The first thing that stands out to me in Genesis 9 is the
change from the peace and harmony of Adam naming the animals to the “fear and
dread” that God places between the animals and humans after the flood. We have
suddenly entered a dangerous world where killing is somehow essential to
survival, yet God values human life in such a way that a reckoning is required
for every human life taken.
Again, the keynote of being “fruitful and multiplying” is
sounded. This was certainly an important command for a struggling, little
nation like Israel to obey. To be fruitful and multiply children on a planet
already overcrowded in our day seems less desirable. However, there are
certainly other ways that God wants us to be fruitful and multiply, spiritually
speaking. In what ways might God want us to be fruitful and multiply in 2014?
With the story of the rainbow we are clearly continuing the Genesis
authors'/editors' intent to tell us various etiologies, stories of where things
come from. A far more curious story is the one of Noah’s drunkenness after
planting the first vineyard. The drunkenness itself does not appear to be
condemned, but rather Ham’s telling his brothers about their father’s nakedness
is condemned. Obviously, the idea of children honoring their parents and even
the duty of covering up one’s parent’s folly, was far more important when this
story was first told and later written down, than it is today. In this story
the Israelites were probably meant to see warnings against, not only drunkenness, but against other sins into which their neighbors, the Canaanites who were
descendants of Ham, might lure them.
Why were the Israelites so interested in something we find
so boring, namely genealogies? This leads to another question: do we in fact
find genealogies boring? Some people today spend a good deal of their time
researching their own family tree and do not find it boring at all. In fact, in
researching one’s family tree many interesting life stories are revealed. I
imagine that is why the Israelites so often included genealogies in their
sacred scriptures, because the genealogies tell important stories, some of
which are probably lost on us today. After all, we are reading about someone
else’s family tree which is not as interesting as studying one’s own genealogy.
Lawrence Boadt in his book, Reading the Old Testament, points out how “the Yahwist added a list
of Cain’s descendants (Gen. 4:17-26), emphasizing those who gave the world the
civilized gifts of music and ironworking, and concluding with a small poem that
showed how the evils of violence and revenge were increasing…” Then “the
Priestly author inserts his own genealogy of the ten descendants of Adam down
to Noah….what has always interested readers is the long lifespan that P credits
to his patriarchs. This was not intended as proof that humans lived to such
ripe old ages in the first days of the world, but a device to show just how vast
a distance separates our own world of experience from that of the story itself.
The ‘myth’ of enormous lifespans was commonly used in the ancient world to show
the superiority of the beginning times….The
final unit in Genesis 1-11 continues the genealogy list of the Priestly author
from chapter 5. P bridges the final distance from mythical time to historical
time by listing the generations from Noah down to the call of Abraham.
Theologically, P makes the point that God had to give up on humanity as a whole
after the tower of Babel incident and instead narrow his choice to one man and
one nation who would learn obedience and devotion to God and eventually bring
this knowledge and divine blessing to all other people. Thus with Abraham the
Bible begins to deal with people and places actually known to exist.”
For more information on the sources behind the first five
books of the Hebrew Scriptures, I recommend Boadt’s book or Richard Elliott
Friedman’s Who Wrote the Bible.
The key phrase that stands out to me from the beginning of
Abraham’s story in Genesis 12 is: “blessed to be a blessing”. It is a phrase
that is true of all of us; we are blessed to be a blessing to others. What
blessings do we have for which we can thank God as we begin a new year? How can
we pass on these blessings to others?
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