Genesis 9:1-7 - Noah's Blessing

THE BLESSING

The first thing to notice about Noah's Blessing is what I call the sandwich effect - a style of writing that is very common in the Bible.  In the sandwich effect, two identical passages begin a section and end the section.  In Genesis 9, the passages before and after are:

God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth (Genesis 9:1)." and  But you, be fruitful and multiply; spread out over the earth and multiply on it (Genesis 9:7).” Everything in the middle then belongs to these verses.  So what is in the middle?  And how does it relate to the blessing? IN THE MIDDLE 1.  God puts the fear of humanity into the animals. 2.  God gives humanity rule over animals: 3.  God gives humanity animals to eat for the first time.  Until Genesis 9 people were vegetarians. 4.  God forbids eating blood. 5.  Capital punishment is required for any animal or human who kills a human being. CONTEXT Just before Genesis 9 Noah and the animals entered the ark. God flooded the world and then Noah and his family walked safely back onto dry ground.  From the writing about this journey in Genesis, the only clearly defined sin that provoked the destruction of the world at that time was the sin of violence - the world was filled with violence (Genesis 6:13).  What kind of violence was around before the flood? Before the flood was even mentioned, the violence in Genesis consisted of Cain who killed his brother Abel, and Lamech who killed a man for hurting him.  In the passage I am studying (Genesis 9), the only mention of violence is murder either caused from animals or people.  So I conclude that the world was destroyed because people murdered each other. WORD STUDIES Fruitful (Parah) The word fruitful no doubt is taken from the image of a tree bearing plenty of fruit.  In Genesis it is used 14 times in the sense of people prospering and having children.  As such it is a dominant theme in Genesis.  Being fruitful was one of the main values held dear to the people of the time. As I read the many times parah is used in Genesis, I discover that being fruitful meant prospering in every way, and most of all in having children and a large family that continued to grow into future generations.  God's blessing for Noah and his sons was exactly for that type of growth.  God's placing barriers and consequences around animals and people was designed to protect people from the loss of becoming fruitful due to an untimely death.  For the biggest barrier of becoming fruitful was being killed either from a human or from an animal. Replenish (Male') The word "replenish" in the Hebrew does not add much more than how it is translated into the English.  It simply means to fill up; "fill the earth" and "the earth was filled with violence" are the only ways the word was used in the early chapters of Genesis. CONTEXT What Went Before The LORD smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: “Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done. (Genesis 8:21) Before this blessing, Noah left the ark after God had destroyed people, animals, and the entire world.  Upon leaving the ark, Noah sacrificed some of the animals to God (even though the animals went in 2 by 2, there were 7 of each that went into the ark).  After Noah's sacrifice and before this blessing, with the sacrifices fresh before God, God reconciled Himself to the fact that killing all things was not going to happen again.  God accepted that people will be violent. What Went After Immediately after the blessing, God made a covenant between humanity, animals, the earth and Himself. The covenant was a vow never again to destroy the earth with water. CONCLUSIONS Even though there was only 2 cases of violence mentioned in the early chapters of Genesis, we can assume that there was a lot of it going on.  Genesis 9:1-7 introduced protection measures that God set up for humanity to escape violence.  By putting fear into animals, generally they would shy away from humans rather than attack them.  By giving humanity dominance over the animals, God was protecting humans even more from animals attacking. By giving humans the right to kill and eat animals gave us even further protection and dominance over the animal kingdom.  With all these measures sandwiched in the middle of a blessing, animals were no longer as much of a threat. Within the blessing was one more protective decree.  Capital punishment was set up to deter individuals from killing others.  The threat would always remain that if you kill someone, you must be killed. Before this announcement, people killed without the consequence of the death penalty.  Cain was the prime example.  After he killed Abel, God sent him out from the good land (Genesis 4:16 suggest that he was expelled from the land where God presence dwelt) and made him to be a wanderer away from God's presence.