohlen, and others), but that Japheth’s dwelling in the tents of Shem shall be in the end his uniting with him in religious communion (Targum Jonathan, Hieronymus, Calvin, and others). The opposite interpretation (Michaelis, Gesenius, De Wette, Knobel, and others), which explains Shem here (שם) as meaning literally name, or fame (dwell in the tents of renown), appears to have proceeded from a misapprehension of the prophetic significance of the language. To dwell in the tents of any one, Knobel holds, cannot mean religious communion. That would be true, if the one referred to had not immediately before been denoted as an observer of the true religion. That the Japhethites, that is, the Greeks, early dwelt in the tents of renown, is, in this respect, a matter by itself, which had already been set forth in Japheth’s own blessing, as implied in what is said of his expansion. As the brothers, whatever contrast there might have been in their characters, had been one in their piety towards their father, so must their posterity become one in this, that they shall finally exchange with each other their respective blessings—in other words, that Japheth shall bring into the tents of Shem what he has won from the world, and, in return for it, share in the blessing of the Name—the name Jehovah, or the true religion.—And Noah lived.—In the Armenian legend, Arnojoten, in the plain of the Araxes, has the name of his place of burial. With the death of Noah, the tenth member of the Genealogical table, ch. v., finds its conclusion.
[Note on the Curse of Canaan—the supposed Curse of Ham—the Blessing op Shem and Japheth. Gen_9:24. And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his youngest son had done unto him. וַיִּיקֶץ, LXX. ἐξένηψε, became fully conscious of his condition. Comp. 1Co_15:24. וַיֵּדַע, knew, became sensible of. It is not the word that would have been employed had he learned it from the information of others. It denotes intelligence—by the eye, as Isa_6:9,—by the touch, Gen_19:33,—experience by any sense, Deu_11:2,—or by the exercise of the mind as following such experience, Jdg_13:21. Had done unto him, עָשָׂה לו. This is, something more than an omission or a neglect. The word is a very positive one. Something unmistakable, something very shameful had been done unto the old man in his unconscious state, either the stripping off his robe, or some act of abuse or mockery of such a nature that it becomes manifest to him immediately on his recovery. It may be remarked, too, that אֵת אֲשֶׁר may more properly be rendered, indefinitely, a thing which, or something which, his youngest son had done unto him. But who was the culprit? Of this, too, the patriarch appears to have been immediately sensible, or to have immediately inferred it from something he must have known of the supposed perpetrator. He seems to have had no doubt. Now Ham had done nothing to his father. On discovery of his state he hastens to his brothers, it may be with the same filial intentions that they more promptly carried out. The sight appears to have been accidental and involuntary. The word is וַיַּרְא, he saw, not וַיַּבֵּט, he looked at, spectavit, ἐθεάσατο, gazed at, implying interest, emotion. There is in the account no intimation of any of that scoffing demeanor that some commentators have so gratuitously charged upon him. He saw and told his brothers. At all events, his fault, if there was one, was simply an omission, which seems to fall altogether short of the force of the words עָשָׂה לוֹ, had done unto him, regarded, too, as something obvious or immediately discoverable by the one who had suffered the indignity. There seems to be a careful avoidance of particularity. The language has an euphemistic look, as though intimating something too vile and atrocious to be openly expressed. Thus regarded, everything seems to point to some wanton act done by the very one who is immediately named in the severe malediction that follows: “Cursed be Canaan.” He was the youngest son of Ham, as he was also the youngest son of Noah according to the well-established Shemitic peculiarity by which all the descendants are alike called sons. Beside the general designations, sons of Israel, בני ישראל, sons of Judah, etc., see such particular cases as Gen_29:5, where Laban is called the son of Nahor; Ezr_5:1, where the prophet Zachariah is called the son of Iddo; whereas, as appears from ZaGen Gen_1:1, he was his grandson. בְּנוֹ הַקָּטָן is rendered in our English version, his younger son, to make it applicable to Ham, on the supposition that he was the middle son, younger than Shem. But this will not do. It would be a vague way of designating him at any rate, even if the language would allow it. But the term קטן can only denote the younger (minor) when used of one of two, and standing in contrast with גדול. Standing alone, as it does here, or in connection with three or more, it can only be rendered minimus, the little one distinctively, the least or youngest of all. The terms are derived from the early family state with its disparity of appearance in size, though afterwards retained or transferred to express simply juniority, as the Latin major and minor in like cases. The primitive association, however, is not wholly lost, and this makes the term such a favorite to express the very youngest in the family, who is regarded as the little one long after he has grown up to maturity of age and size. So Benjamin, even when he was twenty-three years of age, was still הַקָּטָן, the little one. The term, it is true, denotes comparative juniority, yet still it derives its etymological emphasis from the fact that he was יֶלֶד זְקֻנּים, τηλυγέτος, the late-born, the child of old age, and so still thought of as the little one of the family. To the father, especially, or to the grandfather, an epithet of this kind retains all its force. Such, most likely, was the relation between Noah and the young Canaan, until his vile abuse of it called out the greater severity of malediction. So David, too, was specially named after he had arrived at robust manhood. The other sons of Jesse are called collectively גְדֹלִים, and are named, moreover, first, “second, third, etc., but of David it is said הוּא הַקָּטָן, he was the little one, minimus, youngest of all. See also Gen_29:18, where, from a similar association of ideas, Rachel is called בִּתְּךָ הַקְּטַנָּה, thy little daughter, though in that, case there were but two of them.
Everything points to Canaan as the youngest son, at that time, of all the Noachic family. He was the direct object of the curse, which, instead of ascending to the father, contrary to everything else of the kind in the Bible, was so fully accomplished in Canaan’s own direct descendants. So clear is this, that some of the best commentators, including most of the Jewish, although still keeping Ham as the main figure, in consequence of the old prepossession, represent Canaan as playing an active part in the business. It is the current Jewish tradition, that he first saw the exposure and told it to his father. Others ascribe to him a shameful act of mutilation, from whence it is thought came the old fable of Saturn. “It was Canaan that did it,” says Aben Ezra, “although the Scripture does not in words reveal what it was.” Rashi also gives the story of mutilation, יש אוֹמרים סרסו, and he refers to the Sanhedrin of the Talmud. That most acute critic, Scaliger, not only ascribes the act to Canaan, whether it was a positive exposure or anything else, but acquits Ham of all positive blame: “Quid Cham fecit patri suo? Nihil; tantum fratribus de patris probro nuncius fuit.” Scalig., Elench., p. 54.
Ham might have been called the younger son in respect to Shem, as he was the elder in respect to Japheth, but this would neither answer to בן קטן here, nor suit the evidently intended distinctiveness of the designation. On the other hand, he was in no sense minimus or youngest, unless there is wholly disregarded the order in which the names occur at every mention of the three: Shem, Ham, Japheth. See Gen_5:32; Gen_6:10; Gen_7:13; Gen_9:18; Gen_10:1. This would make him the middle one, at all events, whether Shem or Japheth were regarded as the eldest. The determination of the latter question would depend upon the interpretation of Gen_5:32; Gen_10:21. “Noah was five hundred years old and begat Shem, Ham, and Japheth.” It is not at all credible that the births of these sons should have been so near together that they all took place at, or even about, the time when Noah was five hundred years old. It appears from Gen_11:10, that Shem was born about this time, making him about one hundred years old at the beginning of the year after the flood. Now, if we render Gen_5:32 : “Noah was five hundred years old, and had begotten,” or, when he had begotten, etc., making the series end at that time, which is perfectly consistent with the Hebrew idiom, then the first-named would probably have been the youngest, as last begotten, and marking the date. If they were all born afterwards, the inference would, for the same reason, have been just the other way. In favor of the first view, which would make Japheth the elder, there is the rendering which our English version gives to Gen_10:21 : Shem, the brother of Japheth the elder, instead of, the elder brother of Japheth. Some commentators have favored this on the ground that Shem must have been born after Noah was five hundred years old, because his own age is stated as being one hundred years, two years (שְׁנָתַיִם or the second year, or, as the dual form more strongly implies, between one and two years) after the flood. But besides the minute trifling of such an interpretation, there is a grammatical difficulty in the way which is insuperable. In the expression הַגָּדוֹל אֲחִי יֶפֶת, the two first ords being in regimen, the epithet הַגָּדוֹל must belong to the whole as a compound: Japheth’s brother, the elder; otherwise it would be like making the adjective in English agree with the possessive case. Compare Jdg_2:7, כָּל מַעֲשֵׂה יְהוָֹה הַגָּדוֹל, every great work of the Lord;1Sa_17:28, אֱלִיאָב אָחִיו הַגָּדוֹל, Eliab his elder brother, where the pronoun corresponds to the noun in regimen, and, especially, such cases as Jdg_1:13; Jdg_3:9, which are precisely like this, logically and grammatically: אֲחִי כָלֵב הַקָּטֹן, Caleb’s younger brother, not, the brother of Caleb the younger. So far the sense may be said to be fixed grammatically, but the fair inference from the context, and the fact that appears in it that there were three brothers, would seem to give it not only a comparative, but a superlative sense: the brother of Japheth, the elder one,—implying that there were two brothers older than Japheth, and that Shem was the oldest of them. If we look at the whole context (Ham and his genealogy having been just disposed of), we shall see that there was more reason for the narrator’s saying this than for merely mentioning that Shem was older than Japheth. These considerations would seem to fix the position of Ham as the middle son; although, without them, it might have been reasonably argued that Ham himself was the oldest, from the fact that his descendants, with the exception of Canaan (unless we may reckon the Phœnicians among them), so get the start, in history and civilization, of both Shem and Japheth.
A very strong argument against the hypothesis that Ham was cursed here instead of Canaan, arises from the want of allusion, in all other parts of the Scripture, to any such sweeping malediction as involving all Ham’s descendants. The accomplishment of the curse upon Canaan is mentioned often, and the frequent allusion to them as “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” is only an emphatic repetition of Noah’s words, עֶבֶד עֲבָדִים, servant of servants—not slave of slaves, as some would take it, but an intensive Hebrew idiom to denote the most complete subjugation, such as the Canaanites were reduced to in the days of Joshua and Solomon.15 How utterly strange would such language have sounded, had it been applied, at any time during the national existence of the Jews, to the lordly descendants of Cush, Mitzraim, and Nimrod! “Shall be servant to them,” לָמוֹ, a collective term for the descendants of Shem, who had just been blessed. So is it taken by all the Jewish expositors, who regard the antecedent in Gen_9:26 as being Shem alone, no other being mentioned or implied, and in Gen_9:27, as being Shem and the God of Shem who should dwell in his tents. See also Gesenius, Lehrgeb., p. 221. Instead of having ever been servant to Shem, either in the political or commercial sense, Mitzraim held the Israelites for centuries in bondage; Cush (the Æthiopians and the Lubims) conquered them (see 2Ch_12:3; 2Ch_16:8); the nation that Nimrod founded sacked their cities and brought their land under tribute. Instead of being servants to Japheth, the descendants of Ham were founding empires, building immense and populous cities, whilst the sons of the younger brother, with the exception of the Mediterranean or Javanic line, were roaming the dense wilds of Middle and Northern Europe, or the steppes of Central Asia, ever sinking lower and lower into barbarism, as each wave of migration was driven farther on by those that followed. The more abject race, as some would hold them, were the pioneers of the world’s civilization, advancing rapidly in agriculture and the arts, organizing governments admirable for their order though despotic in form, digging canals and lakes to fertilize the desert, everywhere turning the arid earth into a luxuriant garden, whilst the early Gomerites, and those who followed them in their wilderness march to the extreme west of Europe, were falling from iron to copper, from copper to stone, from the implements of Lamech, and of the ark and tower-builders, to the rude flint axes and bone knives that some have regarded as remains of pre-adamite men. The Hamites go down to Egypt, or ascend the Euphrates, and how soon uprise the pyramids, the immense structures of Thebes, the palaces of Babylon and Nineveh, whilst the other wretched wanderers of the wild woods and marshes were building rude huts on piles, over lakes and fens, to protect themselves from the wild beasts, or herding in caves with the animals whose bones are now found mingling with their own. Such was their progress until there met them again that primitive central light, which had been preserved, especially in the Shemitic, and had never gone wholly out in the Hamitic and Javanic lines. Even this Greek or Javanic branch of the Japhethan family, though ever preserving a position so much higher than that of their Northern consanguinii (this coming from their Mediterranean route furnishing greater facilities of intercourse, and keeping up an accessible proximity between the different pioneering waves and the source whence they came) derived, nevertheless, their earliest culture, from the Egyptians and Phœnicians, as, in still later times, they received their highest cultus from a Shemitic source. The wisest among the Greeks ever traced their best thinking to the East, that is, to a Shemitic or Hamitic origin. They were ever kept in connection with the primitive light and primitive spiritual vigor, and this was the chief respect in which they differed from our Japhethan ancestors who were so early lost in the woods, and who had no fresh emanations from this central life until long after, when it had been renewed to more than its primitive power by the coming of Christ and Christianity.
The application of this curse to Ham was early made by commentators, but its enormous extension to the whole continent of Africa belongs to quite modern times. The first, though having so little support in the letter of the Scripture, had some plausible ground in the unfavorable contrast that Ham’s neglect, or carelessness, presents to the pious earnestness of his two brethren; and this may give the reason why he is, personally, neither cursed nor blessed. It derived countenance, also, from the subsequent wickedness of the great Hamitic nations, and that constant antagonism between them and Israel which appears throughout the Bible. The second feeling seems almost wholly due to certain historic phenomena that have presented themselves since the discovery of America. What has favored this tendency has not been alone, or mainly, the defence of slavery, as some would allege; since men have supported it, like Dr. Lange and others, who abhorred the idea of human bondage in all its forms. It has been, rather, the desire to give a worldly, political importance to the Scriptural predictions, especially the early ones, thus magnifying the Scriptures, as they suppose, and furnishing remarkable evidences of the truth of revelation. Very modern changes in the relative position of continents are seized upon for this purpose, to the ignoring or obscuring the true dignity of the Divine Word. It is safest to regard prophecy as ever being in the direct line of the church, and to judge of the relative importance of world-historical changes solely by this standard. Except as standing in visible relation to the chosen people, the chosen church, or to that extraordinary divine doing in the world which is styled revelation, the greatest earthly revolutions have no more super-earthly value than have to us the dissensions of African chiefs, or the wars of the Heptarchy. To the divine eye, or to the mind that guided the Biblical inspiration, human politics, whether of monarchies or republics, and all human political changes, in themselves considered, or out of this visible relation, must be very insignificant things. Judged by such a rule, Trojan wars, Peloponnesian wars, or the wars of Bonaparte, fall in importance below the wars of Canaan, or Hiram’s sending cedarrafts to Joppa to aid Solomon in the construction of the temple.
It is this feeling which has also affected the interpretation of Noah’s blessing of Shem and Japheth, Gen_9:26-27, especially the words וְיִשְׁכֹּן בְּאָחֳלֵי שֵׁם, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem. It is somewhat remarkable that the Jewish authorities should have given what seems the more spiritual, and even evangelical, interpretation here, whilst so many Christian commentators have been fond of what may be called the political or secular aspect of the prophecy, referring it, as many of them do, to the mere predominance of European power and culture among the Asiatic nations in these latter days. To support this there is carelessly assumed an ethnological view untenable in the wide extent given to it. Europe is Japheth, Shem Asia, Ham Africa. At all events, the prophecy is supposed to set forth three types, embracing all mankind. It is thought to be greatly to the honor of Scripture that it should display such a philosophy of history bearing upon the remote, latter ages, as though this were a greater thing than that fixed spirituality of view which is the same for all ages, and for less or greater territory in space. It is easy to find events which are regarded as supposed fulfilments. The English in India, the French in Tonquin, Opium wars in China, Russia forcing its way into Central Asia; it is all Japheth dwelling in the tents of Shem; it is the fulfilling of the Scriptures. There is a bad moral influence in this. An interest in the prediction, or in its supposed interpretation, blinds the moral sense to the enormity of some of the acts by which it is thought to be verified. Much of it, moreover, is false ethnology. The British subjugation of the Hindoos, instead of being Japheth dwelling in the tents of Shem, is nothing more than Japheth dwelling in the tents of Japheth. This political mode of interpretation has affected other prophecies of the Bible, and there is reason to believe that it has been especially blinding in the study of the Apocalypse. It proceeds, often, upon the idea that events which seem very large to us, greatly magnified as they are by nearness or other perspective influences, must have the same relative rank in the divine estimation. Now, the Scriptures teach us, that it is ofttimes directly the reverse; see Luk_16:15, what is said about “things highest in the sight of men,” τὸ ἐν ἀνθρώποις ὑψηλόν. Great as they may seem to us, they may have comparatively little bearing upon that which is the special object of the divine care in human history; whilst their over-estimate favors the false idea, that the church is for the world, and not the world for the church. They may even have much less to do, than is generally imagined, with the highest secular progress of mankind. One political eruption may be the mere filling up of a vacuum produced by another, leaving unaffected the general historical evenness, or making even less deflection from the general course of things than other events of seemingly much less show and magnitude.
