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[PEACE between Heaven and earth . . .Divinity and humanity . . .wrongdoing thrives on earth which angers Heaven, so the Deluge. But after judgment and widespread destruction, the dove symbol appears for the first time (unless it has been in widespread use in myths and legends of antiquity). Here, it is used in the Noah narrative for a practical purpose: to find out if the waters have subsided enough for the survivors, human and beast, to safely dis-emb-ARK.
What about the rainbow? That is probably the better known ‘sign’ and yet, how many actually think back to Noah and the Flood? Do non-bible-reading people know what the rainbow signifies, at least in this narrative? For those of us in the know, we should think back to the covenant God made—not only with Noah but with all living creatures—- that never again will the Creator bring forth destruction in the form of a worldwide deluge. It should remind us as well that our this covenant-making Creator is faithful to the promises He makes. Not to forget, it should serve as a lesson about man’s folly since, in this chapter the impressive record of Noah’s obedience to the last detail of God’s instructions before, during and after the flood is marred by a temporary loss of self-control which opens an opportunity for his son Ham to dishonor him. . . and that had consequences for Ham’s progeny and puts a blight on the future inhabitants of the Land before it was ‘promised’ to Israel. (Read at the end of this chapter a comment by Everett Fox on what might have been the real act of dishonoring his father by Ham.)
We have heard of the seven ‘Noachide Laws’ which chronologically precede the 10 Declarations given on Sinai. From the term ‘Noachide” we connect these with Noah, but reading this chapter, we do not actually find an explicit ordered set of seven commandments of ‘thou shalt’ and ‘thou shalt not’. So where did the idea come from? Supposedly, all of humankind outside of Israel, are expected to live by these laws, did the generations that originated from Noah and his three sons who repopulated the earth know these laws and did they live by them? From the biblical record, we don’t get that impression, so again, where did the ‘Noachide Laws’ come from?
The Commentary we’ve been featuring here — Pentateuch and Haftorahs by Dr. J.H. Hertz — explains:
Rabbinic interpretation of these verses (1-17) deduced seven fundamental laws from them; viz. (1) the establishment of courts of justice; (2) the prohibition of blasphemy (3) of idolatry (4) of incest (5) of bloodshed (6) of robbery (7) of eating flesh cut from a living animal.
The Rabbis called these seven laws the ‘Seven Commandments given to the descendants of Noah’.
These constitute what we might call Natural Religion, as they are vital to the existence of human society. Whereas an Israelite was to carry out all the precepts of the Torah, obedience to these Seven Commandments alone was in ancient times required of non-Jews living among Israelites, or attaching themselves to the Jewish community.
Translation and commentary is from EF/Everett Fox The Five Books of Moses. Be reminded that there is a discrepancy in the wording of the commentary and the translation because Pentateuch and Haftorahs use a different version; still, the phrasing is easy to connect. The basic commentary is from P&H, but when additional comments are inserted from Everett Fox, it is indicated by (EF). Robert Alter’s (RA) translation of The Five Books of Moses is provided at the end of this post, in straight narrative, without commentary.—Admin1.]
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THE COVENANT WITH NOAH, THE SEVEN COMMANDMENTS FOR MAN
Genesis/Bereshith 9
[P&H] 1-2. The blessing which was bestowed on Adam (I,28) is repeated, since Noah and his sons were the heads of a new race. The Divine benediction would hearten them to undertake the task of rebuilding a ruined world.
[RA] God’s first postdiluvian speech to Noah affirms that 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 carnivores’ 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.
AND ‘
1 God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them: Bear fruit and be many and fill the earth! 2 Fear-of-you, dread-of-you shall be upon all the wildlife of the earth and upon all the fowl of the heavens, all that crawls on the soil and all the fish of the sea— into your hand they are given.3 All things crawling about that live, its blood, you are not to eat!
every moving thing. The term i here used in a wide sense to include beast, fish and fowl.
as the green herb. The meaning is that just as the green herb was granted to man as food by God, (I,29), so now permission is given him to partake of the flesh of animals.
4 However: flesh with its life, its blood, you are not to eat!
blood. In the Biblical conception, the blood is identified with life; Deut. XII,23, ‘for the blood is the life.’ This thought was the obvious deduction from the fact that as the blood is drained from the body, the vitality weakens until it ceases altogether. Life, in every form, has in it an element of holiness, since God is the source of all life. Therefore, although permission was given to eat the flesh of an animal, this was done with one special restriction; viz. life must altogether have departed from the animal before man partakes of the flesh. According to Rashi, the restriction was of a twofold nature.
- It, firstly, forbade ‘cutting a limb from a live animal’—a barbarous practice common among primitive races;
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- and secondly, the blood must not on any account be eaten since it was the seat of life.
