Genesis Chapters 9 and 10

Chapter 9

God tells Noah that all animals will now fear humans (and boy do they ever), but you shouldn’t eat and animal that is still alive. There’s also some eye for an eye stuff in the form of,

“⁶Whoever sheds the blood of a human, by a human shall that person’s blood be shed; for in his own image God made humankind.”

Bibles, Harper . NRSV Bible with the Apocrypha (Gen 9:6, p. 42). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.

We get more repetition from Genesis 8 that God will never again destroy the entire earth with a flood. So he’s saying that he may destroy the earth again, but it will be in some other way? He seals the deal with a rainbow. Except, he says that the rainbow is to remind him not to destroy the world a flood again.

Verse 18 makes it sound like we might expect some other sons to leave the ark as we are, once again, reminded of their names. Noah somehow, in some unspecified amount of time, plants a vineyard, grows the grapes, picks them, ferments them, and gets drunk on the wine laying naked in his tent. His son Ham, who we are reminded time and time again is the father of Canaan, walks in on this and goes to tell his brothers who walk backward with a cloak to cover the old man.

When Noah awakens, he somehow knows that Ham saw him nekkid and curses Canaan and asks God to bless his other two sons and make Canaan their slave. This story seems completely unrelated to the rest of the flood narrative. I’m just glad it’s over now.

Chapter 10

This is the Table of Nations which explains how all the nations of the world were descended from Ham, Shem, and Japheth. As it turns out, shockingly, Ham is the father of Canaan <–#END SARCASM–> and Egypt. Here’s another problem for young earth creationists, if the flood happened anytime between 2430 and 2475 BCE (there are at least three different creationist groups that claim a different year for the flood), Egypt’s history goes back to 3100 BCE and there is no mention of global flood. Wouldn’t that be notable? Wouldn’t one of Ham’s relatives have written, “…where were we before all that flooding?”

As I mentioned in an earlier chapter, there were plenty of cultures that were well-established before the supposed Beginning which, according to James Ussher, took place in October 4004 BCE. None of them write about a global flood around the same time. Sure, they had floods, but that is the peril of living next to a river as most civilizations did.

One other thing, because I’m me, I have to chuckle at the name Nimrod. That is all.