Now, in distinction from the political, there is what may be called the spiritual interpretation of this very ancient prophecy, as given by some of the best Christian commentators (see the references to them in Pole’s “Synopsis,” and the Philologica Sacra of Glassius, p. 1998), and held, with few exceptions, by the Jewish authorities. The Targum of Onkelos interprets the Hebrew by making אֱלֹהִים the subject of יִשְׁכֹּן and renders it araphrastically, וְיַשְּׁרֵי שְׁכִנְתֵּהּ בְּמַשְׁכְּנֵהּ דְּשֵׁם, His Shekinah shall dwell in the dwelling of Shem (or of the Name). Maimonides, Rashi, and Aben Ezra, all follow this, though they also allude to a secondary sense: that Japheth should learn in the schools of Shem, which is also expressed in the Targum of Jonathan. This, however, is founded on the former idea of the divine indwelling light, in the blessing of which all nations are ultimately to share. So the Judaico-Arabic translation of Arabs Erpenianus: His Light shall dwell in the tents of Shem; the words light and Shekinah being interposed to avoid the seeming anthropomorphism. The rendering, the Shekinah, is suggested to them, moreover, by the etymological connection between שׁכן (Shakan), the verb here for dwelling, and שְׁכִינָה, the Shekinah: as though such language as we have Deu_12:11, לְשַׁכֵּן שְׁמוֹ שָׁם, and Psa_85:10, לִשְׁכֹּן כָּבוֹדִ בְּאַרְצֵנוּ, came directly from this passage. Some Christian commentators carry this still farther, recognizing the same etymology in the Greek ἐσκήνωσε (root, s k n) of Joh_1:14. Surely the fact has been so. God has specially dwelt in the tents of Shem; “He hath put his glory there.” The Shemite family alone preserved the pure monotheism as against the Eastern pantheism and the Western polytheism lying on each side of it. Even the Arabians and the Syrians kept the holy Name. A chosen branch had the Shekinah, the visible, divine presence, the temple, the promise, and the type of the Messiah. There is, finally, the presence and dwelling of the Messiah with the spiritual Israel down to this day. The interpretation, too, must have been very ancient, antecedent to Targums and Talmuds, as it seems to have colored everywhere the poetry and language of the Old Testament. Hence that frequent imagery of God’s dwelling with his people, or the converse in expression, though essentially the same in thought, His being his people’s “dwelling-place in all generations.” See 1Ki_6:13; 1Ki_8:29; Exo_25:8; Psa_90:1; Eze_43:9; ZeGen Gen_8:3. Such was Shem’s blessing here literally expressed, though clearly implied in the previous verse: blessed be the Lord God of Shem (the name), which was the highest mode of saying, blessed be Shem himself, the people whose God is Jehovah. Psa_33:12; Psa_144:15.
But besides its Scriptural and evangelical fitness, this interpretation has the strongest grammatical reasons. Two verbs in Hebrew, like יפת and ישכן, joined by the conjunction, whether taken copulatively or disjunctively (that is, whether rendered and or but), must have the same grammatical subject, unless a new one clearly intervenes, or the context necessarily implies it. Neither of these exceptions exist here, and, without them, it is irregular to make the object of the first verb the subject of the second. He (God) will enlarge Japheth, but he will dwell in the tents of Shem. The contrast is between the two acts of Deity, the enlarging—the indwelling—an antithesis that seems demanded by the parallelism, but is wholly lost in the other version. If it is the same subject (the blesser), then there are two objects; and two distinct blessings stand in striking contrast. It is outer growth and inner sacredness. Two states, moreover, and two dispositions are described: Japheth, the foreign rover, Shem, the home devotee, abiding mainly in the old father-land, preserving the
Sacra Dei, sanctosque patres.
Japheth is to have enlargement of territory, and, ultimately, worldly power; Shem, though small, is to have the special divine presence and indwelling. He is the divine inheritance (see Deu_32:9) among the nations.
The more secular interpretation has, indeed, some strong points of seeming fulfilment, which may affect the sense and the imagination; but for the reason, as well as for faith, how much greater is the idea of such divine indwelling than that of any outward changes, whether of power or culture, in the relations of mankind! Our estimate of causes, as great or small, even in their earthly aspect, is much affected by an after-knowledge of the effects with which they are seen to be connected. As we look back they appear greatly magnified through the medium of such sequence. It is like the mind correcting the perspective errors of the sight in respect to size and distance. What Philosophy of History, written three hundred years before Christ, even though it had been more acute than any modern production of the kind, could have given the true place of the Jewish people of that day, or would even have taken any notice of them, or regarded them as having any rank among the potent causalities of the world! How small, how secluded, how unrecognized their earthly position at that time! Nothing short of prophetic insight could discover what then lay concealed from all the learning and wisdom of the age,—the divine Name and the divine presence, unfigured on Egyptian monuments, unknown in Athenian temples (see Act_17:23), but dwelling, as a reserve power, in the sequestered tents of Shem.—T. L.]
DOCTRINAL AND ETHICAL
1. See the preceding Annotations.
2. Noah the enlarger and the ennobler of human culture. The dangers of progress in civilization. Men become intoxicated with the success of their worldly efforts—especially in the beginning. After the waters of the flood the gift of wine. Under the sacrament of the rainbow, Noah as husbandman and vineyard-keeper, prepares the elements of the New Testament sacrament, bread and wine.
3. The vine is a mild reflex of the tree of knowledge; how Noah’s sin becomes a mitigated figure of the sin of Adam.
4. Noah, whom all the waters of the flood did not harm, received hurt through his unguarded indulgence in a small measure of wine. The history of Adam teaches us the sacredness of limitation, the history of Noah teaches us a holy carefulness in respect to measure or degree. Moderation was a fundamental law of the ancient Chinese, as the piety that preserved Shem and Japheth.
5. The intimate connection between intoxication by wine and sexual unguardedness, or sensual indulgence in the sins of voluptuousness (see the history of Lot).
6. The three sons of Noah. The simple contrast: Cain and Abel, or godless culture and a holy cultus, develops itself in a more manifold contrast: Shem and Japheth, Shem and Ham, Japheth and Ham. For the interpretation of these contrasts, see just above. It is evident, however, that many Christians even now recognize only the contrast of Cain and Abel; that is, they do not recognize that the line of Japheth had likewise its blessing from God, although he can only reach the blessing of Shem after great wanderings. In the heart of the prophecy, Japheth has already taken up his abode in the tents of Shem, when, on the contrary, Shem himself, in the unbelieving Jews, has been given up to a long-lasting alienation.
7. Shem and Japheth are very different, but are, in their piety, the root of every ideal and humane tendency. The people and kingdom of China are a striking example of the immense power that lies in the blessing of (filial) piety; but at the same time a proof that filial piety, without being grounded in something deeper, cannot preserve even the greatest of peoples from falling into decay, like an old house, before their history ends.
8. The blessing of Shem, or the faith in salvation, shall avail for the good of Japheth, even as the blessing of Japheth, humanitarian culture, shall in the end avail for Shem. These two blessings are reciprocal, and it is one of the deepest signs of some disease in our times, that these two are in so many ways estranged from each other, even to the extent of open hostility. What God has joined together, let not man put asunder.
9. It is a fearful abuse of God’s word, when men refer to the curse of Canaan in defence of American slave-traffic, and slave-holding—as is done in the southern portions of the United States. For in the first place, Canaan is not the same as Ham; in the second place, the conception of a servant in the days of Noah is not that of a slave in modern times; in the third place, Canaan’s servitude is the service of Shem, therefore of the Prince of Shem, that is, he becomes the servant of Christ, and in Christ is free; fourthly, as servant of Shem, and servant of Japheth, he becomes a domestic partner in the religion of Shem, as well as in the civilization of Japheth. On the other side, however, it is a misapprehension of the curse as exhibited in history, when the essential equality of all men before God is regarded as a direct abstract equality of men in their political relations. This comes from not taking rightly into account the divine judgments in history, and the gradualness of the world’s redemption (see Rom_10:12). The reader is referred to Michel’s “History of the Cursed Races of France and Spain” (Paris, 1847), as also the “History of the Cursed Villages” (Delessert, Paris). But such histories do not weigh merely on Canaan, or even generally on Ham. They are always economic, that is, temporary, not perpetual dooms. They are districts in which human compassion shall yet appear as a prophet announcing the turning away of the divine wrath, or as a priest interceding against it.
10. The sons of Noah do not appear to clear up the facts in respect to the race-formations. It is quite evident, however, that Ham (the hot, the dark, the southern) forms a special race, and that with the Æthiopian type the Malayan stands in close relation. On this side there becomes evident the whole power of the life from nature, as the spiritual life becomes subservient to it. Whilst, therefore, it is partly an imperfect distinction when we regard the Shemitic and the Japhethic race (the people of renown, as consisting in the name of God, the δόξα τοῦ θεοῦ, and the people of the outward and bold dispersion over the earth) as having become blended in the Caucasian, it is also in part a proof of the fact that community in the higher spiritual tendency may cause very great contrasts to lose themselves in almost imperceptible distinctions. It is, however, quite consistent with the nature of the “outspreading,” that is, of Japheth, that whilst, on the one side, he may become one with Shem in the Caucasian, he may, on the other, represent the Mongolian, and in the American, even make a near approach to the race of Ham. On the question of races, see Lange’s “Posit. Dogmatic,” p. 324. On the theocratic significance of Shem, Ham, Japheth, compare Delitzsch, p. 282.
11. The fact that Noah lived three hundred and fifty years after the flood, is a proof that the cosmical change which was brought on by the flood is not to be regarded as sudden in all respects—not, at least, in its relation to human life.
12. The poetical form of Noah’s blessing shows that he spake in a highly rapt state of soul, in which he was as much elevated above any passionate, inhuman wrath against Canaan, as above any weak human sympathy for him. The form of curse and blessing, where both are divinely grounded, indicate a prophetic beholding of the curse and blessing, but not a creating, much less any arbitrary or magical production of the same.
13. The tenor of the Noachian blessing in its Messianic significance, cannot be mistaken. It connects itself with the name Shem. The Protevangel announced a future salvation in the seed of the woman; the language here connects the same with the name of God which was to be entrusted to Shem. Shem is to be the preserver of the name of God, of Jehovah—the preserver of his religion, of his revelation. With this office is he, as the thoughtful, the contemplative one, to dwell in tents, whilst, in some way, God is to be glorified in him, a fact which Noah can only express in the form of a doxology. In this way Shem has it as his task: 1. to rule over Canaan, and to educate him as the master the servant; 2. to receive Japheth as a paternal guest who returns after a long wandering, and to exchange with him good for good—the goods of cultus and the goods of culture.
14. The number of Noah’s sons is three, the number of the Spirit. The Spirit will get the victory in the post-diluvian humanity that has been baptized in the flood.
HOMILETICAL AND PRACTICAL
See the Doctrinal and Ethical. The form of life in Noah: 1. Wherein similar to that of Adam? 2. wherein similar to that of Christ? 3. wherein it possesses something peculiar, that lies between them both. Noah’s wine-culture—the sign of a new step in progress in the life of humanity.—The vine in its significance: 1. In its perilous import; 2. in its higher significance.—God hath provided not merely for our necessity, but also for our refreshment and festive exhilaration. The more refined his gifts, so much the more ought they to draw us, and make us feel the obligation of a more refined life. Noah’s weakness; its connection with his freedom, his struggle and inquiry. The watchfulness and discipline of the Spirit is the only thing that can protect us against the intoxication of the sense.—How one sensual excess is connected with another.—How the sins of the old have for their consequence the sins of the young. Impiety (irreverence, want of a pious fear), a root of every evil, especially those of an impure tendency.—Piety a root of everything noble. It has two branches: 1. devoutness; 2. moral cultivation. The harmony of Shem and Japheth. O, that it were so in our times. How they should mutually feel the obligation to cover their father’s nakedness; that is, in this case, the harm of the earlier time and tradition. What glorious effects would come from the harmony of Christendom and civilization? Shem, Ham, and Japheth: 1. All three distinct characters and types; 2. regarded as two parts, they are two sons of blessing, one child of the curse; 3. as one group. Canaan the servant of Shem and Japheth. Japheth the guest and the domestic inmate of Shem.—The blessing of Noah: 1. Its most universal significance; 2. its Messianic significance.—Noah’s joy, sorrow, and consolation after the flood: 1. The expanding race; 2. the new development of evil; 3. the pre-signal of the patriarchal faith.
Starke: Inebriatus est, non quod vitiosus esset, sed quod inexpertus mensurœ assumendœ. Basil.—Noah ad unius horœ ebrietatem nudavit femoralia sua, quœ per sexcentos annos contexerat. Hieron.—Quem tantœ moles aquarum non vicerant, a modico vino victus est. Ephraem (Natalis Alexander i. p. Genesis 228: Ebrietas hœc non solum innoxia sed et mystica fuit. Hieronymus interprets the planting of the vine of the planting of the Church; Noah exposed, he interprets of Christ on the cross; Ham, of the Jews, and so on. In a similar manner Augustine). (As it happens to people in sleep, when they become warm; they uncover themselves unconsciously to get air; and so it happened to Noah.) The sin of excess cannot be excused by the example of Noah. This transgression did not, however, cast him out of the grace of God; for we see that in the prophetic spirit he announces the future destiny of his sons, which certainly could never have happened if the Spirit of God had departed from him. But none the less holds true in this respect what Luther says, namely, that they who go too far in excusing the patriarch throw away the consolation which the Holy Spirit has deemed it necessary to give the Church in the fact that the greatest saints do sometimes stumble and fall (Psa_34:9).—The nobler the gift, the worse the abuse (1Co_9:7; Sirach 31:35; 1Ti_5:23).—Ham: Sic in sacro Dei asylo inter tam paucos diabolus unus servatus est. Calvin.—Hedinger: The spreading of sin is just as much an evil as the perpetration of sin.—Lange: The curse went not forth properly, against the spiritual in men, as though beforehand they had been declared to have forfeited eternal life, but properly against the corporeal only. So it was, that among the Canaanites there were some who were actually blest (there are cited as examples the cases of Melchisedek and the Gibeonites). Even at this day, it is true that Japheth dwells in the tents of Shem, since the promised land has come into the hands of the Turk instead of the Egyptian sultan. This appears also in a more spiritual manner, since in the New Testament heathen and Jews have become one in their conversion to Christ. (Noah’s long life after the flood is represented as designed to instruct his posterity in the knowledge of God.)
Gerlach: It is worthy of remark, that the father of Prometheus in the Grecian fable, and who was a giant, bears the name of Japetus.—Bunsen: Gen_9:18 is the introduction to an old family tradition concerning the irreverence and dissoluteness in the family of Ham, with special reference to Canaan.
Calwer Handbuch: Noah’s human sin regarded as excusable, gives occasion to Ham’s inexcusable sin. The curse comes mainly upon Canaan, since it was just in his race that the most shameless and unnatural abominations prevailed. At the present day the last trace of this people, together with their name, has disappeared from the earth. The highest distinction is that which God hath appointed for Shem. It is the propagation of the kingdom of God by means of his descendants (Joh_10:16). Luther: And so there was a real scandal in the case, in that when Ham stumbled upon his father’s drunkenness, he judged him wrongly, and even took satisfaction in his sin.
Schröder: Valer. Herberger: Here will the reviler say, this is the text for me: Noah behaved himself in a sottish and unseemly way, and therefore may I do the same. Hold, brother. Noah’s example serves not at all your turn. Only once in his life had Noah overshot the mark; but how oft hast thou already done as much? Noah did not do it purposely or wittingly. The lesson thou art to learn from Noah is not drunkenness, but to guard thyself from drunkenness, that thou mayest not, through his example, come to mischief, and cause a scandal. Wouldst thou be joyful, so let it joy remain. Pleasant drink, and wholesome food God grudges not to thee. Drink and eat, only forget not God and thine hour of death. Neither forget the death of Christ; on this account it was, that formerly the image of the cross was made in the bottom of the tankard. Let a man come to the table as to an altar, says Bernhard. In the weakness of Noah there is enkindled the wickedness of Ham. “Then saw Ham.” Love covers; he (Ham), instead of veiling his father’s nakedness, only the more openly exposes what he had left uncovered. As a son he transgresses against his father; so, as a brother, would he become the seducer of his brother.—Calvin: His age did not excuse him. He was no merely mischievous boy, who, in his inconsiderate sport betrayed his own thoughtlessness, for he had already gone beyond his hundredth year. Luther; Whilst, in other cases, the servant has only one master, Canaan here is the servant of two lords, therefore doubly a servant. (In this way, indeed, it is, that by Shem he is drawn to piety, whilst by Japheth he is educated to a human civilization.)—The sins of Ham, as the deep stain of the Hamitic race in general. Farther on the writer speaks of the corruption of Canaan, and the evil reputation of the Phœnicians and Carthaginians.
Calvin: Shem holds the highest grade of honor. Therefore it is that Noah, in blessing him, expresses, himself in praise of God, and dwells not upon the person. Whenever the declaration relates to some unusual and important pre-eminency, the Hebrews thus ever ascend to the praise of God (Luk_1:68).—Japheth: God gives enlargement to the enlarged.—Luther: Since Abraham, in his fiftieth year, had so good and excellent a teacher in Noah, he must have had quite a growth in doctrine and religion.—Herberger: Fear not the cross, since here thou hast before thee one who bore it for nine hundred and fifty years.
Footnotes:
[10][Gen_9:20.—וַיָּחֶל נֹחַ אִישׁ הָאֲדָמָה, rendered “and Noah began to be a husbandman,”—man of the adamah, or man of the soil—γεωργός—agricola. It cannot mean that this was the first time he had practised husbandry, but the beginning of it after the flood, when he and his sons had descended into the low country.—T. L.]
