Genesis 9 - The Noahic Covenant and Here We Go Again

The first thing that Noah did when he departed from the ark was to build an altar and offer 1 (pair?) of every clean animal and bird, which Noah had previously took 7 pairs into the ark, as a burnt offering to God. 

The Noahic Covenant 

Genesis 8:21 to 9:17 is the Noahic Covenant.  The content are as follows:

(a) Recipient: Noah, his descendants (that includes you and me), and all living creatures.

(b) The Promise: all flesh shall never again be cut off by the water of the flood, neither shall there again be a flood to destroy the earth. 

(c) Our Obligation: This is an unconditional covenant, that is, we need not do anything for this particular covenant to be in effect.

(d) The Sign: bow in the cloud (rainbow).

(e) Other Instructions:

- Human beings are to populate the earth.  In fact, this instruction was repeated in verses 1 (Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth) and 7 (be fruitful and multiply; Populate the earth abundantly and multiply in it), emphasising God's seriousness.  Of course, humankind, for some reasons not revealed, decided not to obey this command which we will see in Chapter 11. 

- On top of the green plants, every moving thing that is alive shall be food for you.  Human beings would be omnivorous.  Because of this, God instilled the fear and terror of human beings into the all living creatures because God has also given human beinge dominion over all the living creatures.  This also demonstrated God's grace towards the animals.  The only restriction to this diet is that they are not to "eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood".  This can be interpreted as not eating [drinking] blood (which became an occultic practice later] or flesh which is not drained of its blood. 

-  Capital punishment was mandated for murder in verse 6 - Whoever sheds man's blood, by man his blood shall be shed.  Man was mandated to implement capital punishment on those who kill.  The reason being "for in the image of God He made man".  Since man was made in the image of God, killing a human being is an affront to destroying God's image.  There is no indication here that this was to have any deterrence purpose.  It was simply God's punishment to be executed by humankind for those who kill.

Things to Note

(1) In Gen 8:21-22, God promised not to destroy the earth and all living things as he had done [via water].  While comforting, those of us familiar with the Bible will know that God will ultimately judge the earth with fire.

(2) The sign that God gave for this covenant, the bow or rainbow, points to the fact that the rainbow did not happened pre-flood, else why would it be so special that God gave it as a sign if it was already observed in the pre-flood era.  This also alluded to the idea that the canopy theory can be plausible.  The canopy theory is the idea that the atmosphere, pre-flood era, contained high concentration of water vapour.  This was also the hypothesis why people during that era could live such long lives.  Sure there are good scientific reasons why the atmosphere could not have contained so much water vapour but we should not limit what God is able to do.

The Strange Incident

Gen 9:20-29 narrated a strange incident.  You would think that with the flood, Noah and his sons would experience intimately God's presence and know what needs to be done.  Unfortunately, for some unknown reason(s), Noah decided to plant a vineyard, gather the grapes, made the wine and got himself drunk.  The only saving grace was that he did not publicly embarrased himself but became naked inside his tent.  

His son Ham saw the nakedness of his father and told his 2 brothers.  This demonstrated 2 points: (a) It seems that the only way that Ham could see his father's nakedness was that he went into Noah's tent, which he shouldn't have done and (b) to compound this, instead of covering Noah, he decided to go and tell his brothers about it.  While the Bible did not say why, we can speculate that Ham wanted his brothers to see their father's shame.

To the credit of Shem and Japheth, they did not gloat over their father's plight but covered Noah's nakedness in a ver deliberate manner (But Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it upon both their shoulders and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were turned away, so that they did not see their father's nakedness.).  When Noah woke up, he pronounced the future states of his 3 sons.

Ham: Critics have criticised Noah's curse on Ham through his 4th son Canaan.  Their contention is why should Ham's son be punished for Ham's wrongdoing.  Some Bible commentators tried to justify this by pointing to Bible references (Exo 20:5, 34:6-7, Num 14:18 and Deut 5:9) that say that God punished the sins of a person down to the 3rd and 4th generations.  My view is that this is unnecessary for several reasons: 

(a) In Deut 5:10, God also said that He would show "lovingkindness to thousands [generations], to those who love Me and keep My commandments" (similarly in Exo 34:6-7).  This means that Canaan was also responsible for his own destiny which of course turned out to be bad.  In fact, the indictment of God against Canaan speaks for itself in Deut 12:29-31:

When the LORD your God cuts off before you the [Canaanite] nations which you are going in to dispossess, and you dispossess them and dwell in their land, beware that you are not ensnared to follow them, after they are destroyed before you, and that you do not inquire after their gods, saying, 'How do these [Canaanite] nations serve their gods, that I also may do likewise?'  You shall not behave thus toward the LORD your God, for every abominable act which the LORD hates they have done for their gods; for they even burn their sons and daughters in the fire to their gods.

