For Teaching

Genesis 9: What the Passage Says

80 claims across 29 verses, in the order the chapter makes them.

Not a sermon outline. What Genesis 9 says, and what its hard words meant. The reading of it is yours.

The Chapter in a Sentence

God blesses Noah and his sons, tells them to fill the earth, puts the animals under their power, gives every moving creature as food, forbids eating flesh with its blood in it, and says he will require an accounting for human blood. God then makes a covenant with Noah, his descendants, and every living creature: never again will a flood destroy the earth, and the rainbow in the cloud is the sign of it. Noah's three sons are named, and Noah plants a vineyard, drinks the wine, and lies uncovered in his tent. Ham sees him and tells his brothers, Shem and Japheth cover their father walking backward, Noah wakes and speaks a curse on Canaan and blessings connected with Shem and Japheth, and Noah dies at 950 years old.

Claim by Claim

9:1
- God blessed Noah and his sons.
- God told them to be fruitful.
- God told them to multiply.
- God told them to fill the earth.
9:2
- The fear and dread of Noah and his sons will be upon every living creature of the earth.
- The fear and dread of them will be upon every bird of the sky.
- The fear and dread of them will be upon everything that creeps on the ground.
- The fear and dread of them will be upon all the fish of the sea.
- All these creatures are given into the hand of Noah and his sons.
9:3
- Every moving creature that is alive shall be food for Noah and his sons.
- God says he has given them all things, just as he gave the green plants.
9:4
- God forbids eating flesh with its life in it.
- The life of the flesh is identified as its blood.
9:5
- God will require an accounting for the blood of their lives.
- God will require it from every animal.
- God will require it from man.
- God will require the life of a man from the hand of his brother.
9:6
- Whoever sheds the blood of a man shall have his own blood shed by man.
- God made man in the image of God.
9:7
- God told them to be fruitful.
- God told them to multiply.
- God told them to swarm on the earth.
- God told them to multiply on the earth.
9:8
- God spoke to Noah and to his sons who were with him.
9:9
- God says he is establishing his covenant with Noah and his sons.
- God says he is establishing his covenant with their offspring after them.
9:10
- God establishes his covenant with every living creature that is with them.
- This includes the birds.
- This includes the livestock.
- This includes every beast of the earth that is with them.
- This includes all that came out of the ark.
- This applies to every beast of the earth.
9:11
- God says he will establish his covenant with them.
- God says all flesh will never again be cut off by the waters of a flood.
- God says there will never again be a flood to destroy the earth.
9:12
- God said this is the sign of the covenant.
- God is giving the covenant between himself and them.
- The covenant is also between God and every living creature that is with them.
- The covenant is for perpetual generations.
9:13
- God has set his bow in the cloud.
- The bow will be a sign of a covenant between God and the earth.
9:14
- When God brings a cloud over the earth, the bow will be seen in the cloud.
9:15
- God will remember his covenant between himself and them and every living creature of all flesh.
- The waters will never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.
9:16
- The bow will be in the cloud.
- God will look upon the bow.
- God will look upon it in order to remember the everlasting covenant.
- The covenant is between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.
9:17
- God said to Noah that this is the sign of the covenant.
- God has established the covenant between himself and all flesh that is on the earth.
9:18
- The sons of Noah who came out of the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
- Ham is the father of Canaan.
9:19
- These three were the sons of Noah.
- From them the whole earth was populated.
9:20
- Noah began as a man of the ground, or began by planting; the text is ambiguous as to what he began.
- Noah planted a vineyard.
9:21
- Noah drank of the wine.
- Noah became drunk.
- Noah lay uncovered inside his tent.
9:22
- Ham is the father of Canaan.
- Ham saw the nakedness of his father.
- Ham told his two brothers outside.
9:23
- Shem and Japheth took a garment.
- They laid it on the shoulders of both of them.
- They walked backward.
- They covered their father's nakedness.
- Their faces were turned backward.
- They did not see their father's nakedness.
9:24
- Noah awoke from his wine.
- Noah knew what his younger son had done to him.
9:25
- Noah said Canaan is cursed.
- Noah said Canaan shall be a servant of servants to his brothers.
9:26
- Noah said the LORD, the God of Shem, is blessed.
- Noah said Canaan shall be a servant to him; whether the servitude is to Shem alone or to them is ambiguous.
9:27
- Noah said God shall make room for Japheth.
- Noah said he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; whether the dweller is God or Japheth is ambiguous.
- Noah said Canaan shall be a servant to him.
9:28
- Noah lived three hundred and fifty years after the flood.
9:29
- All the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years.
- Noah died.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

