Old Testament – Genesis 9 – Noah’s Drunken Mistake & His Sons’ Responses

God blessed Noah and his sons and told them to be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth. The fear and Terror of you will be in every living creature on the Earth. They are placed under your Authority. And now, for the first time every living creature will be food for you. Before it was only green plants, but now you can eat animals. However the lifeblood must not be in it.

The next thing God does is to stipulate that all killing is not equal, nor permissible. A man must not take the life of another man, nor haphazardly kill animals. This helps protect man, who once having a taste of blood shed, might feed on it, and become cruel. You kill animals to eat them, and doing more than that, God would require from you your life in return for the haphazard murder you may commit. And interestingly enough, God says he will require the life of an animal if it takes the life of a man. There is no reason to kill another man or animal unless God directs it. And God does direct that men and animals be killed at times, as we will learn later in the Old Testament.

Nephesh is the Hebrew word used here for live and life blood, and it refers to whatever it is that makes a person alive instead of dead. The literal translation is a breathing creature. So anything that breathes has nephesh.

But God is quick to follow up his warning about killing by changing the focus for man to be fruitful and multiply, spread out over the Earth and multiply on it. The focus has always been life and not death.

But since man decided to make his own decisions apart from God, which was sin, man brought death into the world. So God now must make rules and regulations to help contain the damage that sinful, selfish, self-centered people will eventually wreak.

Next, God makes the first official Covenant with man that he will never again destroy the earth and its creatures by a flood. The rainbow in the sky after clouds appear is the physical symbol of his Covenant. He had told Noah back in Genesis 6: 18 that he would establish a covenant with Noah. Here is when it actually happens. The word for Covenant in the Hebrew means cutting, because the way that God would officiate a covenant between himself and man was to have men cut up an animal and line up the pieces to the left and right, and have him walk through the middle of the pieces. Even in Covenants, God uses the lifeblood of an animal to seal his promises.

The word is also sometimes translated as a league or an agreement. This gives the impression of more than one person Binding Together to work together and accomplish a common goal. When God makes a covenant with us, he binds himself to us and makes a promise to help us accomplish his goals. (Phil 2:13 says for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.)

Now, there are different types of Covenants. Someone can make a one-sided Covenant with another person, meaning that no matter what happens, they will not break their promise to you. At other times, there are covenants that are two sided, and if either side breaks the promise, the Covenant is no longer any good. The Covenant that God is about to make with Noah is a one-sided promise, where it does not matter what man does, because God will still keep his promise.

In the upcoming books in the Old Testament, we will find conditional covenants, where God says, if you obey my voice and keep my Covenant then these good things will happen. If you do not keep my Covenant, then these bad things will happen.

Starting in verse 19 however, things start to go bad. Noah planted a Vineyard, and proceeded to get drunk and get naked in his own tent. Interestingly enough, there is no mention that what Noah did upset the Lord. Because of this, commentators think that this was an accidental event, due to festivities.

God does not hold us accountable for temporary lapses in judgement or unintentional sin in the same way that he holds us accountable for willing, deliberate sin. That should both Comfort us and make us afraid.

If we make a mistake, God is not waiting to punish us, but there will be the natural consequences of our actions. Getting drunk, simply put, makes it a lot easier to get naked unintentionally, to be found in compromising situations, and cause unnecessary shame to yourself and others.

On the other hand, he takes deliberate sin very seriously, because it is rebellion and Disobedience directed specifically against him and his commands. Think back onto his commands about taking another person’s or animal’s life and the fatal punishment for it.

This also shows how God can use absolutely anything to reveal the hearts of ourselves and the people around us. In this case, how Noah’s sons responded to the knowledge of their fathers drunkenness and nakedness revealed the conditions of their hearts.

Ham is the one who found him, and instead of Simply averting his eyes, he went out and told other people about the nakedness. What would cause him to want to repeat the bad things that he had seen or heard? This is the question we all have to ask ourselves when we find ourselves gossiping about other people. Do you find yourself repeating to others the things you have found out about other people?

However, his brothers responded to hearing about their father’s indiscretion by still treating him with respect. They did not look on his nakedness or join in with their younger brother in exposing what he had done wrong, but instead, tried to help their father retain his dignity, and covered over his nakedness.

This makes me think of the New Testament, where it says that love covers over a multitude of sins. If we find out something negative about someone else, and we handle it out of love, we should do our best to protect that person from ridicule and embarrassment, not be the one promoting it. For what reason would we ever want to spread bad news about someone?

Next come Noah’s Prophecies of what will happen to his sons because of how they treated him in the situation. Different commentators say different things about what this means or when the prophecies were made. Some people believe that Noah’s parting remarks were not made at the time of his drunkenness, but later at the end of his life, after Ham’s son Canaan had grown up and proven to be a chip off the old block.

Ham’s descendants, starting with Canaan, were to be cursed, and end up in slavery to Shem’s descendants, the people of Israel.

Shem was to be blessed of God as His special people set apart for Himself.

Japheth is thought to be the father of the gentiles, the majority of the inhabitants of the earth. Different commentators read the verse about the tent of Whem differently. Some believe it means that the Gentiles at some point owned the tents of the Israelites, because they were more numerous, and had taken possession of the Israelites. Other commentators think that this means that they eventually become one with the Semites, Shem’s descendants, by being grafted into the vine, being ransomed and adopted into the family of God through the blood of Jesus Christ.