- This double prohibition, of cruelty to animals and the partaking of blood, is the basis of most of the rules of the Jewish slaughter (kashering) of meats, which have been observed by Jews from time immemorial.
your blood of your lives, lit. ‘your blood, according to your own souls.’ The Rabbis understood these words literally, i.e. your life-blood, and based on them the prohibition of suicide.
will I require. i.e. will I exact punishment for it.
beast. If an animal killed a man, it must be put to death; see Exod. XXI,28-32 for the law concerning an ox which gored a man.
at the hand of every man’s brother. Better, at the hand of his brother-man (M. Friedlander). This clause emphasizes the preceding phrase, ‘and at the hand of man.’ If God seeks the blood of a man at the hand of a beast which kills him, how much more will He exact vengeance from a human being who murders his brother-man!
6. Whoever now sheds human blood, for that human shall his blood be shed, for in God’s image he made humankind.by man. This is usually understood, as the Targum has it, through the agency of man, viz. by judges or by an avenger.
for in the image of God. See I,27. We have here a declaration of the native dignity of man, irrespective of his race or creed. Because man is created in the image of God, he can never be reduced to the level of a thing or chattel; he remains a personality, with inalienable human rights. To rob a man of these inalienable rights constitutes an outrage against God. It is upon this thought that the Jewish conception of Justice, as respect for human personality, rests; see Deut. XVI,20.
[EF] Whoever . . .: A poem that plays on the sounds of “humankind” (adam) and “blood” (dam): Shofekh dam ha-adam/ba-adam damo yishafekh. for that human: Or, “by humans.”
[RA] 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 ‘adam, “human,” and the chiastic word order of the Hebrew formally mirrors the idea of measure for measure: shofekh [spills] dam [blood] ha’adam [of the human], ba’adam [by the human] damo [his blood] yishafekh [will be spilled] (=A B C C’ B’ A’). Perhaps the ban on bloodshed at this point suggests that murder was the endemic vice of the antediluvians.
7 As for you—bear fruit and be many, swarm on earth and become many on it!
This verse is not a superfluous repetition of v.1. It gives a further reason why God holds bloodshed in such abhorrence. It is His desire that life should be multiplied, and not diminished through murder. The Talmud founded on this verse its strong condemnation of him who does not fulfill the command to found a family.
Rabbinic interpretation of these verses deduced seven fundamental laws from them; .
(1) the establishment of courts of justice; (2) the prohibition of blasphemy; (3) of idolatry; (4) of incest; (5) of bloodshed; (6) of robbery; ( 7) of eating flesh cut from a living animal.The Rabbis called these seven laws the ‘Seven Commandments given to the descendants of Noah’. These constitute what we might call Natural Religion, as they are vital to the existence of human society. Whereas an Israelite was to carry out all the precepts of the Torah, obedience to these Seven Commandments alone was in ancient times required of non-Jews living among Israelites, or attaching themselves to the Jewish community.
8. God said to Noah and to his sons with him, saying:
9 As for me—here, I am about to establish my covenant with you and with your seed after you,
as for Me. If man, by avoiding homicide, will do his part not to destroy human life, God will never send another Flood.
establish. i.e. confirm. The covenant is that mentioned in VI,18.
10 and with all living beings that are with you: fowl, herd -animals, and all the wildlife of the earth with you; all those going out of the Ark, of all the living -things of the earth, 11 I will establish my covenant with you: All flesh shall never be cut off again by waters of the Deluge, never again shall there be Deluge, to bring the earth to ruin! 12 And God said: This is the sign of the covenant which I set between me and you and all living beings that are with you, for ageless generations:[P&H] token. The visible sign of the permanence of the covenant.
[RA] 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 silence—a failure to comprehend, a resistance to the speaker’s words and so forth. Here God first flatly states His promise never to destroy the world again. The flood-battered Noah evidently needs further assistance, so God goes on, with a second formula for introducing speech, to offer the rainbow as an 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.
13. My bow I set in the clouds, so that it may serve as a sign of the covenant between me and the earth,I have set My bow. This does not imply that the rainbow was then for the first time instituted; it merely assumed a new role as a token of the Divine pledge that there would never again be a world-devastating Deluge. ‘We must explain the verse as saying, The bow which I have set in the clouds from the day of creation shall henceforth be a token of the covenant between Me and you . . . a covenant of peace’ (Nachmanides). The same commentator further asserts, ‘We must accept the view of the Greeks that the rainbow is the result of the reflection of the sun in the moist atmosphere,’ i.e. the refraction and reflection light.
14. It shall be: when I becloud the earth with clouds and in the clouds the bow is seen,
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I will look upon it. The Midrashic comment is: ‘When the attribute of Justice comes to accuse you and hold you guilty of offending, then I will look upon the bow and remember the covenant.’
17. God said to Noah: This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is upon the earth.This concluding verse of the paragraph stresses the idea that the covenant was not only with Noah but with ‘all flesh that is upon the earth’.
18-29. PLANTING A VINEYARD
18. Noah’s sons who went out of the Ark were Shem, Ham, and Yefet. Now Ham is the father of Canaan.The historical thread of the main narrative—which is the story of the Human Family—is now resumed, after the digression on the symbolic meaning of the rainbow. Shem, Ham and Japheth are the fathers of the races from which the whole of mankind has descended.
Canaan. This is mentioned because of the narrative which follows. From a father showing such a fundamental lack of moral sense
[EF] Now Ham is the father of Canaan: See repetition in the story to follow, vv. 20-27.