[11][Gen_9:25.—עֶבֶד עֲבָדִים, “a servant of servants,”—a Hebraism to denote the intensity or degradation of Canaan’s servitude—the lowest and vilest of servants, or, as they are afterwards characterized, “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” in distinction from the ordinary subjugation of a conquered people. For remarks on בְּנוֹ הַקָּטָן, “his younger son,” or little son, and its reference to Canaan alone, see appended Note, p. 337, on Noah’s curse and blessings.—T. L.]
[12][Gen_9:27.—יַפְתְּ—לְיֶפֶת, “shall enlarge Japheth.” Europe (εὐρώπη), wide-faced, extensive, spacious. This supposed residence, as it mainly was, of the sons of Japheth, had this name very early. From its unknown extent it was probably so called in comparison with the better known parts of contiguous Asia. The Greeks may have simply translated the early tradition of the prophecy into the name εὐρώπη, and afterward perverted it, according to their usual course by one of their absurd fables.—T. L.]
[13][Gen_9:27.—יְיִשְׁכֹּן, “and he shall dwell,” etc. Who shall dwell? The Jewish authorities, with few exceptions, say it is God, the subject of the verb just preceding, and this is, doubtless, according to grammatical regularity. See Aben Ezra, Rashi, and others. Sometimes, to avoid the seeming anthropopathism, they substitute for God the word אוֹרוֹ, his light, or שְׁכִינָה (Shekinah), deriving it from this very verb ישכן. Thus, the Targum of Onkelos, וְיַשְׁרֵי שְׁכִנְתּהּ בְּמַשְׁכּנֵהּ דִּשֵׁם, “His Shekinah [or indwelling) shall abide in the dwelling (mashkeneh) of Shem.” So the Arabic, both of the Polyglott and of Arabs Erpenianus, זם׃ַَה ׀זֹׁ ז ַָּםַ לֻלד, “His Light shall dwell in the tents of Shem.” See further, appended note, p. 337. on the blessing of Noah.—T. L.]
[14][The Phœnicians, as distinguished from the Canaanites and Sidonians, were probably Shemites, as they spake the Shemitic language, and thus made it the language of the whole district. This corresponds to what is said by Herodotus and Strabo, that they came from the Persian Gulf—the land of Shinar, the old home-land.—T. L.
[15][The fact that, of all the descendants of Ham, Canaan was the nearest object of interest to the Jews, and so historically of most importance to them, gives the reason of the somewhat peculiar designation, Gen_9:18, where a kind of note is affixed to Ham’s name, stating that he was the father of Canaan, or rather that this was another name specially given to him by the Israelites, as being beet known to them, or called to mind to them, through his son; יְחָם הוּא אֲבִי כְנַעַן, “Ham, that is, the father of Canaan,” or Ham, that is, ’Abi-Canaan,—according to a method of naming that has ever prevailed among the Arabians, down to this day, as Abu-Beker, Abulwalid, or, as in this case, Abu-Canaan, where the son is better known, or an object of nearer interest than the father who is thus named after him.—T. L.]
Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures (Critical, Doctrinal, and Homiletical), ed. John Peter Lange, English translation edited by Philip Schaff (1864–1880) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset & David Brown 1871 · Public Domain On vv2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 13, 20, 21, 24, 25, 26, 27 And the fear of you and the dread of…
And the fear of you and the dread of you--The second part re-establishes man's dominion over the inferior animals; it was now founded not as at first in love and kindness, but in terror; this dread of man prevails among all the stronger as well as the weaker members of the animal tribes and keeps away from his haunts all but those employed in his service.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
Daniel D. Whedon 1874 · Public Domain On vv1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 13, 16, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28 THE COVENANT WITH NOAH, Gen_1:1-17.
THE COVENANT WITH NOAH, Gen_1:1-17.
1. God blessed Noah — Noah, as the second founder of the race, receives a renewal of the blessing and the promise given to Adam, (Gen_1:28-29,) but modified by the altered relations which had been introduced by sin. Had man never fallen, the beasts of the field would willingly and naturally have owned his dominion; but the fallen king must struggle for his sceptre, and can govern only by fear and dread. Gen_9:2.
Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges 1878 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27 1. And God blessed, &c.] The substance of this…
1. And God blessed, &c.] The substance of this verse is a repetition of Gen_1:28. Another chapter in history is begun. As in chap. 1, after the Creation, a single pair confronted the whole earth and its animal world, so here, the single family of Noah is to “replenish the earth,” and receives a special blessing, the assurance of Divine favour.
his sons …] The females are not mentioned, but, as often in the O.T., the wives are included in the mention of the husbands: cf. the Sethite Genealogy in chap. 5.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers 1878 · Public Domain On vv1, 4, 5, 6, 9, 12, 18, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29 (1) God blessed Noah.—The blessing bestowed upon Noah, the…
IX.
(1) God blessed Noah.—The blessing bestowed upon Noah, the second father of mankind, is exactly parallel to that given to our first father in Gen_1:28-29; Gen_2:16-17, with a significant addition growing out of the history of the past. There is the same command to fill the world with human life, and the same promise that the fear of man shall rest upon the whole animated creation; but this grant of dominion is so extended that the animals are now given to man for his food. But just as there was a restriction as regards Adam’s food, the fruit of the tree of knowledge being refused him, so now there is a prohibition against the eating of blood. The addition is the sanctity given to human life, with the evident object of guarding against such a disruption of the human race as was the result of Cain’s murder of Abel. Thus, then, man starts afresh upon his task of subjugating the earth, with increased empire over the animal world, and with his own life more solemnly guarded and made secure.
A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
C. H. Mackintosh 1880 · Public Domain On v1 Genesis 9
Genesis 9
But I have already extended this section far beyond the limit which I had prescribed for it. I shall, therefore, close it with a hasty glance at the contents of Gen. 9. In it we have the new covenant, under which creation was set, after the deluge, together with the token of that covenant. "And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth." Observe, God’s command to man, on his entrance into the restored earth, was to refill that earth; not parts of the earth, but the earth. He desired to have men dispersed abroad, over the face of the world, and not relying upon their own concentrated energies. We shall see, in Gen. 11, how man neglected all this.
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The fear of man is now lodged in the heart of every other creature. Henceforth the service, rendered by the inferior orders of creation to man, must be the constrained result of "fear and dread." In life, and in death, the lower animals were to be at the service of man. ALL creation is delivered, by God’s everlasting covenant, from the fear of a second deluge. Judgement is never again to take that shape. "The world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished: but the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgement and perdition of ungodly men." The earth was once purged with water; and it will be again purged by fire; and in this second purgation none will escape, save those, who have fled for refuge to Him, who has passed through the deep waters of death, and met the fire of divine judgement.
"And God said, This is the token of the covenant ..I do set my bow in the cloud.....and I will remember my covenant," The whole creation rests, as to its exemption from a second deluge, on the eternal stability of God’s covenant, of which the bow is the token; and it is happy to bear in mind, that when the bow appears, the eye of God rests upon it; and man is cast not upon his own imperfect and most uncertain memory, but upon God’s. "I" says God, "Will remember." "How sweet to think of what God will, and what He will not remember! He will remember His own covenant, but He will not remember His people’s sins. The cross, which ratifies the former, puts away the latter. The belief of this gives peace to the troubled and uneasy conscience.
"And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud." Beautiful and most expressive emblem! The beams of the sun, reflected from that which threatens judgement, tranquillise the heart, as telling of God’s covenant, God’s salvation, and God’s remembrance. Precious, most precious sunbeams, deriving additional beauty from the very cloud which reflects them! How forcibly does this bow in the cloud remind us of Calvary. There a cloud indeed - a dark, thick, heavy cloud of judgement discharging itself upon the sacred head of the Lamb of God - a cloud so dark, that even at mid-day "there was darkness over all the earth." But, blessed be God, faith discerns, in that heaviest cloud that ever gathered, the most brilliant and beauteous bow that ever appeared, for it sees the bright beams of God’s eternal love darting through the awful gloom, and reflected in the cloud. It hears, too, the words, "it is finished," issuing from amid the darkness, and in those words it recognises the perfect ratification of God’s everlasting counsels, not only as to creation, but the tribes of Israel and the Church of God.
The last paragraph of this chapter presents a humiliating spectacle. The lord of creation fails to govern himself: "And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard; and he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent." What a condition for Noah, the only righteous man, the preacher of righteousness, to be found in. Alas! what is man? Look at him where you will, and you see only failure. In Eden, he fails; in the restored earth, he fails; in Canaan, he fails; in the Church, he fails; in the presence of millennial bliss and glory, he fails. He fails everywhere, and in all things: there is no good thing in him. Let his advantages be ever so great, his privileges ever so vast, his position ever so desirable, he can only exhibit failure and sin.
We must, however, look at Noah in two ways, namely, as a type, and as a man; and while the type is full of beauty and meaning, the man is full of sin and folly; yet the Holy Ghost has written these words, "Noah was a just man, and perfect in his generation; and Noah walked with God." Divine grace had covered all his sins, and clothed his person with a spotless robe of righteousness. Though Noah exposed his nakedness, God did not see it, for He looked not at him, in the weakness of his own condition, but in the full power of divine and everlasting righteousness. Hence we may see how entirely astray - how totally alienated from God and His thoughts, Ham was, in the course he adopted; he evidently knew nothing of the blessedness of the man, whose iniquity is forgiven, and his sin covered; on the contrary, Shem and Jepheth exhibit, in their conduct, a fine specimen of the divine method of dealing with human nakedness; wherefore they inherit a blessing, whereas Ham inherits a curse.
C. H. Mackintosh, Notes on the Pentateuch — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Pulpit Commentary 1880 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28 And GodElohim, not because belonging to the Elohistic document…
And GodElohim, not because belonging to the Elohistic document (Block, Tuch, Colcnso); but rather because throughout this section the Deity is exhibited in his relations to his creaturesblessed a repetition of the primal blessing rendered necessary by the devastation of the Flood (cf. Gen_1:28) Noah and his sons, as the new heads of the race,and said unto them, audibly, in contrast to Gen_8:21, Gen_8:22, which was not addressed to the patriarch, but spoken by God to himself in his heart, as if internally resolving on his subsequent course of action,Be fruitful, and multiply. A favorite expression of the Elohist, (cf. Gen_1:28 Gen_8:17 Gen_9:1, 7 17:20 28:3 35:11 47:27 48:14) (Tuch); but
(1) the apparently great number of passages melts away when we observe the verbally exact reference of Gen_8:17 Gen_9:1, 7 to 1:28; and of Gen_48:4 to 35:11;
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(2) the Elohist does not always employ his "favorite expression" where he might have done so, as, e.g., not in Gen_1:22 Gen_17:6 Gen_28:14;
(3) the Jehovist does not avoid it where the course of thought necessarily calls for it, (vide Lev_26:9) (Keil). And replenish the earth. The words, "and subdue it, which had a place in the Adamic blessing, and which the LXX insert here in the Noachic (kaisate aujthv), are omitted for the obvious reason that the world dominion originally assigned to man in Adam had been forfeited by sin, and could only be restored through the ideal Man, the woman"s seed, to whom it had been transferred at the fail Hence says Paul, speaking of Christ: "kainta uJpetaxen uJpo toudav aujtou; (Eph_1:22) and the writer to the Hebrews: nun de oupw ojrwmen aujtw (i.e. man) tanta uJpotetagmena, ton deti par ajggelouv hjlattomenon blepomen jIhsoun dia toqhma tou qanatou doxh kainon (i.e. the world dominion which David, Psa_8:6, recognized as belonging to God"s ideal man) opwv cariti qeou uJper pantoshtai qanatou. (Gen_2:8, Gen_2:9) The original relationship which God had established between man and the lower creatures having been disturbed by sin, the inferior animals, as it were, gradually broke loose from their condition of subjection. As corruption deepened in the human race it was only natural to anticipate that man"s lordship over the animal creation would become feebler and feebler. Nor, perhaps, is it an altogether violent hypothesis that, had the Deluge not intervened, in the course of time the beast would have become the master and man the slave. To prevent any such apprehensions in the future, as there was to be no second deluge, the relations of man and the lower creatures were to be placed on a new footing. Ultimately, in the palingenesia, they would be completely restored; (cf. Isa_11:6) in the mean time, till that glorious consummation should arrive, the otherwise inevitable encroachments of the creatures upon the human family in its sin-created weakness should be restrained by a principle of fear. That was the first important modification made upon the original Adamic blessing.
Vers. 1-7.
New arrangements for a new era.
I PROVISION FOR THE INCREASE OF THE HUMAN FAMILY.
1. The procreate instrumentality the ordinance of marriage (vers. 1, 7), which was
1. A Divine institution appointed by God in Eden (cf. Gen_2:22; Mat_19:5)
2. A sacred institution. Every ordinance of God"s appointment, it may be said, is in a manner holy; but a special sanctity attaches to that of marriage. God attested the estimation in which he held it by visiting the world"s corruption, which had principally come through its desecration, with the waters of a flood.
3. A permanent institution, being the same in its nature, uses, and ends that it had been from the beginning, only modified to suit the changing circumstances of man"s condition. Prior to the fall it was exempt from any of those imperfections which in human experience have clung to it ever since. Subsequent to the melancholy entrance of sin, there was superadded to the lot of woman an element of pain and sorrow from which she had been previously free; and though anterior to the Flood it had been grossly abused by man"s licentiousness, after it, we cannot doubt, it was restored in all its original purity, though still with the curse of sorrow unremoved.
2. The originating cause the Divine blessing (vers. 1, 7), without which
(1) The marriage bed would not be fruitful. (Psa_127:3) Cf. the case of Rachel, (Gen_30:2) of Hannah, (1Sa_1:11) of Ruth. (Rth_4:13)
(2) The married life would not be holy. What marriage is and leads to when dissociated from the fear of God had already been significantly displayed upon the theatre of the antediluvian world, and is abundantly declared in Scripture, both by precept (Gen_24:3 Gen_28:1; Deu_7:3, 4 Jos_23:12, Jos_23:13; 2Co_6:14) and example; e.g., the Israelites, (Jud_1:3:6, 7) Samson, (Jud 14:1-16) Solomon, (1Ki_3:1) Jews. (Ezr_9:1-12)
(3) The marriage tie would not be sure. As ungodliness tends to violate the marriage law by sins of polygamy, so, without the fear of God, there is no absolute security that the bond may not be broken by adultery and divorce (Gen_19:5, 8 35:22; 2Sa_11:1-5; Mar_6:17, 18)
II PROVISION FOR THE PROTECTION OF THE HUMAN FAMILY.
1. Against the world of animals.
(1) In Eden such protection was not required, man having been constituted lord of the inferior creation, and the beasts of the field never rising to dispute his authority, his rule being characterized by gentleness and love (Genesis if. 20).
(2) After the fall such protection was incomplete. A change having passed upon the master, there is reason to suppose that a corresponding change transpired upon the servant. The moral order of the world having been dislocated, a like instability would doubtless invade those economical arrangements that depended on man for their successful administration. As man sank deeper into the mire of corruption, his supremacy over the beasts of the field would appear to have been more frequently and fiercely disputed. (Gen_6:11) But now, the Flood having washed away the sinning race,
(3) such protection was henceforth to be rendered secure by imbuing the brute nature with an instinctive dread of man which would lead the animals to acknowledge his supremacy, and rather flee from his presence than assail his dominion. The operation of this law is proved today by the facts that man retains unquestioned his lordship over all those domesticated animals that are useful to him; that there is no creature, however wild and ferocious, that he cannot tame; and that wherever man appears with his civilizing agencies the wild beast instinctively retires.
2. Against the world of men. Ever since the fall man has required to be protected against himself. Prior to the Flood it does not appear that even crimes of murder and bloodshed were publicly avenged. Now, however, the previous laxness, if it was such, and not rather Divine clemency, was to cease, and an entirely new arrangement to come into operation.
(1) The law was henceforth to inflict CAPITAL PUNISHMENT on its murderers; not the law of man simply, but the law of God. Given to Noah, this statute was designed for the universal family of man until repealed by the Authority that imposed it. Not having been exclusively a Jewish statute, the abrogation of the Mosaic economy does not affect its stability. Christ, having come not to destroy the fundamental laws of Heaven, may be fairly presumed to have left this standing. Inferences from the spirit of Christianity have no validity as against an express Divine commandment.
(2) The reasons for the law were to be the essential dignity of man"s nature (ver. 6); cf. homily on the greatness of man, (Gen_1:26) and the fundamental brotherhood of the race (ver. 5), a point which appears not to have received sufficient prominence in prediluvian times (cf. Act_17:26)
(3) The execution of the law was neither to be retained in the Divine hand for miraculous administration, nor to be left in that of the private individual (the kinsman) to gratify revenge, but to be entrusted to society for enforcement by means or a properly-constituted tribunal. This was the commencement of social government among men, and the institution of the magisterial office, or the power of the sword (vide. Rom_13:1-5)
III PROVISION FOR THE SUSTENANCE OF THE HUMAN FAMILY.
1. The rule. It is not certain that animal food was interdicted in Eden; it is almost certain that it was in use between the fall and the Flood. At the commencement of the new era it was expressly sanctioned.
