Genesis 9

¹And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.

Ge 9:1-7. Covenant. 1. And God blessed Noah--Here is republished the law of nature that was announced to Adam, consisting as it originally did of several parts. Be fruitful, &c.--The first part relates to the transmission of life, the original blessing being reannounced in the very same words in which it had been promised at first [Ge 1:28].

²And 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.

2. 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.

³Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.

3. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you--The third part concerns the means of sustaining life; man was for the first time, it would seem, allowed the use of animal food, but the grant was accompanied with one restriction.

⁴But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.

4. But flesh ... the blood ... shall ye not eat--The sole intention of this prohibition was to prevent these excesses of cannibal ferocity in eating flesh of living animals, to which men in the earlier ages of the world were liable.

⁵And 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.

5. surely your blood of your lives will I require--The fourth part establishes a new power for protecting life--the institution of the civil magistrate (Ro 13:4), armed with public and official authority to repress the commission of violence and crime. Such a power had not previously existed in patriarchal society.

⁶Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.

6. Whoso sheddeth man’s blood ... for in the image of God made he man--It is true that image has been injured by the fall, but it is not lost. In this view, a high value is attached to the life of every man, even the poorest and humblest, and an awful criminality is involved in the destruction of it.

¹³I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.

13. I do set my bow in the cloud--set, that is, constitute or appoint. This common and familiar phenomenon being made the pledge of peace, its appearance when showers began to fall would be welcomed with the liveliest feelings of joy.

²⁰And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard:

20. And Noah ... planted a vineyard--Noah had been probably bred to the culture of the soil, and resumed that employment on leaving the ark.

²¹And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.

21. And he drank of the wine, and was drunken--perhaps at the festivities of the vintage season. This solitary stain on the character of so eminently pious a man must, it is believed, have been the result of age or inadvertency.

²⁴And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.

24. This incident could scarcely have happened till twenty years after the flood; for Canaan, whose conduct was more offensive than that even of his father, was not born till after that event. It is probable that there is a long interval included between these verses and that this prophecy, like that of Jacob on his sons, was not uttered till near the close of Noah’s life when the prophetic spirit came upon him; this presumption is strengthened by the mention of his death immediately after.

²⁵And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.

25. Cursed be Canaan--This doom has been fulfilled in the destruction of the Canaanites--in the degradation of Egypt and the slavery of the Africans, the descendants of Ham.

²⁶And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

26. Blessed be the Lord God of Shem--rather, “Blessed of Jehovah, my God, be Shem,”--an intimation that the descendants of Shem should be peculiarly honored in the service of the true God, His Church being for ages established among them (the Jews), and of them, concerning the flesh, Christ came. They got possession of Canaan, the people of that land being made their “servants” either by conquest, or, like the Gibeonites, by submission [Jos 9:25].

²⁷God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

27. God shall enlarge Japheth--pointing to a vast increase in posterity and possessions. Accordingly his descendants have been the most active and enterprising, spread over the best and largest portion of the world, all Europe and a considerable part of Asia. he shall dwell in the tents of Shem--a prophecy being fulfilled at the present day, as in India British Government is established and the Anglo-Saxons being in the ascendancy from Europe to India, from India over the American continent. What a wonderful prophecy in a few verses (Is 46:10; 1Pe 1:25)!