19. These three were Noah’s sons, and from these were scattered abroad all the earth-folk.
overspread. Heb. ‘the whole earth was dispersed’; the word ‘earth’ here meaning ‘the population of the earth’ as in VI,11; XI,1.
20. And Noah was the first man of the soil; he planted a vineyard.
began. The Heb. word has also the meaning of ‘being profane’. Hence, Rashi’s comment:—‘Noah made himself profane, degraded himself. He should have planted anything but the vine,’ which is the source of so much sin and crime among the children of men.
[RA] 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.
21.When he drank from the wine, he became drunk and exposed himself in the middle of his tent.
uncovered. ‘Scripture shows in this narrative what shame and evil can through drunkenness befall even a man like Noah, who was otherwise found righteous and blameless before God. Some commentators, however, explain that as Noah was the first to cultivate the vine, he was ignorant of the intoxicating effect of its fruit. What happened to him is therefore a warning to mankind’ (Luzzatto).
22. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father’s nakedness and told his two brothers outside.
Ham, the father of Canaan. This vague narrative refers to some abominable deed in which Canaan seems to have been implicated.
told his two brethren. Instead of showing filial respect and covering his father, Ham deemed the occasion food for laughter, and mockingly repeated the incident to his brothers.
23. Then Shem and Yefet took a cloak, they put it on the shoulder of the two of them, and walked backward, to cover their father’s nakedness. —Their faces were turned backward, their father’s nakedness they did not see.
garment. Heb. ‘an outer cloak.’
Some Jewish and non-Jewish teachers omit this story in children’s Bible classes. Yet, it is of deep significance in a child’s moral training. An intelligent child cannot help now and then detecting a fault or something to laugh at in his parents; but instead of mockery or callous exposure, it is for him to throw the mantle of filial love over the fault and turn away his face. ‘Am I the one to judge my parents?’ a child should ask himself (F. Adler). Few Jewish children have parents who are drunkards, but there is a great number of whose fathers and mothers do not, e.g. speak the language of the land as fluently as they do. Instead of laughing at them, Jewish children should be taught to feel: ‘Have my parents had the opportunities in life that they have given me?’
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24. When Noah awoke from his wine, it became known (to him) what his littlest son had done to him.
youngest son. Heb. beno hak-katan, which might also mean ‘grandson’, like the French petit fils Wogue). The reference is evidently to Canaan.
[EF] littlest: Or “youngest,” difficult in the light of v. 18.
25. He said: Damned be Canaan, servant of servants may he be to his brothers!cursed be Canaan. It was firmly held in ancient times (XLVIII and XLIX) that the blessing or curse which a father pronounced upon a child affected the latter’s descendants. We, therefore, have here in effect a forecast of the future, that the Canaanites would be a servile and degraded race.
servant of servants. A Hebraism expressing the superlative degree; the meanest, most degraded, servant’ “Song of Songs’; i.e. the most beautiful song.
26. Hand he said: Blessed be YHWH God of Shem, but may Canaan be servant to them!the God of Shem. The meaning is, Blessed be the God who will, in the days to come, keep His promise to the descendants of Shem—the Israelites—the promise to give unto them the land of Canaan for a possession, and to be their God and their Guide.
[EF] to them: Others use “to him.”
27. May God extend/yaft Yefet, let him dwell in the tents of Shem, but may Canaan be servant to them!God enlarge Japheth. A play on the root-meaning of the name, which may mean ‘enlargement’. Japheth, the progenitor of the Indo-European or Aryan peoples, receives the blessing of worldly prosperity and widespread dominion, but he was to dwell ‘in the tents of Shem’. Friendly relations should subsist between the Semitic and Japhetic races. This is the first of the universalist forecasts in Scripture of the day when enmity between nations will be forgotten, and they will unite in acknowledgement of the God of Israel.
The word Japheth may also mean ‘beauty’. The Rabbis conceived of beauty under the category of purity; and longed for Japheth, i.e. the beauty of Greece, to dwell in the tents of Shem.
[RA] enlarge Japheth. The Hebrew involves a pun: yaft leyafet.
28. And Noah lived after the Deluge three hundred years and fifty years.
29. And all the days of Noah were nine hundred years and fifty years, then he died.[EF] Drunkeness and Nakedness (9:20-29): From the lofty poetry of God’s blessings and promises, we encounter an all-too-brief description of a bizarre event. The soil, which evidently has not entirely shaken off its primeval curse, proves once again to be a source of trouble. The nature of the crime mentioned here (“seeing the father’s nakedness”) has been variously interpreted: Buber and others see in it a reference to the sexual “immorality” of the Canaanites, which the Israelites found particularly abhorrent. This would explain the emphasis on the son of the culprit in the story, rather than on the perpetrator.
A similar undistinguished anscestry is traced in Chap. 19, referring to the incestuous origins of Israel’s neighbors and frequent enemies, the Moabites and Ammonites.
[RA] 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.
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[Straight Text, No Commentary]
ROBERT ALTER’S THE FIVE BOOKS OF MOSES
GENESIS