2. The restriction. While the flesh of animals might be used as food, they were not to be mutilated while alive, nor was the blood to be eaten with the flesh. Note the bearing of the first of these on the question of vivisection, which the Divine law appears explicitly to forbid, except it can be proved to be indispensable for the advancement of medical knowledge with a view to the healing of disease, and, in the case of extending a permission, imperatively requires to be carried on with the least possible infliction of pain upon the unresisting creature whose life is thus sacrificed for the good of man; and of the second of these, on the lawfulness of eating blood under the Christian dispensation, see Expos. on ver. 4.
3. The reason.
(1) For the rule, which, though not stated, may be judged to have been
(a) a concession to the moral weakness of man"s soul, and
(b) a provision for the physical infirmity of man"s body.
(2) For the restriction
(a) to prevent cruelty to animals;
(b) to fence about man s life by showing the criminality of destroying that of the beast;
(c) to assert God s lordship over all life;
(d) because of its symbolic value as the sign of atoning blood.
Lessons:
1. God"s clemency towards man.
2. God"s care for man.
3. God"s goodness to man.
4. God"s estimate of man.
HOMILIES BY R.A. REDFORD Vers. 1-7.
The new life of man on the earth
under a new revelation of the Divine favor. The chief points are
I UNLIMITED POSSESSION OF THE EARTH, and use of its inhabitants and products, whether for food or otherwise; thus supplying
1. The scope of life.
2. The enjoy-meat of life.
3. The development of life.
II Absolute RESPECT FOR HUMAN LIFE, and preservation of the gentler feelings (the blood being forbidden as injurious to man in this case), promoting
1. The supremacy of the higher nature over the lower.
2. The revelation of the ethical law.
3. The preparation of the heart for Divine communications.
III Man living in BROTHERHOOD,
(1) revealing the image of God,
(2) observing God"s law,
(3) rejoicing in his blessing, he shall multiply and fill the earth.
The earth waits for such inhabitants; already by Divine judgments prepared for them. R.
The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Biblical Illustrator 1887 · Public Domain On vv1, 6, 8, 12, 18, 20, 25, 28 God blessed Noah and his sons
Gen_9:1-7
God blessed Noah and his sons
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The Divine benediction on the new humanity
I.
PROVISION FOR THE CONTINUANCE OF ITS PHYSICAL LIFE. This divinely appointed provision for the continuance of man upon the earth--
1. Raises the relation between the sexes above all degrading associations.
2. Tends to promote the stability of society.
3. Promotes the tender charities of life.
II. PROVISION FOR ITS SUSTENANCE. The physical life of man must be preserved by the ministry of other lives--animal, vegetable. For this end God has given man dominion over the earth, and especially over all other lives in it. We may regard this sustenance which God has provided for mans lower wants--
1. As a reason for gratitude. Our physical necessities are the most immediate, the most intimate to us. We should acknowledge the hand that provides for them. We may regard Gods provision herein--
2. As an example of the law of mediation. Mans life is preserved by the instrumentality of others. Gods natural government of the world is carried on by means of mediation, from which we may infer that such is the principle of His moral government. That bread of life by which our souls are sustained comes to us through a Mediator. Thus Gods provisions for our common wants may be made a means of educating us in higher things. Nature has the symbols and suggestions of spiritual truths.
3. As a ground for expecting greater blessings. If God made so rich and varied a provision to supply the necessities of the body, it was reasonable to expect that He would care and provide for the deeper necessities of the soul.
III. PROVISION FOR ITS PROTECTION.
1. From the ferocity of animals.
2. From the violence of evil men.
IV. PROVISION FOR ITS MORALITY.
V. PROVISION FOR ITS RELIGION.
1. Mankind were to be educated to the idea of sacrifice.
2. Mankind were to be impressed with the true dignity of human nature.
3. Mankind must be taught to refer all authority and rule ultimately to God. (T. H. Leale.)
Noah a representative person
1. In the earliest fauna and flora of the earth, one class stood for many. The earliest families combined the character of several families afterwards separately introduced. This is true, for instance, of ferns, which belong to the oldest races of vegetation. Of them it has been well said that there is hardly a single feature or quality possessed by flowering plants of which we do not find a hint or prefiguration in ferns. It is thus most interesting to notice in the earliest productions of our earth the same laws and processes which we observe in the latest and most highly-developed flowers and trees.
2. At the successive periods of the unfolding of Gods great promise, we find one individual representing the history of the race, and foreshadowing in brief the essential character of large phases and long periods of human development. Hence it is that here Noah becomes the representative of the patriarchal families in covenant with God. He is the individual with whom God enters into covenant, in relation to the successive generations of the human race.
3. And in this respect Noah is a retrospective type of Him who, in the eternal ages, consented to be the representative of redeemed humanity, and with whom the Father made an everlasting covenant; and a prospective type of that same Representative who, in the fulness of time, received the Divine assurance that in Him should all nations of the earth be blessed. (W. Adamson.)
The new world and its inheritors--the men of faith
1. The first is the new condition of the earth itself, which immediately appears in the freedom allowed and practised in regard to the external worship of God. This was no longer confined to any single region, as seems to have been the case in the age subsequent to the Fall. The cherubim were located in a particular spot, on the east of the garden of Eden; and as the symbols of Gods presence were there, it was only natural that the celebration of Divine worship should there also have found its common centre. But with the Flood the reason for any such restriction vanished. Noah, therefore, reared his altar, and presented his sacrifice to the Lord where the ark rested. There immediately he got the blessing, and entered into covenant with God--proving that, in a sense, old things had passed away, and all had become new. But this again indicated that, in the estimation of Heaven, the earth had now assumed a new position; that by the action of Gods judgment upon it, it had become hallowed in His sight, and was in a condition to receive tokens of the Divine favour, which had formerly been withheld from it.
2. The second point to be noticed here is the heirship given of this new world to Noah and his seed--given to them expressly as the children of faith. A change, however, appears in the relative position of things, when the flood had swept with its purifying waters over the earth. Here, then, the righteousness of faith received direct from the grace of God the dowry that had been originally bestowed upon the righteousness of nature--not a blessing merely, but a blessing coupled with the heirship and dominion of the world. There was nothing strange or arbitrary in such a proceeding; it was in perfect accordance with the great principles of the Divine administration. Adam was too closely connected with the sin that destroyed the world, to be reinvested, even when he had through faith become a partaker of grace, with the restored heirship of the world. Nor had the world itself passed through such an ordeal of purification, as to fit it, in the personal lifetime of Adam, or of his more immediate offspring, for being at all represented in the light of an inheritance of blessing.
3. The remaining point to be noticed in respect to this new order of things is the pledge of continuance, notwithstanding all appearances or threatenings to the contrary, given in the covenant made with Noah, and confirmed by a fixed sign in the heavens. There can be no doubt that the natural impression produced by this passage in respect to the sign of the covenant is, that it nowfor the first time appeared in the lower heavens. The Lord might, no doubt, then, or at any future time, have taken an existing phenomenon in nature, and by a special appointment made it the instrument of conveying some new and higher meaning to the subjects of His revelation. But in a matter like the present, when the specific object contemplated was to allay mens fears of the possible recurrence of the deluge, and give them a kind of visible pledge in nature for the permanence of her existing order and constitution, one cannot perceive how a natural phenomenon, common alike to the antediluvian and the postdiluvian world, could have fitly served the purpose. In that case, so far as the external sign was concerned, matters stood precisely where they were; and it was not properly the sign, but the covenant itself, which formed the guarantee of safety for the future. We incline, therefore, to the opinion that, in the announcement here made, intimation is given of a change in the physical relations or temperature of at least that portion of the earth where the original inhabitants had their abode; by reason of which the descent of moisture in showers of rain came to take the place of distillation by dew, or other modes of operation different from the present. The supposition is favoured by the mention only of dew before in connection with the moistening of the ground (Gen_2:6); and when rain does come to be mentioned, it is rain in such flowing torrents as seems rather to betoken the outpouring of a continuous stream, than the gentle dropping which we are wont to understand by the term, and to associate with the rainbow. (P. Fairbairn, D. D.)
The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Expositor's Bible 1887 · Public Domain On v20 NOAH in the ark was in a position of…
NOAHS FALL
Gen_9:20-27
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NOAH in the ark was in a position of present safety but of much anxiety. No sign of any special protection on Gods part was given. The waters seemed to stand at their highest level still; and probably the risk of the arks grounding on some impracticable peak, or precipitous hill-side, would seem as great a danger as the water itself. Five months had elapsed, and though the rain had ceased the sky was heavy and threatening, and every day now was worth many measures of corn in the coming harvest. A reflection of the anxiety within the ark is seen in the expression, "And God remembered Noah." It was needful to say so, for there was as yet no outward sign of this.
To such anxieties all are subject who have availed themselves of the salvation God provides. At the first there is an easy faith in Gods aid; there are many signs of His presence; the subjects in whom salvation operates have no disposition or temptation to doubt that God is with them and is working for them. But this initial stage is succeeded by a very different state of things. We seem to be left to ourselves to cope with the world and all its difficulties and temptations in our own strength. Much as we crave some sign that God remembers us, no sign is given. We no longer receive the same urgent impulses to holiness of life; we have no longer the same freshness in devotion as if speaking to a God at hand. There is nothing which of itself and without reasoning about it says to us, Here is Gods hand upon me.
In fact, the great part of our life has to be spent under these conditions, and we need to hold some well-ascertained principle regarding Gods dealings, if our faith is to survive. And here in Gods treatment of Noah we see that God may as certainly be working for us when not working directly upon us, as when His presence is palpable. His absence from us is as needful as His presence. The clouds are as requisite for our salvation as the sunny sky. When therefore we find that salvation from sin is a much slower and more anxious matter than we once expected it to be, we are not to suppose that God is not hearing our prayers. When Noah day by day cried to God for relief, and yet night after night found himself "cribbd, cabind, and confined," with no sign from God but such as faith could apprehend, depend upon it he had very different feelings from those with which he first stepped into the ark. And when we are left to one monotonous rut of duty and to an unchanging and dry form of devotion, when we are called to learn to live by faith, not by sight, to learn that Gods purposes with us are spiritual. and that slow and difficult growth in self-command and holiness is the best proof that He hears our prayers, we must strive to believe that this also, is a needful part of our salvation; and we must especially be on our guard against supposing that as God has ceased to disclose Himself to us, and so to make faith easy, we may cease to disclose ourselves to Him.
For this is the natural and very frequent result of such an experience. Discouraged by the obscurity of Gods ways and the difficulty of believing when the mind is not sustained by success or by new thoughts or manifest tokens of Gods presence, we naturally cease to look for any clear signs of Gods concernment about our state, and rest from all anxious craving to know Gods will about us. To this temptation the majority of Christian people yield, and allow themselves to become indifferent to spiritual truth and increasingly interested in the non-mysterious facts of the present world, attending to present duties in a mechanical way, seeing that their families have enough to eat and that all in their little ark are provided for. But to this temptation Noah did not yield. Though to all appearance abandoned by God, he did what he could to ascertain what was beyond his immediate sight and present experience. He sent out his raven and his dove. Not satisfied with his first enquiry by the raven, which could flit from one piece of floating garbage to another, he sent out the dove, and continued to do so at intervals of seven days.
Noah sent out the raven first, probably because it had been the most companionable bird and seemed the wisest, preferable to "the silly dove"; but it never came back with Gods message. And so has one often found that an enquiry into Gods will, the examination, for example, of some portion of Scripture, undertaken with a prospect of success and with good human helps, has failed, and has failed in this peculiar ravenlike way; the enquiry has settled down on some worthless point, on some rotting carcase, on some subject of passing interest or worldly learning, and brings back no message of God to us. On the other hand, the continued use, Sabbath after Sabbath, of Gods appointed means, and the patient waiting for some message of God to come to us through what seems a most unlikely messenger, will often be rewarded. It may be but a single leaf plucked off that we get, but enough to convince us that God has been mindful of our need, and is preparing for us a habitable world.
Many a man is like the raven, feeding himself on the destruction of others, satisfied with knowing how God has dealt with others. He thinks he has done his part when he has found out who has been sinning and what has been the result. But the dove will not settle on any such resting-place, and is dissatisfied until for herself she can pluck off some token that Gods anger is turned away and that now there is peace on earth. And. if only you wait Gods time and renew your endeavours to find such tokens, some assurance will be given you, some green and growing thing, some living part, however small, of the new creation which will certify you of your hope.
On the first day of the first month, New Years day, Noah removed the covering of the ark, which seems to have stranded on the Armenian tableland, and looked out upon the new world. He cannot but have felt his responsibility, as a kind of second Adam. And many questionings must have arisen in his mind regarding the relation of the new to the old. Was there to be any connection with the old world at all, or was all to begin afresh? Were the promises, the traditions, the events, the genealogies of the old world of any significance now? The Flood distinctly marked the going out of one order of things and the establishment of another. Mans career and development, or what we call history, had not before the Flood attained its goal. If this development was not to be broken short off, and if Gods purpose in creation was to be fulfilled, then the world must still go on. Some worlds may perhaps die young, as individuals die young. Others endure through hair-breadth escapes and constant dangers, find their way like our planet through showers of fire, and pass without collision the orbits of huge bodies, carrying with them always, as our world does, the materials of their destruction within themselves. But catastrophes do not cut short, but evolve Gods purposes. The Flood came that Gods purpose might be fulfilled. The course of nature was interrupted, the arrangements of social and domestic life were overturned, all the works of men were swept away that this purpose might be fulfilled. It was expedient that one generation should die for all generations; and. this generation having been taken out of the way, fresh provision is made for the co-operation of man with God. On mans part there is emphatic acknowledgment of God by sacrifice; on Gods part there is a renewed grant to man of the world and its fulness, a renewed assurance of His favour.
This covenant with Noah was on the plane of nature. It is mans natural life in the world which is the subject of it. The sacredness of life is its great lesson. Men might well wonder whether God did not hold life cheap. In the old world violence had prevailed. But while Lamechs sword may have slain its thousands, God had in the Flood slain tens of thousands. The covenant, therefore, directs that human life must be reverenced. The primal blessing is renewed. Men are to multiply and replenish the earth; and the slaughter of a man was to be reckoned a capital crime; and the maintenance of life was guaranteed by a special clause, securing the regularity of the seasons. If, then, you ask, Was this just a beginning again where Adam began? Did God just wipe out man as a boy wipes his slate clean, when he finds his calculation is turning out wrong? Had all these generations learned nothing; had the world not grown at all since its birth?-the answer is, it had grown, and in two most important respects, -it had come to the knowledge of the uniformity of nature and the necessity of human law. This great departure from the uniformity of nature brought into strong relief its normal uniformity, and gave men their first lesson in the recognition of a God who governs by fixed laws. And they learned also from the Flood that wickedness must not be allowed to grow unchecked and attain dimensions which nothing short of a flood can cope with.
Fit symbol of this covenant was the rainbow. Seeming to unite heaven and earth, it pictured to those primitive people the friendliness existing between God and man. Many nations have looked upon it as not merely one of the most beautiful and striking objects in nature, but as the messenger of heaven to men. And arching over the whole horizon, it exhibits the all-embracing universality of the promise. They accepted it as a sign that God has no pleasure in destruction, that He does not give way to moods, that He does not always chide, that if weeping may endure for a night joy is sure to follow. If any one is under a cloud, leading a joyless, hopeless, heartless life, if any one has much apparent reason to suppose that God has given him up to catastrophe, and lets things run as they may, there is some satisfaction in reading this natural emblem and recognising that without the cloud, nay, without the cloud breaking into heavy sweeping rains, there cannot be the bow, and that no cloud of Gods sending is permanent, but will one day give place to unclouded joy. Let the prayer of David be yours, "I know, O Lord, that Thy judgments are right, and that Thou in faithfulness hast afflicted me. Let, I pray Thee, Thy merciful kindness be for my comfort according to Thy word unto Thy servant."
It may be felt that the matters about which God spoke to Noah were barely religious, certainly not spiritual. But to take God as our-God in any one particular is to take Him as our God for all. If we can eat our daily bread as given to us by our Father in heaven, then we are heirs of the righteousness which is by faith. It is because we wait for some wonderful and out-of-the-way proofs that God is keeping faith with us that we so much lack a real and living faith. If you think of God only in connection with some spiritual difficulty, or if you are waiting for some critical spiritual experience about which you may deal with God, -if you are not transacting with Him about your daily work, about your temporal wants and difficulties, about your friendships and your tastes, about that which makes up the bulk of your thought, feeling, and action, -then you have yet to learn what living with God means. You have yet to learn that God the Infinite Creator of all is present in all your life. We are not in advance of Noah, but behind him, if we cannot speak to God about common things.
Besides, the relation of man to God was sufficiently determined by this covenant. When any man in that age began to ask himself the question which all men in all ages ask, How shall I win the favour of God? it must, or it might, at once have struck him, Why, God has already favoured me and has bound Himself to me by express and solemn pledges. And radically this is all that any one needs to know. It is not a change in Gods attitude towards you that is required. What is required is that you believe what is actually the case, that the Holy God loves you already and is already seeking to bless you by making you like Himself. Believe that, and let the faith of it sink more and more deeply into your spirit, and you will find that you are saved from your sin.
