An Atheistic Bible Study Of Genesis Chapters Nine And Ten – After Noah

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Chapter Nine The only eight humans left on Earth prepare to move out from the Ark into the barren World that is only just starting to heal after the genocidal Flood. God bestows his blessings on Noah and his sons, but says nothing about their respective wives. God tell the men to start multiplying fruitfully, which must be obvious to them given the state of the World before them. Without the four women getting pregnant human beings are going to perish. God warns Noah that all creatures on Earth and all nature will fear us because we are superior to them. Given that we have messed up the environment for them all this might be one of the few points the Bible gets right. God then spoils this by telling us that everything that lives and moves will feed us. No, many creatures and plants are poisonous to us. God imposes the first real kosher law by outlawing the consumption of anything while it till bleeds. In other words, our food meat must be dead and properly cooked. Having a blood red rare steak is not acceptable to God. God makes it clear that he will keep an account of every animal we kill for our food supplies. Preparing food properly makes sense of course if we don’t want to die of food poisoning. God then adds that if a man kills a man, other men have a right to kill the killer due to all men being created in God’s image. Here is an open declaration of support for capital punishment, not for just the killing in itself but due to it being the killing of a perception of God. It smacks of great vanity by God. God again reminds Noah and his three sons to go forth and multiply (get their wives pregnant). God then promises Noah that he will never again Flood the Earth to kill most of its life off with water. He states this as a divine covenant or oath, his first of many. The reason he won’t drown us all of course is as his future prophesized destructions will involve fire instead. God now invents the rainbow, setting it in the sky after ordinary rain storms to show that he still loves us and that this rain wasn’t the start of a new Flood. That rainbows are just a natural result of light shining through water, and visible in waterfalls, the spray from lawn-sprinklers and totally understandable through scientific observation. God says then that when he (God) sees the rainbow among rain clouds he (God) will be reminded of his covenant promise not to use the rain to drown us all. Why would he need to remind himself not to commit a second colossal mass murder? Why did he even commit the first one? The focus of Genesis now switches to Noah’s three sons, Shem, Ham and Japeth. Their offspring were allegedly destined to repopulate the World. Ham’s sons become the population of the Biblical city of Caanan, which will be referenced a lot in the pages to come. Noah himself meanwhile, settles down and grows himself a vineyard, and gets drunk on the wine he produces. Drunk and naked, his nudity shocks his sons who walk towards him backwards to avoid looking at him and wrap him in robes to give him back some dignity. Noah wakes, still in a drunken stupor and curses the citizens of Canaan because of Ham’s part in getting him dressed and safely to bed. Noah curses the Canaanites with slavery. Oddly he wants the descendants of the other two brothers to be the slave masters, even though they assisted Shem in dressing him to cover his shameful state. He has cursed his son for helping him. There’s gratitude for you. Noah lives for another 350 years and finally dies at the age of 950, with hi decent into alcoholism being rather an ignoble undignified ending for him after being singled out by God as the one family leader worth saving from the Flood. It is not surprising that there should be a Flood related myth, and in fact there are several, including that in the Epic Of Gilgamesh which the Noah story borrows from. Early human settlements started at the close of the ice age, when melting ice would have caused waters to rise. Also, mot people lived close to rivers, streams and lakes where they could easily access fresh drinking water so when these waters rose as any tidal river would from time to time, settlements could be flooded. Memories of particularly bad or fatal floods might well have fuelled the legends and myths of Noah’s Ark. Chapter Ten This is little more than a list of the names of the descendants of Noah’s three sons. Most are just the names of peoples of the cities they found, with no timelines or ages given unlike the peoples leading up to Noah’ generation. Only a few people and cities are given any description beyond their listed names. The Rodanin, (descended from Japeth) are seen as seafarers who went out to populate lands beyond the Near East. We are told they had their own languages, even though the division of language only originates with the fall of Babel in the next chapter. Nimrod, descended from Ham’s bloodline, is described as a mighty hunter, highly respected by God, Nimrod founds Babylon and Nineveh among other cities. He is the first named king on Earth. We get no more information on him beyond that. Thus the Earth was repopulated fully, much as it was before the Flood that God interrupted our progress with. Here endeth the chapter. Arthur Chappell