Genesis 9:1-7

5. The Beginning of the Beginning Again (Genesis 9:1-7): The New World-Order. (This last felicitous phrase is borrowed from Skinner, ICCG, 169).

And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. 2 And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every bird of the heavens; with all wherewith the ground teemeth, and all the fishes of the sea, into your hand are they delivered. 3 Every moving thing that liveth shall be food for you; as the green herb have I given you all. 4 But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat. 5 And surely your blood, the blood of your lives, will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it: and at the hand of man, even at the hand of every man's brother, will I require the life of man. 6 Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God made he man. 7 And you, be fruitful, and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein.

(1) The Divine blessing bestowed on Noah and his sons is an almost verbal repetition of the primeval blessing bestowed upon mankind (Genesis 1:28). It is conferred on Noah and his sons (and not upon their wives directly) as the new heads of the race. It is significant also that here (in contrast to Genesis 1:22) animals are not included in the Divine benediction. Man's dominion over the animals is reaffirmed, but now in the form of fear and dread on their part; into your hand are they delivered, that is, the power of life and death over the subhuman orders is reestablished in man as lord tenant of the earth. (JB, 25,n.): The laws of nature are stabilized again. Aware of man's continuing malice God nevertheless preserves what he himself has made and, in spite of man, will lead it to the goal that he has determined. In the beginning man was blessed and was consecrated lord of creation; he is now blessed and consecrated anew, but his rule is tranquil no longer. In this new age man will be at war with the beasts and with his fellows, The peace of Paradise will not return until -the latter days,-' Isaiah 11:6.

(2) The central injunction here is the authorization of the eating of animal flesh for food: every moving thing that liveth shall be food for you (thus excluding such as had died of themselves or been slain by other beasts: cf. Exodus 22:31, Leviticus 22:8). We see no reason for assuming, as some commentators do, that man had been permitted only a vegetarian diet prior to the Flood: Skinner, for instance, speaks of the central injunction here as the removal of the prohibition of animal food. Where is any such prohibition to be found in previous Chapter s of Genesis? Certainly Genesis 1:29-30, while expressly authorizing vegetarian food, does not in itself exclude the eating of meat, (But what about the expression, Genesis 9:3, as the green herb I have given you all? The JB renders it: Every living and crawling thing shall provide food for you, no less than the foliage of plants. This makes sense). The view that animal food was permitted prior to the Flood is supported by the following matters. (a) the distinction between clean and unclean animals (this certainly implies some correlation between the more hygienic kinds of animal flesh and the use of it for food); (b) the language of Genesis 1:29 does not explicitly forbid the use of animal flesh for food; (c) shortly after the Fall, animals by Divine direction were slain for sacrifice, and hence probably for food also (by no means an unwarrantable inference from Genesis 4:4); (d) the sufficient reason for emphasis on the authorization of animal food in Genesis 9:3 is that it is subjoined with the restrictions which follows (Genesis 9:4); however, it affords no ground for assuming the existence of previous limitations; (e) if the eating of animal flesh was supposed to heighten human sensuality (carnality), certainly vegetarianism thought to have been practised exclusively before the Flood, was no less productive of the same effect, as evident from the licentiousness and violence of the Line of Cain. We find no reason, therefore, for assuming that the human race was by Divine ordination or by any other authority restricted to a vegetarian diet before the Flood or after that event.