What remains to be told of Noah is full of moral significance. Rare indeed is a wholly good man; and happy indeed is he who throughout his youth, his manhood, and his age lets principle govern all his actions. The righteous and rescued Noah lying drunk on his tent-floor is a sorrowful spectacle. God had given him the earth, and this was the use he made of the gift; melancholy presage of the fashion of his posterity. He had God to help him to bear his responsibilities, to refresh and gladden him; but he preferred the fruit of his vineyard. Can the most sacred or impressive memories secure a man against sin? Noah had the memory of a race drowned for sin and of a year in solitude with God. Can the dignity and weight of responsibility steady a man? This man knew that to him God had declared His purpose and that he only could carry it forward to fulfilment. In that heavy, helpless figure, fallen insensible in his tent, is as significant a warning as in the Flood.
Noahs sin brings before us two facts about sin. First, that the smaller temptations are often the most effectual. The man who is invulnerable on the field of battle amidst declared and strong enemies falls an easy prey to the assassin in his own home. When all the world was against him, Noah was able to face single-handed both scorn and violence, but in the midst of his vineyard, among his own people who understood him and needed no preaching or proof of his virtue, he relaxed.
He was no longer in circumstances so difficult as to force him to watch and pray, as to drive him to Gods side. The temptations Noah had before known were mainly from without; he now learnt that those from within are more serious. Many of us find it comparatively easy to carry clean hands before the public, or to demean ourselves with tolerable seemliness in circumstances where the temptation may be very strong but is also very patent; but how careless are we often in our domestic life, and how little strain do we put upon ourselves in the company of those whom we can trust. What petulance and irritability, what angry and slanderous words, what sensuality and indolence could our own homes witness to! Noah is not the only man who has walked uprightly and kept his garment unspotted from the world so long as the eye of man was on him, but who has lain uncovered on his own tent-floor.
Secondly, we see here how a man may fall into new forms of sin, and are reminded especially of one of the most distressing facts to be observed in the world, viz., that men in their prime and even in their old age are sometimes overtaken in sins of sensuality from which hitherto they have kept themselves pure. We are very ready to think we know the full extent of wickedness to which we may go; that by certain sins we shall never be much tempted. And in some of our predictions we may be correct; our temperament or our circumstances may absolutely preclude some sins from mastering us. Yet who has made but a slight alteration in his circumstances, added a little to his business, made some new family arrangements, or changed his residence, without being astonished to find how many new sources of evil seem to have been opened within him? While therefore you rejoice over sins defeated, beware of thinking your work is nearly done. Especially let those of us who have for years been fighting mainly against one sin beware of thinking that if only that were defeated we should be free from sin. As a man who has long suffered from one bodily disease congratulates himself that at least he knows what he may expect in the way of pain, and will not suffer as some other man he has heard of does suffer; whereas though one disease may kill others, yet some diseases only prepare the body for the assault of worse ailments than themselves, and the constitution at last breaks up under a combination of ills that make the sufferer a pity to his friends and a perplexity to his physicians. And so is it in the spirit; you cannot say that because you are so consumed by one infirmity, others can find no room in you. In short, there is nothing that can secure us against the unspeakable calamity of falling into new sins, except the direction given by our Lord, "Watch and pray, lest ye enter into temptation." There is need of watching, else this precept had never been uttered; too many things absolutely needful for us to do have to be enjoined upon us to leave any room for the injunction of precepts that are unnecessary, and he who is not watching has no security that he shall not sin so as to be a scandal to his friends and a shame to himself.
Noahs sin brought to light the character of his three sons-the coarse irreverence of Ham, the dignified delicacy and honour of Shem and Japheth. The bearing of men towards the sins of others is always a touchstone of character. The full exposure of sin where good is expected to come of the exposure and when it is done with sorrow and with shame is one thing, and the exposure of sin to create a laugh and merely to amuse is another. They are the true descendants of Ham, whether their faces be black or white, and whether they go with no clothes or with clothes that are the product of much thought and anxiety, who find pleasure in the mere contemplation of deeds of shame, in real life, on the boards of the theatre, in daily journals, or in works of fiction. Extremes meet, and the savage grossness of Ham is found in many who count themselves the last and finest product of culture. It is found also in the harder and narrower set of modern investigators, who glory in exposing the scientific weakness of our forefathers, and make a jest of the mistakes of men to whom they owe much of their freedom, and whose shoe latchet they are not worthy to tie, so far as the deeper moral qualities go.
But neither is religious society free from this same sin. The faults and mistakes and sins of others are talked over, possibly with some show of regret, but with, as we know, very little real shame and sadness, for these feelings prompt us, not to talk them over in companies where no good can be done in the way of remedy, but to cover them as these sorrowing sons of Noah, with averted eye and humbled head. Charity is the prime grace enjoined upon us and charity covers a multitude of sins. And whatever excuses for exposing others we may make, however we may say it is only a love of truth and fair play that makes us drag to light the infirmities of a man whom others are praising, we may be very sure that if all evil motives were absent this kind of evil speaking would cease among us. But there is a malignity in sin that leaves its bitter root in us all, and causes us to be glad when those whom we have been regarding as our superiors are reduced to our poor level. And there is a cowardliness in sin which cannot bear to be alone, and eagerly hails every symptom of others being in the same condemnation.
Before exposing another, think first whether your own conduct could bear a similar treatment, whether you have never done the thing you desire to conceal, said the thing you would blush to hear repeated, or thought the thought you could not bear another to read. And if you be a Christian, does it not become you to remember what you yourself have learnt of the slipperiness of this worlds ways, of your liability to fall, of your sudden exposure to sin from some physical disorder, or some slight mistake which greatly extenuates your sin, but which you could not plead before another? And do you know nothing of the difficulty of conquering one sin that is rooted in your constitution, and the strife that goes on in a mans own soul and in secret though he show little immediate fruit of it in his life before men? Surely it becomes us to give a man credit for much good resolution and much sore self-denial and endeavour, even when he fails and sins still, because such we know to be our own case, and if we disbelieve in others until they can walk with perfect rectitude, if we condemn them for one or two flaws and blemishes, we shall be tempted to show the same want of charity towards ourselves, and fall at length into that miserable and hopeless condition that believes in no regenerating spirit nor in any holiness attainable by us.
William Robertson Nicoll, ed., The Expositor's Bible (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1887–1910) — public domain. 65 of 66 books (1 Corinthians is not separately keyed, as that volume carries no machine-parseable verse references); section-level commentary keyed to the opening verse. Introductory and overview sections not keyed to a specific passage are excluded.
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary 1892 · Public Domain On vv1, 8, 18, 20, 28 Gen_9:1. God] Heb. Elohim. Blessed] Similar to the blessing…
CRITICAL NOTES.—
Gen_9:1. God] Heb. Elohim. Blessed] Similar to the blessing pronounced upon Adam and Eve (Gen_1:28.—
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Gen_9:2. The fear of you, and the dread of you] The fear of you, as existing in the inferior animals. “Dread” imparts a greater intensity of meaning into the word—the fear which paralyses. It may be that even in Paradise the lower animals had a wholesome fear of man, by means of which they could be kept in subjection. Now they are to be ruled by force and terror.—
Gen_9:3. Every moving thing that liveth] This form of permission forbids the using of any animal that hath died of itself.—
Gen_9:4. But the flesh with the life thereof] Some suppose that it is hereby intended to forbid the cruel custom of some ancient nations in tearing off the flesh from living animals. But this was the practice of later heathenism, and it is therefore more probable that we have here a command that the blood of animals must first be shed before they can be used for food. This prohibition was also made to serve the purpose of educating the people to the idea of the sacredness of blood as a means of atonement (Lev_17:11; Heb_9:22).—Life.] The animating principle—the animal soul. The blood is regarded as the basis of life (Deu_12:23). “The blood is the fluid-nerve: the nerve is the constructed blood” (Lange). “He disgorges the crimson tide of life” (Virgil), Æn. IX., 348.—
Gen_9:5. Your blood of your lives] LXX. has “blood of your souls”—the blood which contains the life or animal principle.—Require] i.e., judicially, in the sense of making “inquisition for;” same verb used in Psa_9:12.—At the hand of every beast] They have no right to human flesh, and men are to avenge the injuries they suffer from them. Hence their extermination is justifiable for the protection of human life.—Every man’s brother] Heb. “Of every man, his brother.” Society was thus permitted to inflict punishment for the highest wrongs against itself. Every man was to see in every other a brother, which recognition would give an awful significance to the crime of murder. Some consider that the duty of blood-vengeance is thus laid upon the next of kin; but this sprang up in later times, and it is better to take the words as laying down the principle of all such punishments.—Life of man] Man is emphatic.—
Gen_9:6. By man] This would seem to denote the instrument of the action, yet the Hebrew has a special phrase to indicate such a meaning, in that case using the expression “by the hand of man.” It is more probable that the preposition denotes substitution “n the place of man,” “life for life.” Thus 2Sa_14:7, “For the soul (the life, or in place of) his brother.” The LXX has (Gen_9:6) “in return for his blood.” The Targum of Onkelos has “by the witnesses according to the word of judgment.”—
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.—Gen_9:1-7
THE DIVINE BENEDICTION ON THE NEW HUMANITY
The human race now starts from a new beginning. Through the Fall the contagion of sin had spread until the Old World had reached a maturity of corruption, and tempted beyond forbearance the vengeance of Heaven. The terrible judgment of the Flood overwhelmed the violence that filled the earth, and destroyed all except the “eight souls who were saved by water.” But Mercy at length finds a time for rejoicing and triumph, and those deeds of kindness in which she delights. The Divine benediction, so full of present gifts and of promise, came in answer to pious devotion expressed in an act of sacrifice. The new humanity had acknowledged sin, and the necessity of propitiating Him to whom alone man has to render an account. God’s blessings are no empty form of words, no pleasing abstractions in which alone philosophic meditation can delight. They are substantial good. God loves, and therefore gives. The word of blessing, in Gen_9:1, is afterwards expanded into gifts and provisions for the new humanity. “God blessed Noah and his sons,” and spake unto them in words which represented solid benefits. Here we have blessing in the form of provisions for this new beginning of the human race.
I. Provision for the Continuity of its Physical Life (Gen_9:1). Death must still reign until destroyed as the last enemy. Successive generations shall go down to the grave, to be replaced by others who in their turn must submit to the common fate. But while the individual dies, as far as his portion and work in the world are concerned, the race is destined to be immortal. The stream of human life must flow on throughout the ages, until God shall be pleased to bring in a new order, and the former things be passed away. This continuity of humanity through the wastes of death is to be maintained by the institution of marriage. To these progenitors of the new race, God said, as to our first parents, “Be fruitful and multiply.” Sexual sin Lad been the ruin of the old world; but now it shall be seen that lawful connections can be formed and the proper uses of marriage secured. The command to replenish the earth by the multiplication of the species is now given to men who with their “wives” came forth out of the ark. It is therefore a re-affirmation of the sanctity of marriage. This divinely appointed provision for the continuance of man upon the earth.—
1. Raises the relation between the sexes above all degrading associations. Without the protection and guidance of a divine ordinance, such relations would be chiefly governed by natural instincts. Marriage controls these, and restrains their impetuosity within wholesome bounds. It brings the relation between the sexes under the sanction of God’s order, by which it becomes ennobled. Man is thus reminded that moral responsibility belongs to him in all the relations of life.
2. Tends to promote the stability of society. Wild and untamed passions, the indulgence of animal instincts without control, will keep any society of men in the lowest possible condition. It is only when the reason and conscience submit to the laws of God that man can exist in stable society, or rise in the family of nations. Men are not to herd together as beasts, they must live together, otherwise they debase the dignity of human nature. They cannot form a society possessing strength and nobility, unless they acknowledge that the relations of life rest upon something out of sight. They are ultimately spiritual relations. There is no real progress for man, unless in all the relations of life he acknowledges the will of the Supreme Father. Marriage is the foundation of the family, and the family is the foundation of the State.
3. Promotes the tender charities of life. To this ordinance we owe the love of husband and wife, parent and child, and the play of all those affections that make home sacred. Whatever is noble and tender in natural instinct becomes enhanced and permanent when God is acknowledged in all the domestic relations of life.
II. Provision for its sustenance (Gen_9:3). In the history of the human creature the sustenance of life is the first consideration, though not the most important. It is necessary first to live before we can live well. “First that which is natural, and afterwards that which is spiritual,” is the order of human progress, as it is the order in which we must supply the wants of our nature. Life is a flame that must be sustained by something outside of itself. No creature can live on its own blood. The physical life of man must be preserved by the ministry of other lives—animal, vegetable. For this end God has given man dominion over the earth, and especially over all other lives in it. We may regard this sustenance which God has provided for man’s lower wants
(1) as a reason for gratitude. Our physical necessities are the most immediate, the most intimate to us. We should acknowledge the hand that provides for them. We should feel how much we are beholden to God for our very life itself, upon which foundation even the highest blessings rest. The order of thought requires that we thank God for our creation and preservation, even before we thank Him for His love to us in Christ Jesus. We may regard God’s provision herein
(2) as an example of the law of mediation. Man’s life is preserved by the instrumentality of others. God’s natural government of the world is carried on by means of mediation, from which we may infer that such is the principle of His moral government. That “bread of life” by which our souls are sustained comes to us through a Mediator. Thus God’s provisions for our common wants may be made a means of educating us in higher things. Nature has the symbols and suggestions of spiritual truths
(3) as a ground for expecting greater blessings. If God made so rich and varied a provision to supply the necessities of the body, it was reasonable to expect that He would care and provide for the deeper necessities of the soul. Man was made in the image of God, and invested with dominion over the world. He is of the blood-royal of Heaven, and may be permitted to hope for those better things suitable to his high estate. God will surely maintain His own glory in caring for His image. If there be no provision for our souls, then would there be a strange break in the dealings of God with man, and a fatal gulf between Heaven and earth.
III. Provision for its protection. Human life must be protected from dangerous enemies (Gen_9:5-6). There are evils against which no human foresight can provide, but there are many more from which we have abundant means of defending ourselves. Though the dominion of man over nature has limitations, yet it is real; otherwise man could never have held his place against such tremendous obstacles. It is necessary that our physical life be protected—
1. From the ferocity of animals. From their numbers and strength, these would be formidable enemies. They increase rapidly and exist in external conditions against which the natural weakness of man could not contend. Their time of utter helplessness in infancy is short, they soon become independent of their fellows, they are provided with clothing and weapons of defence and attack.
“Hale are their young, from human frailties freed,
Walk unsustained or unsupported feed;
Bound o’er the lawn, or seek the distant glade,
And find a home in each delightful shade.”
Man, on the other hand, passes through a long period of weakness and entire dependence upon others, requires artificial clothing to shelter him from the cold. He is not provided by nature with any formidable weapons for his defence; yet subdues all things, captures other animals for his food, compels them to perform his work, or tames them to make him sport. Man, inferior in every physical quality and advantage, reigns over them by his superior reason. The force of intellect, by directing and controlling all other forces, maintains his pre-eminence. The lower animals acknowledge his majesty in fear and dread. The Providence of God preserves the balance of power, in a wonderful manner, between man and the lower animals. Man has the Divine sanction for protecting himself against their ferocity. He is commanded to avenge the life of his fellow upon them. It is lawful for him to seek their extermination, should they become dangerous to his existence. Human life must be held sacred, and its rights vindicated, even when they are invaded by a blind ferocity.
2. From the violence of evil men. Sinners were destroyed by the flood, yet sin remained in the human family. The evils of our nature were too deeply seated to be cleansed away even by so dire a judgment. It was contemplated that in this new humanity evil passions would arise, and drive men to deeds of violence against their fellows. God would require, judicially, the blood of man at the hands of him who shed it, and has given authority to man to execute His vengeance. In this permission and command there may be a remembrance of Cain, who did the first murder. The new society must be protected by holding a terrible penalty over murderers. The Bible does not indulge in poetical theories of human nature, but soberly acknowledges all its most terrible facts.
IV. Provision for its Morality. Without morality society cannot be stable, exist in comfort, or make progress. Nations having the highest resources of talent, power, and wealth, have yet been destroyed by their own corruptions. The new humanity must have laws of right conduct, and sufficient penalties to enforce them; else it could not continue in prosperity, or rise to higher things. The inbred corruption of human nature, its fierce passions, imperfections, and frailties, demanded the restraint of law. Here, however, we have not so much the external command as (what might be called) the material and principle of law. We have the ethics of human conduct not settled into formulated statements, but held in solution. The aim is to attack the evils of society in their roots, to give ennobling views of human nature, and to create a sufficient authority on the side of order and good.
1. Hence the tendency to cruelty was to be repressed. They were not to eat the blood of animals. The prohibition was necessary to preserve men from acquiring savage tastes, and practising gross and revolting forms of cruelty. This would be one of the effects of the command to abstain from the use of blood, though it is probable that a higher lesson was intended. All that tends to repress cruelty greatly modifies the evils of depravity, is on the side of goodness, and strengthens the charities of the heart. Cruelty imparts a terrible momentum to evil, until that which is sad and pitiable becomes monstrous and horrible. When men are seized by this demon of cruelty, they go rapidly to the extremest verge of sin and crime. Hence to forbid what may lead to cruelty is a wise provision to preserve morality.
