LESSON 7
Genesis for Today: Chapters 9-11
by Herb Drake

Copyright (c) 1998, 2020, Herb Drake.

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The Flood Subsides

After the flood passes, Noah and his family are free to re-populate the earth. The new covenant puts everything into the hands of humanity, including the consumption of meat (provided that the meat is drained of blood). Murder will be punished by execution. As a sign of the covenant, God provides the rain bow. God also promises to never punish humanity with a flood again. Of course, this is still the primeval period period, well before Moses and the law. But the covenatant with Noah is a foretaste of the law that comes out of the wilderness experience of the book of Exodus.

It doesn't take long for this optimistic situation to begin to deteriorate. There is nothing wrong with Noah's decision to plant a vineyard, but his over-consumption of the vineyard's product displays a momentary lack of judgment. This provokes a sin when one of his sons disrespects his father by looking upon Noah's intoxicated nakedness, drawing a curse on Ham's son Canaan. Why the curse fell on Canaan rather than on Ham or either of his other sons remains a mystery about which scholars continue to argue, but as Noah's children and grandchildren start to create nations, this curse might explain the enmity between peoples that go on for generations. A long genealogy follows that documents this process.

Babel

During the many generations described in Chapter 8, the Bible does not mention God at all. The long genealogy conveys the fact that many years had passed since Noah's covenant with the Lord. God reappears in the narrative when he comes upon the people of the city of Babel at the start of the next chapter. These people, if they had even remembered the covenant upon seeing the sign of the rainbow in the sky, set themselves on a course of action intended to "make a name for themselves." This phrase, often appearing in our own modern culture, expresses the arrogance of godless individuals having an "I'd rather do it myself" attitude and refusing to acknowledge their dept to their creator.

Names in the Bible are far more than identifiers. Names convey the entire essence of the individual to which they are attached. For example, when we include "In the name of Jesus" in a prayer, we are invoking the entirety of the person of Jesus. Some names echo a source or purpose (e.g., "Adam" resembles "ground," as he was created from the ground). We will see in subsequent chapters that God renames individuals (e.g., Abram becomes Abraham) when their relationship with him changes.

The people of Babel decided that they could get rid of God altogher. Their plan was to construct a tower tall enough to reach the third heaven (remember the ancient view of the cosmos?), build seige works against the heavenly city, drive God out, and take over the place. It is important that this threat be taken seriously; it is, indeed, an offense that eclipses even the Niphilim that provoked the flood judgment. So God breaks up the unity that survived the many generations of Chapter 8 by dispersing the people and confusing their languages in a move to frustrate any future attempts to spin such a conspiracy. This judgment persists for a very long time, and is not reversed until the language differences are overcome and people of faith from all of the known world are reunited in the events of Acts 2.

But where is God's grace? Due to the seriousness of the Babel offense, there is not even a hint of grace this time around. Instead, there is a giant vacuum that the serious reader will surely recognize. It will not appear until several more generations have passed as we read through another long genealogy, which finally brings us to the appearance of Abram and his nephew, Lot. We finally find the grace from the Babel judgment there, in God's call of Abram. His story, and the blessing that God passes on to his progeny is the subject of the next section.

Genesis 8-9 | Genesis 12-13