(3) The Law Prohibiting the Eating of Blood (Genesis 9:4), that is, the eating of flesh from which the blood has not been properly drained. This prohibition, supposed to have been enjoined on all peoples through Noah who preceded Abraham by some ten generations (hence as universal in scope as the Rainbow Covenant), was later incorporated in the Mosaic legislation (Leviticus 3:17; Leviticus 7:26-27; Leviticus 17:10-14; Leviticus 19:26; Deuteronomy 12:16; Deuteronomy 12:23-24; Deuteronomy 15:23), and subsequently was imposed upon Gentile converts to Christianity by the authority of the Holy Spirit and the Apostles (Acts 15:21; Acts 15:28-29). Among the reasons for the original promulgation of this law undoubtedly were the following: (a) the desire to guard against cruelty to animals; (b) the design to protect human life by demonstrating the inviolability which attaches in God's sight even to the lives of lower animals; (c) the intention to emphasize the sanctity of all life as God's most precious gift; (d) the design to point up the intimate connection between the blood and the life which subsists even in the animal world (cf. Leviticus 17:10-13); (e) the design to emphasize especially its symbolic use in relation to atonement for sin (Hebrews 9:22). Is not this law intended to enforce the truth in a special way that all life is sacred and must be restored to God before the flesh can be eaten? (W. Robertson Smith (RSFI, 338) suggests that this law originally may have been directed, at least in part, against the superstition that by eating the blood in which is the life of the totem animal, the worshiper appropriated the life and shared the attributes of the god thus worshiped.)

(4) The Law against Murder (Genesis 9:5-7). (Murder is rightly defined as the taking of another man's life on one's own authority and with malice aforethought), (a) Whoso sheddeth, i.e., wilfully and unwarrantedly, and not simply accidentally (manslaughter, Numbers 35:11), or judicially, for that is ordained here by the wording of the law itself. (Man's blood, literally the blood of man). By man shall his blood be shed: Whitelaw (PCG, 141): Not openly and directly by God, but by man himself, acting of course as God's instrument and agentan instruction which involved the setting up of the magisterial office by whom the sword might be borne. (The law here certainly harks back to the principle of blood revenge which had existed from the beginning [as implicit in the words of Cain, Genesis 4:14-15] and has continued to be practised for many centuries among primitive peoples, although in the verse before us the manner of execution is not specified. According to this procedure, when a murder was committed, the victim's relatives, usually by direction of the elders of the tribe, were bound to retaliate by taking the life of the murderer. This was earliest man's only means of preventing wholesale murder. He who took from his victim God's greatest gift and man's greatest possession, life itself, must needs forfeit his own life as the only penalty sufficient to restore the balance of justice.) (JB, 25 n.): The blood of every creature belongs to God, cf. Lev. l:5f., but man's in particular because man was made to God's likeness. God will avenge human blood, cf. Genesis 4:10, and delegates this office to man himself to be exercised through the state, or, Numbers 35:19 f., through the individual -avenger of blood.-' Murder has never been tolerated by any ethnic group because the right to life is man's fundamental right, and it is so because he was made in the image of God (Genesis 9:6). Whitelaw (PCG, 141): Shall. Not merely a permissive legalising, but an imperative command enjoining, capital punishment, the reason for which follows: for in the image of God made he man. Some expositors have found nothing in this law but an ordinary prophecy that the shedding of blood would always bring reprisal in civil law (in the form of capital punishment). It is plain, however, that the law against murder was a positive Divine enactment, and not a prophecy in any sense, as well as the penalty for its violation. Whether Christ, in any of his teaching, has given us the right to believe that the penalty has been removed, is yet an open question. Given to Noah, this statute, however, was designed for the universal family of man, until repealed by the Authority who ordained it. Not having been exclusively a Jewish statute, the abrogation of the Mosaic economy does not affect its stability. Christ, not having come to destroy the fundamental laws of Heaven, may fairly be presumed to have left this standing. Inferences from the spirit of Christianity have no validity against an express Divine commandment. The principle of Atonement, operating between Heaven and earth, seems always to have been life for life. (It should be noted too that a beast which might kill a human being was to forfeit its life, just as any human murderer must do: cf. Genesis 9:5, Exodus 21:28-29). To summarize the precepts given here: animals could be killed for food, but the blood must not be eaten; though the life of animals might be taken, human life was to be held sacred. Some would hold that we have in addition to the law of abstinence from blood, and the law prohibiting murder, the recognition of civil authority (cf. Romans 13:4).

REVIEW QUESTIONS

See Genesis 9:28-29.