2. They were to remember the fact of mutual brotherhood. “At the hand of every man’s brother.” God was the universal Father, and the human race was His family. Every man was to see in every other a brother. The recognition of this fact would be a fruitful source of goodwill towards all, and a promoter of social order and morality. No deed of violence, cruelty, or wrong could be done where there was a full and real knowledge of this truth. This conviction of our common brotherhood is so disguised, overlaid, and silenced by the depravity within and around us that it is comparatively weak as a restraint on the evils of the world. It can only be clear and come to strength and efficacy when we read it in the light of our Lord’s redeeming work. Men cannot have true union with one another until they have union with God through His Son. The hand has no direct connection with the foot, but each is connected with one centre of life. The unity of the body is thus maintained, and so it must be with the members of the human family. There will be no perfect union until they all partake of one spiritual life. Still, the fact of human brotherhood prepares the way for this sublime issue, and helps us to rise to the thought of it. The tie that really binds men together must be spiritual.
3. Morality was to be protected by authority armed with penalties. (Gen_9:6.) Society was empowered to punish crimes committed against itself. The whole community, by means of appointed and responsible persons, must avenge the wrong done to any of the individuals of which it is composed. Here we have the punishment to be inflicted upon those who commit the highest offence against society. Hence the origin and use of the civil magistrate. The community should be on the side of right and justice, and against violence and wrong. But, for the sake of convenience, it is necessary that this feeling should be represented and the duties belonging to it carried out by the officers of the law. They represent the authority of God, and the just feeling of society. Nations could not exist with the stability and privileges of civil life without a government strong enough to enforce the laws. The form of government is a human ordinance, arising out of the necessities of life and moulded by the events of political history, but the end of government is of Divine appointment. By requiring so terrible a penalty from him who sheds the blood of man, God has given His sanction to the office of the civil magistrate. Such deal with offences against morality in the form of crime, or of evils affecting the comfort and well-being of society. In the present condition of mankind, teaching and moral suasion are insufficient to preserve public peace and order. There must be an authority, which is to be feared by evildoers. God sets His seal upon human institutions which have the safety and well-being of mankind for their object. Hence in this new beginning of the race, He directs that men shall protect themselves against all deeds of injustice and violence.
V. Provision for its Religion. Something more must be considered than the safety and prosperity of men regarded as inhabitants of this world. Man needs a religion, for he is conscious of relations with a higher world. We have here the outlines of certain religious truths, which compel us to refer the principles of conduct and the foundation of authority ultimately to God. They were also intended to prepare humanity for the superior light of a later Revelation
1. Mankind were to be educated to the idea of sacrifice. (Gen_9:4.) Blood was forbidden as a separate article of food. Men were to be taught to regard it as a sacred thing, so that they might be prepared for the fact that God had set it apart as the symbol of expiation. The education of humanity is a slow process, and in its earlier stages it was necessary that men should attain to the knowledge of the deep truths of religion by the aid of outward symbols. Pictures and illustrations of truth were suitable to the childhood of the world. Mankind were first to see the form and appearance of truth before they could examine its structure, or know its essence. The sanctity of blood prepared the way for the rites of sacrifice, and sacrifice taught the sinfulness of sin and the necessity of some Divine expedient for restoring man to the favour of God. It also suggested man’s superior relation to God and to the spiritual world. If man were not accountable to his Maker when this life is ended, why should he be taught the necessity of being purged from sin? Surely God contemplated a creature who, when he had attained purity, might be fitted to dwell with Himself.
2. Mankind were to be impressed with the true dignity of human nature. For the law concerning murder, there is the moral sanction arising from the brotherhood of man, but there is also the religious sanction founded upon the fact that he was made in the image of God. The sublime truths of revelation must be regarded as extravagant, unless we suppose them addressed to a creature having such dignity. Mankind were to be early impressed with the idea of their high and noble origin in order that they might be prepared for the successive advances of God’s kindness. The gifts of God, however great they may be, cannot be unsuitable to a being made in His image. From this fact we gather—
1. That man has the capacity for religion. The image of God in him is greatly defaced, but it is not destroyed. He has the capacity for knowing God, for understanding his own responsibility, and feeling after the spiritual world. By this he is distinguished from, and placed far above, all other lives on the earth. There is something in man that answers to the voice of God and the suggestions of inspiration.
2. That man is destined for another life. To partake of the image of God is to partake of immortality. God, who has made and fashioned us in His likeness, will have respect to the work of His own hands, and will not suffer us to be destroyed in the grave.
3. Mankind must be taught to refer all authority and rule ultimately to God. The civil magistrate was to be invested with authority and power to punish the crime of murder by the infliction of the death penalty. The assigned reason is, man was made in the image of God. Thus all human authority, for its foundation and warrant, is cast ultimately on God. Religion is the life of all progress. Every question concerning the interests of mankind resolves itself, in the end, into a question of religion. Here are the only noble and sufficient impulses, motives, and sanctions of all the activities and aims of human life. Man must realise the full significance of his relations to God, that he might be fitted to occupy his position as the appointed ruler of the world.
SUGGESTIVE COMMENTS ON THE VERSES
Gen_9:1. God gives his benediction at every great crisis in the history of mankind. Thus at the creation of man (Gen_1:28). Even when He sent forth His “fiery law,” He loved the people and gave His blessing (Deu_33:2-3). When the Messiah came, the blessing became more definite and plentiful.
At every great epoch of human history, Gods shows some sign of His favour to the race.
God’s blessing goes before His commands. Men must have the light of His favour before they can serve Him. Religion would be altogether impossible did not the grace of God go before men and lead the way.
This was the blessing of a Father, for it was spoken to His offspring. Given to rational beings, it implied duties which the righteous Father requires of His children.
God is the source of all paternity. Every society in heaven and earth must acknowledge Him as their origin—their Father. They were begotten by His gracious will (Joh_1:13).
As the old blessing is repeated, so is the old command to be “fruitful and multiply.” God intends a human history, and thus provides for the continuity of the life of the race, without which history would be impossible.
In this text the marriage state is praised and celebrated, since thereout flows not only the order of the family and the world, but also the existence of the Church.—(Lange.)
The earth was to be overcome by the diffusion of human life over it. Hence learn the energy of spiritual life, which is a power to conquer and subdue all opposition.
Man’s place on earth is appointed by his Heavenly Father, who disdains not to give him direction for the lowest as well as the highest duties; for this world, and that which is to come.
Fruitfulness is another blessing of this stage. Just as in creation, when the third day rose, and the waters were restrained, the earth was made fruitful; so now in Noah, the third great stage in man, the flood being passed, man increases wonderfully. “Except the corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (Joh_12:24). Now having died to the world by the cross, and the evil fruits which grow out of old Adam being judged by the overflowing waters, the new man within increases yet more. Being purged, he brings forth much fruit.—(Jukes, Types of Genesis.)
The greatest desolations in the world cannot hinder God from having a people.—(Hughes.)
The grant of increase is the same as at first, but expressed in ampler terms.—(Murphy.)
Gen_9:2. Human reason, fruitful as it is in resources of skill and contrivance, would not by itself secure the complete subjection of the lower animals. Man could not maintain his sovereignty unless they were weakened by dread and felt an awe of his majesty.
It is often God’s plan to work by an internal power upon the nature of His creatures as well as by influences from without.
To be compelled to rule by fear was a sign that man was now out of harmony with nature. This is one of the jarring notes of discord which sin has introduced.
Enmity is put between fallen man and all the brute creatures, as well as the serpent. But though they are so greatly superior in strength, their instinct is commonly to flee from the presence of man. If it were not so, how full of terror would man be in new settlements, where civilised society crowds upon the wilderness tribes.—(Jacobus.)
“Into your hand are they delivered.” Man does not wear an empty title of sovereignty. A real dominion is conveyed to him.
The Scripture everywhere maintains the lordship of man. He is the central figure, all things deriving their worth and excellence from the relations in which they stand to him. Hence the Bible is not a history of external nature, but of man.
This dominion, as granted to the first Adam and renewed to Noah, was in itself limited and conditional, such as is fit to grant to sinners. As granted to the second Adam, He that is the Lord from heaven, under that man’s feet God hath put all things (Heb_2:6-9; 1Co_15:27). This is given to Christ as Mediating Lord, and by Him is sanctified to His members; so the covenant renewed to Noah includes some special blessings in this dominion unto the Church, as it refers to the promised seed, the ground of all God’s gracious promises and revelations unto His people.—(Hughes.)
God will, as it were, make a covenant for him with the beasts of the field, and they shall be at peace with him, or at least shall be awed by his authority. All this is out of respect to the mediation of Christ, and for the accomplishing of the designs of mercy through Him.—(Fuller.)
Gen_9:3. Physical life must be sustained by other lives of flesh and blood; mental, by the life of other minds; spiritual, by the infusion of the life of God.
God prepares a table for His family. Having granted the greater blessing, He will not withhold the lesser. He who gave life will give all that is necessary for its maintenance.
The daily supply of our common wants is now part of the established order of things. We are in danger of regarding it as a matter of course, and not calling for any special recognition. Yet we should realise the fact that these are gifts of God, and receive them as if they came fresh from His hand. The manna, though it came regularly every day, was yet given from heaven.
By the slaying of animals for food, men would grow familiar with the thought that life is preserved by death. They would be prepared for the doctrine of the atonement, where the death of the Divine victim procures the life of the world.
The grant of sustenance is no longer confined to the vegetable, but extended to the animal kinds, with two solemn restrictions. This explains how fully the animals are handed over to the will of man. They were slain for sacrifice from the earliest times. Whether they were used for food before that time we are not informed. But now every creeper that is alive is granted for food. Every creeper is every thing that moves with the body prone to the earth, and therefore in a creeping posture. This seems to describe the inferior animals in contradistinction to man, who walks erect. The phrase that is alive seems to exclude animals that have died a natural death from being used as food.—(Murphy.)
Gen_9:4. In the largest rights granted to man God reserves something to Himself. He maintains some supreme rights, and grants liberty with wholesome restraints.
It is God’s design to invest the seat of life with peculiar sacredness; to encourage that mysterious awe with which all life should be regarded.
The basis of life is still the most perplexing inquiry of philosophy. Human science fails to bridge over the chasm between physical organisms and the facts of volition and consciousness. It would seem that God has thrown around the whole subject the sacredness of mystery.
As the people were to be trained to great leading ideas of sin and salvation by means of these ritual ordinances, so they were to be taught of a special sanctity attaching to blood in the system of Divine grace. “For without shedding of blood is no remission” (Heb_9:22). The natural horror of blood which obtains among men is evidence of such a Divine regulation.—(Jacobus.)
As life, must the life of the beast go back to God its Creator; or, as life in the victim offered in sacrifice, it must become a symbol that the soul of man belongs to God, though man may partake of the animal materiality, that is, the flesh.—(Lange.)
Blood is the life, and God seems to claim it as sacred to Himself. Hence, in all the sacrifices the blood was poured out before the Lord: and in the sacrifice of Christ, He shed His blood, or poured out His soul unto death.—(Fuller.)
Gen_9:5. Justice is not a mere abstraction, but a reality in the Divine nature, making demands upon the transgressor which must be satisfied, either by the provisions of grace, or by the exaction of penalty. Justice is made terribly real by the personality of God, the “one Lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy.” (Jas_4:12.) “I will require.”
The awful punishment for murder proclaims the sacredness of human life.
The principle is here approved that the safety of society must be secured at whatever cost to the individual.
The life of man was to be required judicially at the hands of irrational animals, though they must be ignorant of the moral aspects of their actions. Hence man has the right to exterminate them should it be necessary to the safety and welfare of society.
The civil magistrate is an ordinance of God, not an expedient of man to meet the necessities of society. We have reason to believe that the first ideas of law, order, and civilisation were the result of Divine teaching. Men have never risen from the savage state by any internal power, but have always been helped from without. A boat cannot be propelled by the strength of a man exerted within it—since action is always equal to reaction—the oar must press upon a fulcrum outside of it. In like manner, man, if he will make any progress, must have some fulcrum outside of himself.
This ordinance of the civil magistrate had not existed before this time. Rom_13:4. From this preliminary legislation the synagogue has derived “the seven Noachic precepts,” which were held to be obligatory upon all proselytes. These forbid
(1) Idolatry.
(2) Blasphemy.
(3) Murder.
(4) Incest.
(5) Theft.
(6) Eating of blood and strangled animals.
(7) Disobedience to magistrates. (Jacobus.)
The brotherhood of man ought to be a sufficient guard of morality; but the sense of it in humanity is too weak to be effectual without the aid of religion, teaching, as it does, the highest form of that fact.
By thus reminding those who intend an injury to others of the common brotherhood of the race, there is an appeal to what is noble in human nature, which is anterior to the threat of law. We have here the suggestion and prophecy of those purer and nobler principles of action to which God is gradually leading up mankind. Moral principles are before the forms of law and shall survive them.
“I will require it.” The trebling of the expression notes the intention of care which God hath over the life of man.—(Hughes.)
I, the Lord, will find the murderer out and exact the penalty of his crime. The very beast that causes the death of man shall be slain. The suicide and the homicide are alike accountable to God for the shedding of man’s blood.—(Murphy.)
Gen_9:6. Here we have no pleasing dream of an ideal humanity. It is contemplated that the crime of murder would be committed.
The State must be founded upon justice, and in human society justice can only be maintained by punishment.
Punishment, though it may act as a deterrent, or as a means of improvement, must yet in itself be regarded as the upholding of justice against disobedience, the natural reaction of justice against its violation.
Those who are appointed to administer the law, and make effectual the sanctions of it, have a duty to do for society in the name of God.
Murder is the most extreme violation of the brotherly relation of mankind, and is to be punished accordingly. The penal power, attributable to God alone, is here committed to the hands of man.—(Delitzsche.)
This image of God, in which man was first formed, so belongs even to fallen man that such wilful destruction of human life is to be regarded as a crime against the Divine majesty, thus imaged in man.—(Jacobus.)
Capital punishment has been objected to on the ground that, as life is the gift of God, we have no right to take it away. But the real conflict here is between the sacredness of individual life and that of society. The question is not whether there shall be death, but whether society shall inflict it?
However expedient it may be to visit the crime of murder with the extreme penalty, yet the more excellent way, in which the spirit of the Christian religion leads, is to teach the sacredness of human life.
The image of God in man must be held as a constant fact, invariable in its essentials through all the changes of his moral history, and through all the mystery of his future. This fact has a bearing upon
(1) the question of human depravity. Man is not altogether evil. The image of God in him is only defaced, not destroyed. There is something in his nature to which religion can make an appeal, otherwise he would be incapable of it. There must be something in the soul answering to truth and goodness.
2. Upon the conversion of the soul. That great spiritual crisis in a man’s life destroys none of his natural powers, but only directs them into new channels, and exalts their energy. The image of God is brought out more clearly and perfectly.
3. Upon immortality. Man was made in the image of God, and, therefore, in the image of His immortality. God will not suffer a spark of Himself to see corruption. The Gospel finds, but does not make, men immortal.
4. Upon wrongs done to our fellow creatures. He who sins against a man sins against God, to whose image he does dishonour. In an especial manner he does so who sins against a child, where the image of God is fresh and new. Hence our Lord pronounces a heavy woe upon all who lay a stumbling-block in their way.
The first law promulgated in Scripture was that between Creator and creature.… And so it continued to be in the antediluvian world. No civil law is on record for the restriction of crime.… So long as the law was between Creator and creature, God Himself was not only the sole legislator, but the sole administrator of the law. The second law is that between creature and creature.… In the former case God is the administrator of the law, as He is the immediate and sovereign party in the legal compact. In the latter case, man is, by the express appointment of the Lord of all, constituted the executive agent.—(Murphy.)
Gen_9:7. An apparent repetition of Gen_9:1, but with the added idea that the earth affords the necessary conditions for the multiplication of the race. The life of the earth is to be transformed into the life of man. The earth is the fruitful mother of mankind, both prefiguring and maintaining their fruitfulness.
How great is man, touching, as he does, the dust at one extremity and God at the other! He joins earth and heaven, frailty and immortal strength, brief life, and the day of eternity!
The command to multiply is repeated, and contains permission, not of promiscuous intercourse, like the brutes, but of honourable marriage. The same law which forbade the eating of blood, under the Gospel, forbade fornication.—(Fuller.)
ILLUSTRATIONS
BY
REV. WM. ADAMSON
Noachic Covenant! Gen_9:1-17. We have here
(1) Principle of Government, as God’s institution for the good of His saints;
(2) Promulgation of Covenant, as God’s instruction to mankind of an everlasting covenant in Christ; and
(3) Proclamation of Rainbow, as God’s intimation of His faithfulness, in which no arrow shall ever find a place. There are men who can see no lofty aim in this chapter 9, and who only see the abstract moral principle of right and wrong, virtue and vice. Like the first visitors to the coral lagoons, they can only perceive a sheet of water; whereas deep down are the pearl-treasures—the gems of great price. Dost thou well
“To challenge the designs of the All-wise;
Or carp at projects which thou may’st but scan
With sight defective: typal contrivances
Of peerless skill and of unequalled art,
Framed by divinest wisdom to subserve
The subtle processes of grace?”
ILLUSTRATIONS
BY
REV. WM. ADAMSON
Representation! Gen_9:1.
(1). In the earliest fauna and flora of the earth, one class stood for many. The earliest families combined the character of several families afterwards separately introduced. This is true, for instance, of ferns, which belong to the oldest races of vegetation. Of them it has been well said that there is hardly a single feature or quality possessed by flowering plants, of which we do not find a hint or prefiguration in ferns. It is thus most interesting to notice in the earliest productions of our earth, the same laws and processes which we observe in the latest and most highly developed flowers and trees.