(b) If God's punishment of Ham to the 3rd and 4th generations was true, then it should have also affected Ham's three other sons - Cush, Mizraim and Put who were the ancestors of what became the north African nations and Egypt.  As far as we know, these other sons (and nations) of Ham did not suffered God's judgment for Ham's transgression. 

(c) it could be God's [Moses'] way of explaining the state of affairs of the Canaanite nations during his time as exemplified in Deut 12:29-31 above.  

In any case, Noah prophesised that Ham's son Canaan would become the lowliest of servants (servant of servants) to both his uncles', Shem and Japheth, descendants. 

Shem: Noah's blessing on Shem could be missed if one reads too quickly.  It is interesting that Noah did not bless Shem but blessed Yahweh, the God of Shem.  From this blessing, the descendants of Shem would uniquely possess the knowledge of God through which God's redemptive plan would be fulfilled.  Canaan would become the slaves of the Shemites as detailed in Genesis 14:1-4 and 1 Kings 9:20-21.  

Japheth: Japheth would have the largest numbers of descendants (May God enlarge Japheth) and would ultimately include the inhabitants of Asia and Europe (this will be discussed in the next chapter).  Noah also mentioned that Japheth will "dwell in the tents of Shem".  The Hebrew word for "dwell" is שׁכן (shakan), which also can mean tabernacle.  It could mean that the descendants of Japheth would adopt the cultural and religious practices of the Shemites.  Again, Canaan was to become the slaves of the descendants of Japheth as well as seen in the later fulfilment when the Phoenicians became the slaves to Greeks and Romans.

Ham's Curse as Justification for Slavery?

During the European and American slavery periods, people have attempted to use Ham's (or more correctly, Canaan's) curse to justify slavery.  They deliberately mis-translated the name Ham to mean "black" through its Egyptian word origin and sought to justify enslavement of the Africans.  This is totally bizzare as not all descendants of Ham were black-skinned as can be seen from the Canaanites and Egyptians.  There is no room to use the Bible to justify the enslavement of any races.

Death of Noah

Chapter 9 ends with the death of Noah who died at the age of 950 years old.  He would be the last of the patriarchs that lived to such a long age.

Genesis 7 and 8 - The Flood

Based on Chapter 7 and 8 of Genesis, I have summarised the timeline and the critical activities in the following chart (adapted from Matthew Kneisler at www.arksearch.com):

In total, Noah, his family and the animals spent a total of 378 days in the ark.

The Flood: Universal or Local? 

There are protracted debates over the question whether the flood that occurred during Noah's time was local or universal.  Unlike the identity of the Sons of God in Chapter 6 where it is not critical on the view one holds, the Bible here clearly, in my view, showed that the flood was universal.  There are many reasons for holding this view.

If the flood was local, there will be no need for God to gather all the animals to the ark nor for Noah to build the ark in the first place.  He could have moved Noah, his family and the animals to another place where the flood did not impact.  Afterall, they had 120 years to do just that.  

If the flood was local, in the same vein, the rest of the people could have moved further away from the local flood area by foot or by some form of flotation devices.  Surely, some could have survived the flood if it was local.

The language in chapter 7 and 8 also make a local flood a little hard to grapple with.  The Bible mentioned the following:

The water prevailed more and more upon the earth, so that all the high mountains everywhere under the heavens were covered. [Gen 7:19]

The water prevailed fifteen cubits higher, and the mountains were covered. [Gen 7:20]

The water prevailed upon the earth one hundred and fifty days. [Gen 7:24]

and the water receded steadily from the earth, and at the end of one hundred and fifty days the water decreased. [Gen 8:3]

The water decreased steadily until the tenth month; in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains became visible. [Gen 8:5]

People who argue against a universal flood do so for "scientific" reasons (you can see Hugh Ross' arguments here).  It's interesting that some of them defer to the scientific "evidences" against a local flood and yet in the same breath, reject the scientific "evidences" for evolution.