9:1: "Replenish" in 1611 English simply meant "fill"; it did not carry the modern sense of filling again. The command repeats word for word the blessing given at the creation of the first humans.
9:2: "Into your hand are they delivered" means the animals were put in people's care. It does not mean God handed them over one by one.
9:3: "Meat" in the King James Version means food of any kind, not flesh specifically. The sentence is saying that animals are now added to the plants already given as food.
9:4: Blood was understood as the seat of a creature's life, so the life had to be returned rather than consumed. In practice this meant draining the blood from a slaughtered animal before eating it, a rule kept in Israelite law ever after, and the origin of kosher slaughter.
9:5: "Require" here has its older legal sense: to demand back, to call someone to account for something owed. "Every man's brother" means every fellow human being, not a literal sibling.
9:6: The Hebrew wording can be read either as a prediction of what will happen (bloodshed brings bloodshed) or as an authorisation for human beings to execute a killer. Translators have long divided on which is meant, and the line is deliberately left open here. The phrase itself is a tight word-pattern in Hebrew (shofekh dam ha-adam, ba-adam damo yishafekh) with the words mirrored around the center.
9:9: A covenant is a formal, binding commitment, closer to a treaty or a sworn contract than to a promise casually given. Ancient covenants normally had two parties with obligations; this one places obligations on God alone. "Seed" in the King James Version means offspring or descendants.
9:10: "Fowl" means birds and "cattle" in the King James means domestic animals in general, herds and flocks, not only cows.
9:11: "All flesh" is a standard Hebrew idiom for every living creature, humans and animals together, not for bodies as opposed to souls.
9:12: "Token" in the King James Version means a sign or visible mark, not a keepsake or a coin. "Perpetual generations" means all generations to come, without end.
9:13: The Hebrew word translated "bow" is the ordinary word for the weapon, a war bow. It is not a separate word for rainbow; the image is of a bow hung up in the clouds. "I do set" translates a verb form that can mean either "I hereby place" or "I have placed," so it is unclear whether the rainbow is being newly created or newly given a meaning.
9:18: Canaan is singled out because his descendants, the Canaanites, were the people occupying the land that Israel later entered. Naming him here prepares for the curse in verse 25.
9:19: The ancient writer is saying that every people on earth traced their family back to one of these three brothers. Chapter 10 lists the nations that came from each.
9:20: "Husbandman" is the older English word for a farmer or tiller of the soil. The Hebrew can mean either that Noah became a farmer and planted a vineyard, or that he was the first person ever to plant one.
9:21: Tents were a single open living space, so a person lying uncovered inside was private but completely exposed to anyone who walked in.
9:22: Elsewhere in Hebrew law "to see the nakedness of" someone is an idiom for a sexual act, so readers have long disputed whether Ham merely looked or did something worse. Verse 23 describes his brothers avoiding the literal sight, which points to looking; the text does not settle the question. In this culture, seeing a father exposed and then reporting it to others was a serious dishonoring of him.
9:23: Carrying the garment stretched between them on their shoulders and reversing into the tent let them cover their father without any chance of glancing at him.
9:24: "Awoke from his wine" means slept off the drunkenness. Ham is listed second of the three brothers throughout, so "younger son", literally "smallest son" in Hebrew, is puzzling; it may mean youngest, or simply the junior one, or the phrase may point to Canaan.
9:25: The curse falls on Ham's son Canaan rather than on Ham himself, and the text gives no explanation for the shift. "Servant of servants" is a Hebrew way of forming a superlative, the lowest of slaves. The word rendered "servant" means a slave, not a hired worker.
9:26: "LORD" printed in capitals stands for the personal name of God in the Hebrew, four consonants usually written YHWH, which Jewish readers did not pronounce aloud. Blessing God rather than Shem is unusual phrasing; "his servant" could mean Shem's servant or the LORD's, and the Hebrew leaves it open.
9:27: A play on the name: Japheth sounds like the Hebrew verb yaft, "make wide" or "give room to." The subject of "shall dwell in the tents of Shem" is grammatically unclear: it may be Japheth living among Shem's descendants, or God dwelling there.
9:29: Recording the full lifespan and then "and he died" is the fixed closing formula used for each figure in the early genealogies of Genesis.

Read Genesis 9