(2) At the successive periods of the unfolding of God’s great promise, we find one individual representing the history of the race, and foreshadowing in brief the essential character of large phases and long periods of human development. Hence it is that here Noah becomes the representative of the patriarchal families in covenant with God. He is the individual with whom God enters into covenant, in relation to the successive generations of the human race.
(3) And in this respect Noah is a retrospective type of Him who, in the eternal ages, consented to be the representative of redeemed humanity, and with whom the Father made an everlasting covenant; and a prospective type of that same Representative who, in the fulness of time received the Divine assurance that in Him should all nations of the earth be blessed, when, as the Prince of Peace, He
“Leads forth His armies with triumphal palms,
And hymning hallelujahs, while his foes
Are crushed before Him, and Himself assumes
The sceptre of His rightful universe.”
Bible Revision! Gen_9:1. etc.
(1) The last four verses of Genesis 8 properly belong to Genesis 9. In any future revision, these 4 verses, along with the first 17 verses of Genesis 9, should be united in one chapter. The sweet-smelling savour is intimately connected with the Divine declaration of man’s future. As we link the blessings of humanity for the last 2000 years with the sweet-smelling sacrifice of Calvary, so should we join the future of man (as in Gen_9:1-17) with the Noachic sacrifice so acceptable to God.
(2) And as the ark cast upon the stormy floods was divinely designed to be a type of that other and better ark, sheltering man from the wrath divine; so that sweet and odorous offering, with its succeeding stream of divine benediction, was a divinely-appointed symbol of the nobler victim on a holier mount,
“The fragrance of whose perfect sacrifice
Breathes infinite beatitude, and spans
The clouds of judgment with eternal light.”
Man’s Lordship! Gen_9:2. In India, a man-eating tiger sprang upon a group of men resting in the shade. Grasping with his teeth one of the group, he sprang off into the jungle, while the rest of the natives scattered hither and thither. The following day, a maiden, returning from the fountain, met the same tiger. Fastening her eye firmly upon that of the tiger, she boldly advanced to the beast, which suddenly turned and fled into the thickets. God thus shows what sin has done in destroying man’s lordship over the creature. No doubt, had man under the Noachic covenant walked with God, the fear of man and the dread of man would have been upon every beast of the field, and upon every fowl of the air. It was the same lion, which seized the soldier by the camp-fire, which next day fled precipitately from the form of a little child, as it stood staring with childish wonderment at the strange creature that stepped across the path leading to the Missionary’s compound. In that retreating monarch of the wild from the shining eye of childhood, we have a relic, not of man’s Adamic, but of man’s Noachic dominion over the beasts of the forest, who slunk away
“With muttered growls, and sought their lonesome dens,
Gliding, like cowering ghosts with baffled mien,
Into the dark, deep forest.”—Collingwood.
Blood for Blood! Gen_9:6. An English tourist came upon an Indian village, in centre of which a number of youths were playing. Provoked in play, one lost his temper, and, suddenly seizing a knife, struck his opponent in the neck. The wound, though not dangerous, bled profusely, and a cry was immediately raised. A young chief came forth from his hut—inquired the cause—and, having ascertained the culprit, started in pursuit of him. Soon overtaken, the guilty youth was dragged to where the wounded one lay. After carefully examining the depth, extent etc. of the wound, the young chief took a knife and made precisely the same incision in the offender’s neck. The one was a papyrographic fac-simile of the other. Both were then taken to their huts. This Indian chief was the “Goel;” i.e., the avenger of the injured;
“Poising the cause in justice’ equal scales,
Whose beam stands sure, whose rightful cause prevails.”—Shakespeare.
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary (gen. ed. Joseph S. Exell; Funk & Wagnalls, c. 1892) — public domain (pre-1929). A full-Bible homiletical/sermon-outline anthology covering 65 of 66 books (2 John is absent from the source module). Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Sermon Bible 1900 · Public Domain On v1 How are we to use the creation of God…
Gen 9:3
How are we to use the creation of God so that it may help towards our own supreme object? (1) We can study created things; we can see God Himself through them. (2) We may use God’s creation for our necessity, for our advantage, and for our delight. (3) We are to abstain from it in obedience to temperance and to the rules of discipline. Of these three ways of using the creation, the first is the most noble; the second is the most common; the third is the most necessary. To some the means of serving God have grown so all-important that they have forgotten altogether that it was to serve God that they set out. The source of error lies in placing the means before us, as if they were the end, and leaving out the thought of the end in our lives and conversation. When we go wrong in our work or our leisure, our words or our silence, we do it because we forget the end of everything; because we dethrone from its rightful, its eternal seat, the strong, the bright, the radiant remembrance that we are of God, that we are in God, and that we are on our way to God.
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Archbishop Benson, Boy Life: Sundays in Wellington College, p. 26.
References: Gen 9:1-20.—Clergyman’s Magazine, vol. iv., p. 82. Gen 9:5, Gen 9:6.—G. Calthrop, Words Spoken to my Friends, p. 320.
Gen 9:8-9
To understand this covenant, consider what thoughts would have been likely to grow up in the minds of Noah’s children after the flood. Would they not have been something of this kind? "God does not love men. He has drowned all but us, and we are men of like passions with the world that perished; may we not expect the like ruin at any moment? Then what use to plough and sow, and build and plant, and work for those who shall come after us? Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die."
I. The covenant God made with Noah was intended to remedy every one of the temptations into which Noah’s children’s children would have been certain to fall, and into which so many of them did fall. They might have become reckless from fear of a flood at any moment. God promises them, and confirms it with the sign of the rainbow, never again to destroy the earth by water. They would have been likely to take to praying to the rain and thunder, the sun and the stars. God declares in this covenant that it is He alone who sends the rain and thunder, that He brings the clouds over the earth, that He rules the great awful world; that men are to look up and believe in God as a loving and thinking Person, who has a will of His own, and that a faithful and true and loving and merciful will; that their lives and safety depend not on blind chance or the stern necessity of certain laws of nature, but on the covenant of an almighty and all-loving Person.
II. This covenant tells us that we are made in God’s likeness, and therefore that all sin is unworthy of us and unnatural to us. It tells us that God means us bravely and industriously to subdue the earth and the living things upon it; that we are to be the masters of the pleasant things about us, and not their slaves, as sots and idlers are; that we are stewards or tenants of this world for the great God who made it, to whom we are to look up in confidence for help and protection.
C. Kingsley, Village Sermons, p. 82.
References: Gen 9:8-17.—R. S. Candlish, The Book of Genesis, vol 1., p. 151. Gen 9:11.—Bishop Armstrong, Parochial Sermons, p. 163. Gen 9:11-17.—J. Cumming, Church before the Flood p. 388.
Gen 9:12-15
I. Among the many deep truths which the early chapters of Genesis enforce, there is none which strikes the thoughtful inquirer more forcibly than the connection between the disorder occasioned by man’s sin and the remedy ordained by the wisdom and mercy of God. This connection may be traced in a very remarkable manner in the appointment of the rainbow as a sign and pledge of the covenant.
II. Not only is the rainbow, as an offspring equally of storm and sunshine, a fitting emblem of the covenant of grace; it is also a type of the equally distinctive peculiarity of Christ’s Gospel—that sorrow and suffering have their appointed sphere of exercise, both generally in the providential administration of the world and individually in the growth and development of personal holiness.
III. For the full comprehension of the bow we must turn to the New Testament. In the Person and work of the atoning Mediator we find the only solution of that marvellous combination of judgment and mercy which is the distinctive characteristic of the whole of the Divine economy.
IV. There is a necessary imperfection in all earthly types of heavenly things. In nature the continued appearance of the rainbow is dependent on the continued existence of the cloud. In heaven the rainbow will continue to point backward to man’s fall, onward to the perpetuity of a covenant which is ordered in all things and sure. But the work of judgment will then be accomplished, and therefore the cloud will have no more place in heaven.
E. B. Elliott, Contemporary Pulpit, vol. v., p. 151 (also Good Words, 1876, p. 341). Reference: Gen 9:12-16.—S. Leathes, Truth and Life, p. 27.
Gen 9:13
I. God sent a flood on the earth; God set the rainbow in the cloud for a token. The important thing is to know that the flood did not come of itself, that the rainbow did not come of itself, and therefore that no flood comes of itself, no rainbow comes of itself, but all comes straight and immediately from one living Lord God. The flood and the rainbow were sent for a moral purpose: to punish sinners; to preserve the righteous; to teach Noah and his children after him a moral lesson concerning righteousness and sin, concerning the wrath of God against sin,—concerning God, that He governs the world and all in it, and does not leave the world or mankind to go on of themselves and by themselves.
II. The flood and the rainbow tell us that it is God’s will to love, to bless, to make His creatures happy, if they will allow Him. They tell us that His anger is not a capricious, revengeful, proud, selfish anger, such as that of the heathen gods; but that it is an orderly anger, and therefore an anger which in its wrath can remember mercy. Out of God’s wrath shines love, as the rainbow out of the storm. If it repenteth Him that He hath made man, it is only because man is spoiling and ruining himself, and wasting the gifts of the good world by his wickedness. If God sends a flood to destroy all living things, He will show, by putting the rainbow in the cloud, that floods and destruction and anger are not His rule; that His rule is sunshine and peace and order.
III. The Bible account of the flood will teach us how to look at the many accidents which still happen upon the earth. These disasters do not come of themselves, do not come by accident or chance or blind necessity; God sends them, and they fulfil His will and word. He may send them in anger, but in His anger He remembers mercy, and His very wrath to some is part and parcel of His love to the rest. Therefore these disasters must be meant to do good, and will do good, to mankind.
C. Kingsley, The Gospel of the Pentateuch, p. 47.
I. Consider the record of the flood as a history: a history having a twofold aspect—an aspect of judgment, and an aspect of mercy. (1) "God," St. Peter says, "spared not the old world," He "brought in a flood upon the world of the ungodly." He who made can destroy. Long trifled with, God is not mocked; and he who will not have Him for his Father must at last know Him as his Judge. (2) The record of judgment passes on into a record of mercy. Mercy was shown: (a) in preservation; (b) in reconstruction.
II. Consider the flood in its uses: as a type, as a prophecy, and as a warning. (1) The water through which Noah and his family passed into their ark was like the water of holy baptism, through which a Christian, penitent and believing, finds his way into the Church of the living God. (2) St. Peter exhibits the flood to us also as a prophecy. The flood of waters becomes in its turn the prediction of a last flood of fire. He who foretold the one—and notwithstanding long delay the word was fulfilled—may be believed when He threatens the other; and no pause or respite can defeat the certainty of the performance. (3) There is one special warning appended by our Lord Jesus Christ Himself to the Scriptural record of the great deluge: "As the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be."
C. J. Vaughan, Christ the Light of the World, p. 133 (also Good Words, 1865, p. 520).
References: Gen 9:13.—Parker, vol. i., p. 168; C. Kingsley, National Sermons, p. 423; Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxvii., p. 97; Clergyman’s Magazine, vol. vii., p. 241.
Gen 9:14
How often after that terrible flood must Noah and his sons have felt anxious when a time of heavy rain set in, and the rivers Euphrates and Tigris rose over their banks and submerged the low level land! But if for a while their hearts misgave them, they had a cheering sign to reassure them, for in the heaviest purple storm-cloud stood the rainbow, recalling to their minds the promise of God.
I. If it be true that God’s rainbow stands as a pledge to the earth that it shall never again be overwhelmed, is it not also true that He has set His bow in every cloud that rises and troubles man’s mental sky? Beautiful prismatic colours in the rainbow that shines in every cloud—in the cloud of sorrow, in the cloud of spiritual famine, in the cloud of wrong-doing.
II. We are too apt in troubles to settle down into sullen despair, to look to the worst, instead of waiting for the bow. There are many strange-shaped clouds that rise above man’s horizon and make his heavens black with wind and rain. But each has its bow shining on it. Only wait, endure God’s time, and the sun will look out on the rolling masses of vapour, on the rain, and paint thereon its token of God’s love.
S. Baring-Gould, Village Preaching for a Year, vol. ii., p. 28.
References: Gen 9:14.—Spurgeon, Evening by Evening, p. 227. Gen 9:15.—Spurgeon, Evening by Evening, p. 228. 9:15-11:26.—J. Monro Gibson, The Ages before Moses, p. 138. Gen 9:16.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. ix., p. 517; Christian World Pulpit, vol. iv., p. 132. Gen 9:17.—J. A. Sellar, Church Doctrine and Practice, p. 297; H. Thompson, Concionalia—Sermons for Parochial Use, vol. i., p. 85. Gen 9:18-29.—R. S. Candlish, Book of Genesis, vol. i., p. 157. Gen 9:24-27.—J. Cumming, Church before the Flood, p. 412.
The Sermon Bible, ed. William Robertson Nicoll (1888–1900) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Alexander MacLaren 1905 · Public Domain On v8 Gen 9:8 - Gen 9:17.
Genesis
THE SIGN FOR MAN AND THE REMEMBRANCER FOR GOD
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Gen 9:8 - Gen 9:17.
The previous verses of this chapter lay down the outlines of the new order which followed the flood. The blessing and the command to be fruitful are repeated. The dominion over animals is confirmed, but enlarged by the permission to use them as food, and by the laying on them of ‘the terror of you and the dread of you.’ The sanctity of human life is laid down with great emphasis. Violence and bloodshed had brought about the flood. The appalling destruction effected by it might lead to the mistaken notion that God held man’s life cheap. Therefore the cornerstone of future society is laid in that declaration that life is inviolable. These blessings and commands are followed by this remarkable section, which deals with God’s covenant with Noah, and its token in the rainbow.
1. The covenant is stated, and the parties concerned in it enumerated in Gen 9:3 - Gen 9:11. When Noah came forth from the ark, after the stupendous act of divine justice, he must have felt that the first thing he needed was some assurance as to the footing on which he and the new world round him stood with God. The flood had swept away the old order. It had revealed terrible possibilities of destruction in nature, and terrible possibilities of wrath in God. Was any knowledge of His intentions and ways possible? Could continuance of the new order be counted on? The answer to such questions was-God’s covenant. Now, as then, when any great convulsions shake what seems permanent, and bring home to men the thinness of the crust of use and wont roofing an infinite depth of unknown possibilities of change, on which we walk, the heart cries out for some assurance of perpetuity, and some revelation of God’s mind. We can have such, as truly as Noah had, if we use the Revelation given us in Jesus.
In God’s covenant with Noah, the fact of the covenant may first be noted. What is a covenant? The term usually implies a reciprocal bond, both parties to which come under obligations by it, each to the other. But, in this case, there are no obligations on the part of man or of the creatures. This covenant is God’s only. It is contingent on nothing done by the recipients. He binds Himself, whatever be the conduct of men. This covenant is the self-motived promise of an unconditional mercy. May we not say that the ‘New Covenant’ in Jesus Christ is after the pattern of this, rather than after the manner of compacts which require both parties to do their several parts?
But note the great thought, that God limits His freedom of action by this definite promise. Noah was not left to grope in dread among the terrible possibilities opened by the flood. God marked out the line on which He would move, and marked off a course which He would not pursue. It is like a king giving his subjects a constitution. Men can reckon on God. He has let them know much of the principles and methods of His government. He has buoyed out His course, as it were, on the ocean, or pricked it down upon a chart. We have not to do with arbitrary power, with inscrutable will. Our God is not one who ‘giveth no account of any of His matters.’ To use a common saying, ‘We know where to have Him.’
The substance of this covenant is noteworthy. It is concerned solely with physical nature. There is nothing spiritual or ‘religious’ about it. There are to be no more universal deluges. That is all which it guarantees. But consider how important such an assurance was in two aspects. Note the solemn light which it threw on the past. It taught that the flood was an exception in the divine government, which should stand unrepeated for ever, in its dread pre-eminence testifying how awful it was as a judicial act, and how outrageous had been the guilt which it drowned out of existence and sight. A wholesome terror at the unexampled act of judgment would fill the hearts of the little group which now represented mankind.
Consider the effect of the covenant in encouraging hope. We have said that the one thing needful for Noah was some assurance that the new order would last. He was like a man who has just been rescued from an earthquake or a volcanic eruption. The ground seems to reel beneath him. Old habitudes have been curled up like leaves in the fire. Is there to be any fixity, any ground for continuous action, or for labour for a moment beyond the present? Is it worth while to plant or sow? Men who have lived through national tempests or domestic crashes know how much they need to be steadied afterwards by some reasonable assurance of comparative continuity. And these men, in the childhood of the race, would need it much. So they were sent out to till the earth, and to begin again strenuous lives, with this covenant to keep them from falling into a hand-to-mouth style of life, which would have brought them down to barbarism. We all need the same kind of assurance; and then, when we get it, such is the weakness of humanity, we are tempted to think that continuity means eternity, and that, because probably to-morrow shall be as this day, there will never come a to-morrow which shall be quite unlike to-day. The crust of cooled earth, on which we walk, is thick enough to bear man and all his works, but there comes a time when it will crack. The world will not be flooded again, but we forget, what Noah did not know, that it will be burned.
