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

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The Flood Subsides

After the flood passes, Noah and his family are free to re-populate the earth. God's command to them was a reboot of the one he gave Adam: to multiply and fill the earth (9:1), but with some amendments. The new covenant puts everything into the hands of humanity, including the consumption of meat (provided that the meat is drained of blood). Murders will be punished by execution. As a sign of the covenant, God puts away his war bow and replaces it with the rain bow. God also promises to never punish humanity with a flood again. Of course, this is still the primeval period, well before Moses and the law. But the covenant 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 and ends in the very important Table of Nations (Chaptter 10) which, at the time of its writing, represented every nation in the known world.

Babel

During the many generations described in Chapter 8, the Bible does not mention God at all. The long genealogy suggests 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 had no intention of following God's demand that they fill the earth but decided to take a stand instead. If they had remembered the covenant upon seeing the sign of the rainbow in the sky, they ignored it and 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 debt to their creator and take God's will into consideration.

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 alltogher. Their plan was to construct a tower tall enough to reach the third heaven (remember the ancient view of the cosmos?), build siege 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 incident that provoked the flood judgment. So God forces the "fill the earth" command that Babel ignored 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.

God's Council

Here we find a remarkable return of the Sons of God--not in Genesis, but in Deuteronomy 32:8. While the people of Babel spread out into the Table of Nations, God also distributed the Sons of God into those same nations. These are the same beings that spawned the Nephilim, and the Bible sometimes refers to them as "gods." Some might object to the notion that Yahweh was not the only "god," but remember that the First Commandment does not limit the number of gods but rather insists that Yahweh is the only god that should be worshipped. We see many local gods throughout the Old Testament, and it is not out of the question that this explains their origin. One might ask what purpose these gods might have bad; perhaps they were charged with administrative duties over their assigned nations. But it is clear from Psalm 82 that they abused their office and are doomed to destruction "as humans" in the end time. The psalm also informs us that God presided over a "council" in which these gods participated. (One can see this council in action in 1 Kings 22:19-23.)

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 the population resettles throughout the known world, which finally brings us to the appearance of Abraham, a story that we pick up on the next page.

Genesis 8-9 | Genesis 12-13