1And God blessed Noah and his sons and He said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. 2And the dread and fear of you shall be upon all the beasts of the field and all the fowl of the heavens, in all that crawls on the ground and in all the fish of the sea. In your hand they are given. 3All stirring things that are alive, yours shall be for food, like the green plants, I have given all to you. 4But flesh with its lifeblood still in it you shall not eat. 5And just so, your lifeblood I will requite, from every beast I will requite it, and from humankind, from every man’s brother, I will requite human life.
6He who sheds human blood
by humans his blood shall be shed,
for in the image of God
He made humankind.
7As for you, be fruitful and multiply,
swarm through the earth, and hold sway over it.”
8And God said to Noah and to his sons with him,9 “And I, I am about to establish My covenant with you and with your seed after you, 10and with every living creature that is with you, the fowl and the cattle and every beast of the earth with you, all that have come out of the ark, every beast of the earth. 11And I will establish My covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of the Flood, and never again shall there be a Flood to destroy the earth.” 12And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I set between Me and you and every living creature that is with you, for everlasting generations: 13My bow I have set in the clouds to be a sign of the covenant between Me and the earth, 14and so, when I send clouds over the earth, the bow will appear in the cloud. 15Then I will remember My covenant, between Me and you and every living creature of all flesh, and the waters will no more become a Flood to destroy all flesh. 16And the bow shall be in the cloud and I will see it, to remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures, all flesh that is on the earth.” 17And God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant I have established between Me and all flesh that is on the earth.”
18And the sons of Noah who came out from the ark were Shem and Ham and Japheth, and Ham was the father of Canaan. 19These three were the sons of Noah, and from these the whole earth spread out. 20And Noah, a man of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard. 21And he drank of the wine and became drunk, and exposed himself within his tent. 22And Ham the father of Canaan saw his father’s nakedness and told his two brothers outside. 23And Shem and Japheth took a cloak and put it over both their shoulders and walked backward and covered their father’s nakedness, their faces turned backward so they did not see their father’s nakedness. 24And Noah woke from his wine and he knew what his youngest son had done to him. 25And he said,
“Cursed be Canaan,
the lowliest slave shall he be
to his brothers.”
26And he said,
“Blessed be the LORD
the God of Shem,
unto them shall Canaan be slave.
27May God enlarge Japheth,
may he dwell in the tents of Shem,
unto them shall Canaan be slave.”
28And Noah lived after the Flood three hundred and fifty years. 29And all the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years. Then he died.
CHAPTER 9 NOTES
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1–7. God’s first postdiluvian speech to Noah affirms man’s solidarity with the rest of the animal kingdom—the covenant He goes on to spell out is, emphatically, with all flesh, not just with humankind—but also modifies the arrangement stipulated in the Creation story. Vegetarian man of the Garden is now allowed a carnivore’s diet (this might conceivably be intended as an outlet for his violent impulses), and in consonance with that change, man does not merely rule over the animal kingdom but inspires it with fear.
6. He who sheds human blood / by humans his blood shall be shed. “By humans” might alternately mean “on account of the human.” In either case, a system of retributive justice is suggested. As many analysts of the Hebrew have noted, there is an emphatic play on dam, “blood,” and ʾadam, “human,” and the chiastic word order of the Hebrew formally mirrors the idea of measure for measure: shofekh/spills (a), dam/blood (b), haʾadam/of the human (c), ba’adam/by the human (c'), damo/his blood (b'), yishafekh/will be spilled (a'). Perhaps the ban on bloodshed at this point suggests that murder was the endemic vice of the antediluvians.
7. hold sway. The translation here follows some versions of the Septuagint, which read uredu, “and hold sway,” instead of urevu, “and multiply,” as in the Masoretic Text. The latter reading looks suspiciously like a scribal transposition of urevu from the end of the first clause. The entire line, of course, picks up the language of 1:28 as the process of human history is resumed after the Flood.
12. And God said. This is the first instance of a common convention of biblical narrative: when a speaker addresses someone and the formula for introducing speech is repeated with no intervening response from the interlocutor, it generally indicates some sort of significant silence—a failure to comprehend, a resistance to the speaker’s words, and so forth. (Compare Judges 8:23–24: first Gideon declares to his men that he will not rule over them. Seeing their evident resistance, he proposes a concrete alternative they can understand, the collection of gold ornaments to make an ephod.) Here, God first flatly states His promise never to destroy the world again. The flood-battered Noah evidently needs further assurance, so God goes on, with a second formula for introducing speech, to offer the rainbow as outward token of His covenant. The third occurrence of the wayomer formula, at the beginning of verse 17, introduces a confirming summary of the rainbow as sign of the covenant.
20–27. Like the story of the Nephilim, this episode alludes cryptically to narrative material that may have been familiar to the ancient audience but must have seemed to the monotheistic writer dangerous to spell out. The big difference is that, for the first time in Genesis, the horizon of the story is the national history of Israel: Ham, the perpetrator of the act of violation, is mysteriously displaced in the curse by his son Canaan, and thus the whole story is made to justify the—merely hoped-for—subject status of the Canaanites in relation to the descendants of Shem, the Israelites. (Ham also now figures as the youngest son, not the middle one.) No one has ever figured out exactly what it is that Ham does to Noah. Some, as early as the classical Midrash, have glimpsed here a Zeus–Chronos story in which the son castrates the father or, alternately, penetrates him sexually. The latter possibility is reinforced by the fact that “to see the nakedness of” frequently means “to copulate with,” and it is noteworthy that the Hebrews associated the Canaanites with lasciviousness (see, for example, the rape of Dinah, Genesis 34). Lot’s daughters, of course, take advantage of his drunkenness to have sex with him. But it is entirely possible that the mere seeing of a father’s nakedness was thought of as a terrible taboo, so that Ham’s failure to avert his eyes would itself have earned him the curse.
27. enlarge Japheth. The Hebrew involves a pun: yaft leyafet.
28–29. These verses resume the precise verbal formulas of the antediluvian genealogy in chapter 5. The story of Noah is given formal closure with this recording of his age, and the stage is set for the Table of Nations of the next chapter, which will constitute a historical divider between the tale of the Flood and the next narrative episode, the Tower of Babel.