The parties to the covenant must be noticed. Note how frequently the share in it, which all living creatures have, is referred to in the context. In Gen 9:10 the language becomes strained {in the original}, in order to express the universal participation of all living creatures; and in Gen 9:13 ‘the earth’ itself is spoken of as one party. God recognises obligations to all living things, and even to the dumb, non-sentient earth. He will not causelessly quench one bright, innocent life, nor harm one clod. Surely this is, at least, an incipient revelation of a God whose ‘tender mercies are over all his works.’ He ‘doth take care for oxen’; and man, with all the creatures that are with him, and all the wild ones that ‘come not near’ him, and all the solid structure of the world, are held in one covenant of protecting and sustaining providence and power.
2. The sign of the covenant is described at great length in Gen 9:12 - Gen 9:17. Note that Gen 9:12 - Gen 9:13 state the general idea of a token or sign, that Gen 9:14 - Gen 9:16 deepen this by stating that the token to man is a reminder to God, and that Gen 9:17 sums up the whole with emphatic repetition of the main points. The narrative does not imply, as has often been supposed, that the rainbow was visible for the first time after the deluge. To suppose that, is to read more into the story than is there, or than common sense tolerates. If there were showers and sunshine, there must have been rainbows. But the fair vision strode across the sky with no articulate promise in its loveliness, though it must always have kindled wonder, and sometimes stirred deeper thoughts. Now, for the first time, it was made ‘a sign,’ the visible pledge of God’s promise.
Mark the emphasis with which God’s agency is declared and His ownership asserted. ‘I do set My bow.’ Neither Noah nor the writer knew anything about refraction or the prismatic spectrum. But perhaps they knew more about the rainbow than people do who know all about how it comes, except that God sets it in the cloud, and that it is His. Let us have the facts which science labels as such, by all means, and the more the better; but do not let us forget that there are other facts in nature which science has no means of attaining, but which are as solid and a great deal deeper than those which it supplies.
The natural adaptation of the rainbow for this office of a token is too plain to need dwelling on. It ‘fills the sky when storms prepare to part,’ and hence is a natural token that the downpour is being stayed. Somewhere there must be a bit of blue through which the sun can pierce; and the small gap, which is large enough to let it out, will grow till all the sky is one azure dome. It springs into sight in front of the cloud, without which it could not be, so it typifies the light which may glorify judgments, and is born of sorrows borne in the presence of God. It comes from the sunshine smiting the cloud; so it preaches the blending of love with divine judgment. It unites earth and heaven; so it proclaims that heavenly love is ready to transform earthly sorrows. It stretches across the land; so it speaks of an all-embracing care, which enfolds the earth and all its creatures.
It is not only a ‘sign to men.’ It is also, in the strong anthropomorphism of the narrative, a remembrancer to God. Of course this is accommodation of the representation of His nature to the limitations of ours. And the danger of attaching unworthy ideas to it is lessened by noticing that He is said to set His bow in the cloud, before it acts as His remembrancer. Therefore, He had remembered before it appeared. The truth, conveyed in the childlike language, is that God has His covenant ever before Him, and that He responds to and honours the appeal made to Him, by that which He has Himself appointed for a sign to men. The expectant eyes of the trustful man and the eye of God meet, as it were, in looking on the sign. On earth it nourishes faith; in heaven it moves to love and blessing. God can be reminded of what He always remembers. The rainbow reminds Him of His covenant by its calm light. Jesus Christ reminds Him of His grace by His intercession before the throne. We remind Him of His plighted faithfulness by our prayers. ‘Ye that are the Lord’s remembrancers, keep not silence.’
Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture (1904–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
J. R. Dummelow 1909 · Public Domain On v1 The Divine Blessing and Covenant. Noah and the Vine.…
The Divine Blessing and Covenant. Noah and the Vine. The Curse of Canaan
1-7. The primeval benediction of man (Gen_1:28) is now repeated and enlarged. Animal food is allowed (cp. Gen_1:29), but blood is forbidden. The blood makes the life manifest, as it were, to our senses, and the life belongs to God, and must, therefore, be offered to Him.
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5, 6. The ground of the sacredness of human life here is the existence of the divine image in man. It is not conceived as being wholly destroyed by sin.
9. My covenant] This word occurs some two hundred times in the OT., and the idea lies at the root of the whole conception of law among the Jews. Covenants, as made between men, form the beginnings of civilised government: cp. Gen_26:26; Gen_31:44, etc. The word is also used of the relation of God to man; of His justice, His unchangeable nature, and His protecting power, on the one side, and the corresponding duties devolving upon man, especially as embodied in the law of Moses, on the other. A series of covenants (with Abraham and his successors, with Israel in the wilderness, with David) runs through OT history. The particular idea in the covenant with Noah is that of the uniform working of God in Nature (cp. Gen_8:22), and of His loving care for His creation. On these two ideas are based all physical science, which could not exist if there were no laws of nature, and all religion, which otherwise would become mere superstitious dread of unseen powers. Jeremiah (Jer_31:31-34) speaks of a new covenant which is to take the place of the covenant of the exodus. The New Testament claims that this new covenant has been introduced by Christ (Luk_22:20; 1Co_11:25; 2Co_3:6; Hebrews 8). Hence the two divisions of the Scriptures are properly not 'Testaments' but 'Covenants.'
13-17. We are not to understand that the bow was now first created. From the beginning a rainbow would be formed, whenever the sunshine and the rain met together. But it was now designated to be the token of God's gracious promise, and its use for this purpose is in harmony with the feelings which it naturally excites. The rain-storm is on us, but the sun is in the skies: the dark background brings out the glorious arc of colour. Man need not yield wholly to depression, for he knows that the clouds will pass. Hindoo mythology calls the rainbow Indra's war-bow, laid aside by him after he had vanquished the demons. Scandinavian legend speaks of it as a bridge built by the gods to join heaven and earth. It is also alluded to in the Babylonian narrative of the Flood.
18-27. Noah and the Vine. The curse of Canaan.
The purpose of the passage is (1) to explain by a story the origin of the cultivation of the vine, and (2) to set forth the moral and religious position of Israel among the other nations of the world. On the ground of the mention of Canaan instead of Ham in Gen_9:25, Gen_9:27, it has been suggested, with some probability, that in the Primitive document the sons of Noah were originally Shem, Japheth and Canaan, and that the explanations in Gen_9:18, Gen_9:22 (Ham the father of Canaan) were introduced to harmonise the story with the Priestly document, which speaks of Shem, Ham and Japheth.
18, 19. These vv. are a link, inserted to connect the incident with the account of the Flood.
20. Noah is represented as the first cultivator of the vine.
21. Noah's intoxication was not due to deliberate excess, but was his practical discovery of the properties of wine. The story therefore contains nothing inconsistent with the character already ascribed to him.
25. Canaan represents the nations of Palestine subdued by Israel. The justification of the conquest lay in the impure character of their worship, which was foreshadowed in the immodest conduct of their ancestor.
26. The Lord God of Shem] RV 'the Lord (Jehovah), the God of Shem.' Shem was the ancestor of Israel, and these words assert Israel's unique position and calling, as the chosen people of the true God. Canaan shall be] RV 'let Canaan be': so in Gen_9:27.
27. God shall enlarge] RV 'God enlarge Japheth.' Japheth represents the remaining peoples of the world. They have a share in God's favour, even though they do not know Him in His true character as Jehovah. He shall dwell] RV 'let him dwell,' in friendly alliance. We may see in the words a forecast of the days when the descendants of Japheth should come to worship the Lord God of Shem: cp. Isa_60:3, Isa_60:5.
J. R. Dummelow, A Commentary on the Holy Bible (Macmillan, 1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
C. I. Scofield 1917 · Public Domain On vv1, 8, 13, 25 and said unto them
and said unto them
The Noahic Covenant. The elements are:
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(1) The relation of man to the earth under the Adamic Covenant is confirmed (See Scofield "Gen 8:21")
(2) The order of nature is confirmed (Gen 8:22)
(3) Human government is established (Gen 9:1-6)
(4) Earth is secured against another universal judgment by water Gen 8:21; Gen 9:11
(5) A prophetic declaration is made that from Ham will descend an inferior and servile posterity Gen 9:24; Gen 9:25.
(6) A prophetic declaration is made that Shem will have a peculiar relation to Jehovah Gen 9:26; Gen 9:27. All divine revelation is through Semitic men, and Christ, after the flesh, descends from Shem.
(7) A prophetic declaration is made that from Japheth will descend the "enlarged" races Gen 9:27. Government, science, and art, speaking broadly, are and have been Japhetic, so that history is the indisputable record of the exact fulfilment of these declarations. (See Scofield "Gen 8:21") for the other seven covenants:
EDENIC Gen 1:28 ADAMIC Gen 3:15 ABRAHAMIC Gen 15:18 MOSAIC Exo 19:25 PALESTINIAN Deu 30:3 DAVIDIC 2Sa 7:16 NEW Heb 8:8
The Scofield Reference Bible (1917 edition), notes by C. I. Scofield — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Arno C. Gaebelein 1922 · Public Domain On v1 The Earth Replenished
CHAPTER 9
The Earth Replenished
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1. The divine commission (Gen 9:1-7)
2. The covenant with Noah (Gen 9:8-11)
3. The token of the covenant (Gen 9:12-17)
4. The family of Noah (Gen 9:18-19)
5. Noah’s drunkenness (Gen 9:20-24)
6. Noah’s prophecy (Gen 9:25-27)
7. Noah’s death (Gen 9:28-29)
A new start is made after the judgment by water and Noah is blessed by God. Like Adam and Eve they are commissioned to fill the earth, but nothing is said of having dominion over the earth.
In Gen 1:29 we read that man was to eat the green herb and the fruit of the trees, but now there is permission given to eat every moving thing that liveth. It seems clear that before the deluge meat was not eaten. There are not a few advocates of total abstinence from meat in our day. The adherents of delusions like theosophy and others tell us that a vegetable diet will ennoble man, deliver him from the lust of the flesh, make him pure and good and fit to approach God. With all the abstinence from meat before the deluge the people were not better, but ended in the flesh and perished in it. In 1 Tim. 4 we read of those who live in the latter times and depart from the faith, and among the characteristics given is the following: “Forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats which God has created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth. For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving.”
And why is the blood made so prominent? Four times we read the word “blood” in Gen 9:4-6. The book of Leviticus gives the answer. “For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you upon the altar, to make an atonement for your souls; for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul” (Lev 17:11). The sanctity of the blood is here shown forth. Even the hunter in Israel had to keep it in view. “And whatsoever man there be of the children of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among you which hunteth, or catcheth any beast or fowl that may be eaten; he shall even pour out the blood thereof, and cover it with dust. For it is the life of all flesh; the blood of it is for the life thereof, therefore I said to the children of Israel, Ye shall eat the blood of no manner of flesh; for the life of all flesh is the blood thereof, whosoever eateth it shall be cut off” (Lev 17:13-14). So the hunter had to stop, and pour out the blood. All points to the blood of the Lamb.
God established His covenant with Noah and his seed and put the token of the covenant in the clouds. The rainbow speaks of a passed judgment of His salvation and remembrance. Another universal judgment by water will never come again (Gen 9:15). Another judgment is in store for this planet. “The world that was then, being overflowed with water, perished; but the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men” (2Pe 3:6-7).
Interesting is Noah’s prophecy after his drunkenness.
Ham (black) is not mentioned in the curse, but the son of Ham, Canaan (the merchantman). Ham’s deed revealed the unbelieving condition of his heart, while Shem’s and Japheth’s action manifest divine grace in covering up the nakedness. God’s eye beheld Canaan and his subsequent career in his descendants. He inherits the curse. How literally it was carried out! Shem, meaning “name,” becomes the family in which Jehovah, the Name, is to be revealed. Jehovah is the God of Shem. Soon we shall see a son of Shem, Abram, and his seed becoming the depository of Jehovah’s revelation. Later Jehovah speaks and reveals His name by which He wishes to be known forever to another son of Shem, Moses. “Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, Jehovah, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob hath sent me unto you; this is my name forever, and this is my memorial unto all generations” (Exo 3:15). He does not call Himself “the God of Japheth” but “the God of Shem.” Shem’s supremacy is here indicated. It is a far-reaching prophecy.
Japheth means “expansion.” His sons are Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshech, Tiras, and the sons of Gomer and Javan are mentioned in the next chapter. They expanded and Japheth dwells in the tents of Shem, partakes of Shem’s blessing and responsibility. Some take “He shall dwell in the tents of Shem,” the “he” as referring to God, but this is incorrect. It means Japheth and reminds us of the parable of the olive tree in Romans 11.
Shem’s blessing consisted (1) In being the carrier of the Name, Jehovah. (2) In controlling Canaan and being the master over him. (3) The giving shelter to Japheth and let him be sharer of the blessing. It is the germ of all following prophecy and we wait still for its end fulfillment.
Arno C. Gaebelein, The Annotated Bible (1913–1922) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Paul E. Kretzmann 1924 · Public Domain On vv1, 8, 18, 24 God blesses Noah and His Sons
God blesses Noah and His Sons
v. 1. And God blessed Noah and his sons and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. This is a repetition and a confirmation of the blessing of creation, Gen 1:28. As founders of the new human race, Noah and his sons received the assurance of God’s blessing for the propagation of their kind. Note that the blessing of the Lord is incidentally a command; it is His will that the human race should be propagated, that man and woman, in holy wedlock, should be fruitful and multiply. The modern criminal limiting of offspring is a blasphemous perversion of God’s order of creation.
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v. 2. And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered. This is an extension and a confirmation of the order of God by which man was given dominion over the animals. Before the Fall all creatures willingly placed themselves under the direction of man, as the lord of creation. But now the fear of man and the dread of man was to keep the animals and the birds and the fishes in check, because sin with its consequences has dissolved the bonds of willing subjection, man having lost his natural power over nature, and nature, in turn, being constantly on the verge of rebellion against man. God gave them under the hand of man, but man is constantly obliged to resort to force to maintain his superiority.
v. 3. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things. In the early days of the human race God had restricted man to a vegetarian diet, Gen 1:29, but now everything that lived and moved, all animals, were included in the food which was at man’s disposal. Thus was the eating of flesh formally legalized and, at the same time, commended.
v. 4. But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat. Although the eating of flesh was permitted, yet a restriction is added to the concession, namely, that excluding flesh as food while the living blood was still coursing through the veins, whether this referred to pieces cut out of the living animal or to the eating of blood. This provision was added to prevent man’s degeneration to coarse and brutal barbarism, or even savagery.
v. 5. And surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man’s brother will I require the life of man.
v. 6. Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God made He man. While the blood and the life of animals is in the power of man, he is strictly forbidden to shed that of his fellow-man. The blood of every person with reference to his soul (since the life is in the blood) the Lord will require at the hands of man and of every beast. Thus the life of man is here safeguarded against beasts as well as against fellow-men. The killing of every human being will be punished by the Lord, but not directly or immediately, as He had promised in the case of Cain. He that sheds man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed. The punishment of murder is laid into the hands of the government, which shall punish the murderer by requiring his life in exchange for that which he took. This is, as Luther remarks, the first command regarding the authority of the government in the wielding of the sword. In these words the temporal government is authorized, and the authority from God to use the sword is conferred. For in the image of God made He man: murder is a violation of the image of God in man, which the Lord intends to restore in all those that are renewed in faith, and which He wants all men to put on. In a wider sense, therefore, man bears even now the image of God, since he is a rational creature and has an immortal soul.
v. 7. And you, be ye fruitful and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein. Cf v. 1; Gen 1:28. The emphatic repetition is not without significance, especially in view of the situation as it now exists.
Paul E. Kretzmann, Popular Commentary of the Bible (1921–1924) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
unfoldingWord translationNotes 2017 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv1, 3, 5, 8, 11, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28 Be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth
Be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth
This is God's blessing. He told Noah and his family to produce more humans like themselves, so that there would be many of them. The word "multiply" explains how they are to be "fruitful." See how you translated these commands in Genesis 1:28. (See: Doublet and Idiom)
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The fear of you and the dread of you will be upon every living animal ... and upon all the fish of the sea
The writer speaks of fear and dread as if they were physical objects that could be upon the animals. AT: "Every living animal ... and all the fish of the sea will be dreadfully afraid of you" (See: Metaphor)
The fear of you and the dread of you
The words "fear" and "dread" mean basically the same thing and emphasize how afraid the animals will be of mankind. AT: "A dreadful fear of you" or "A terrible fear of you" (See: Doublet)
every living animal on the earth
This is the first of the four categories of animals that the writer lists, and not a summary of the rest of the animals that he mentions next.
bird
This is a general term for things that fly. See how you translated this in Genesis 1:21.
upon everything that goes low on the ground
This includes all types of small animals. See how you translated this in Genesis 1:25.
They are given into your hand
The hand represents control. This can be made active. AT: "They are given into your control" or "I have put them under your control" (See: Metonymy and Active or Passive)
translationWords
God
bless
Noah
fear
hand
unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.
Tyndale Open Study Notes 2022 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 18, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27 9:1-7 God’s first post-flood speech opens and closes with…
9:1-7 God’s first post-flood speech opens and closes with blessing (9:1, 7). In it, human and animal relationships are again defined, with some modification of the original created order. The sanctity of life is given special focus.
9:1 Be fruitful and multiply: The blessing and mandate first given to Adam (1:28) are now reissued to Noah, the “Adam” of the newly cleansed world in need of repopulation.
Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.