To me, the strongest evidence for a universal flood is the promise made to Noah by God at the end of the flood in Gen 8:21-22

and the LORD said to Himself, "I will never again curse the ground on account of man, for the intent of man's heart is evil from his youth; and I will never again destroy every living thing, as I have done.  While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease."      

If it was a local flood, then God has not kept His promise as there were records of deadly local floods since then.  Some try to circumvent this by saying that unlike the Noah's flood which destroyed every living thing, the subsequent local floods did not.  My rebuttal is that why do these people insist on reading the term "every living thing" in Gen 8:22 literally but not the "all the high mountains everywhere under the heavens were covered" statement in Gen 7:19.  You can't have it both ways in a single narrative. 

Here are other interesting points from Chapter 7 and 8:

(1) In Genesis 7:2-3, an elaboration of the gathering of the animals was revealed.  Besides the gathering of one pair (male and female) of the animals, God instructed Noah to further gathering 7 pairs of clean animals.  The Bible did not explain the purpose but we do know that one pair of each of the clean animals were offered as burnt offering to God after the flood (Genesis 8:20).  The interesting thing to note here is that before the Mosaic Law, it was apparent that people during Noah's time did know the categorisation of clean and unclean animals.  This bolster the view that Cain and Abel did know what was expected of them in terms of the sacrifices that was demanded by God.

(2) The flood was caused from 2 sources: (a) all the fountains of the great deep burst open and (b) the floodgates of the sky were opened, both on the same day.  The rain fell upon the earth for forty days and forty nights and while it is not mentioned in the Bible, it is most probable that the fountains of the great deep also continued to pour forth water for the same duration as the Bible mentioned in Gen 8:2 that the same fountains of the deep were closed only at the end of the flood. 

(3) Recall a previous post discussing the role Methuselah, Noah's grandfather, played in the timeline of the flood.  Based on the genealogy in Genesis 5, Methuselah died in the year the flood came upon the earth.  His name ([his] death, shall bring) was actually a prophetic message and some have speculated that his death actually triggered the rain (Gen 7:6) and Noah was graciously given an additional 7 days (Gen 7:10) to mourn the death of Methuselah.  Just an interesting bit for you to chew on...

(4) Given such a catacylsmic event, it would be seared in the memories of the Noah and his family, and that this event would have been passed down to the subsequent generations.  And indeed they were.  However, people assumed that later accounts copied from the earlier accounts, that the Genesis account of the flood was copied from the earlier Babylonian myth in the Epic of Gilgamesh.  It is interesting that even in wikipedia, the contributors chose to record this one act of "plagarism" to only the Genesis account and not the more than 20 flood accounts there.

(5) If we assume that accounts get more embellished the later they are recorded, then the Genesis account would get the right to be the oldest account.  There was no embellishment in the Genesis account, the detailed dimensions of the ark was recorded and shown to make sense from the stability point of view, and the time intervals between each significant flood event were also "painstakingly" recorded.  This is in stark contrast to others as you can read from the wikipedia reference.

(6) Genesis 8:1 records yet another expression of anthropomorphism where the Bible seems to hint that God has forgotten about Noah.  It is interesting to note that this particular verse seldom gets pick on.

(7) The receding of the flood waters seem to have occurred naturally.  The water also apparently did not "return" to the fountains of the deep since the Bible only recorded that God closed them (Gen 8:2).  So where did all the water went?  Based on the timeline above, the waters would have had 331 days to evaporate and at the same time, the weight of all these waters would have drastically change the topology of the earth somewhat, with new valleys and mountains being created by the force of the waters.  This 331 days would seem to be unnecessary if it was only a local flood.

(8) Noah's method of checking whether the water has receded and the choice of birds used are intriguing.  It also help draw out the important lesson that humans need to play their part in the overall plan of God.  Noah obviously did not sit in the ark waiting for God to tell him that the water had receded.  He took the responsibility and the active role to find that out for himself.  Once Noah had done his part, God stepped in immediately to instruct him what needed to be done.

I will talk about Genesis 8:15-22 together with the next chapter to explain the 2nd covenant found in the Bible - The Noahic Covenant.