NOTES for Gen 9:1-29

The covenant with Noah was marked by another fairly important innovation: from then on, human beings were allowed to eat meat. People may, of course, have eaten it before, but now it was blessed by God. True, there was one reservation: meat could be eaten, but without blood, because the soul is in the blood. What is meant here?

In the Bible, the soul is not a structure, not something static; it is rather a process, a dynamic, a flow of life, what a modern philosopher would most likely call existence. According to the biblical witness, animals have the same kind of soul, and for them it is in the blood.

This is understandable: blood is the substance of life, its symbol, at least when we are speaking about natural life. Life belongs to God; no human being can appropriate it. It is not meat, which is now given to humanity for food just as grain and fruit were given for food at creation. Meat is for the human being; life, of which that meat had been the vessel, is for God. The matter is even more interesting, and sadder, with human beings: their soul, the flow of their life, is now also bound to blood.

Before the fall, it was bound to that "breath of life" which God gave the human being at creation, and this was the uniqueness of the human being: human life, the very process of human existence, was determined by God directly through the "breath of life." Now everything has changed: human life has moved into the blood, as in any animal. In a certain sense, the human being has himself become an animal; his existence is now determined not by God, not by the "breath of life," but by nature, by the natural processes that take place in his body.

Accordingly, direct guidance of human life by God is now only something to dream of: at the fall, human bodily existence changed so that a human being could live in a semi-autonomous mode, like all the animals whom he has now come to resemble. Now, in order to come even a little closer to the former state before the fall, a person has to make an effort so that God may once again begin to determine his life through the "breath of life," which after the fall a person at times barely notices within himself and almost forgets.

The human being remained a spiritual-natural creature, but if before the fall his natural state was spiritual life, so that the spirit within him determined the life and activity of his nature, now his natural state has become a natural one, so that nature now determines the limits of the existence and manifestation of his spirit. These are the fruits of the fall, with which even a righteous person such as Noah has to make peace.

Why does the rainbow become the sign of the covenant that God makes with Noah and, in his person, with all the righteous of all times and nations? In antiquity, the overwhelming majority of peoples regarded the rainbow as a bridge joining heaven and earth. Along this bridge, as they thought, the gods who lived in the heavens descended to earth to human beings in order to enter into communion with them. Of course, the sacred writer sees the God of the Bible in no way as the ancient pagans saw their gods. But he preserves the image of the rainbow, making it a symbol of the covenant. And, apparently, the chief meaning of this symbol, the meaning contained in it from the beginning, becomes the connection between heaven and earth.

Indeed, any covenant-union presupposes special relations between those who make it, in this case between God and those righteous people who, like Noah, matter so much to God that He is ready to save them even when all the rest of humanity is doomed. But something else is important for the destinies of humanity: God is ready to stop the coming catastrophe for the sake of those righteous people with whom He has made a union. And the rainbow is a living reminder, and therefore an actualization of the relations that the union presupposes. Strictly speaking, it is precisely these relations that save the world from catastrophe.

Of course, one cannot count on more here: the covenant with Noah is not enough to change the situation in the world radically. What is needed here is the people of God with their history, ending in the coming of the Messiah. But it is enough to save the world from catastrophe. And that is already no small thing: thanks to the covenant with Noah, humanity receives the possibility of living until its salvation.

One often hears from a person who has read the Bible, as also from one who has not read it, the question: why is all this history needed at all? Why does God need some special people whom He calls His own, why this special religion, and Christ too: why? Were there not enough good people in the world before Christ and before Abraham, and are there not such people now even among unbelievers, not to mention those who believe differently from Christians? How are these good and even, in their own way, believing people worse than the Jews or Christians chosen by God? After all, neither group as a whole is anywhere near ideal, and among both one meets all kinds of people. Is this game begun by God, this grand project that appears not to bring the expected results, really worth the trouble?

The parable of Noah, usually called the story of the flood, though the flood is exactly what concerns the author least of all, gives the answer to this question. This answer consists above all in the fact that God is not indifferent to "good people," whom the Bible usually calls the righteous. The righteous really did exist in the world long before Abraham, before the beginning of the history of the people of God. The image of Noah is the collective image of these righteous people, and it is not so important who historically stands behind this image from the biblical parable.

Something else matters: all righteousness is absolutely important to God, important enough that He is ready to make a covenant with everyone who is ready to walk His way, whenever and wherever such a person may live. Yet for all the importance of such righteousness, it turns out to be insufficient. It is enough only so that the world will not again be struck by catastrophe, so that it will not collapse into the abyss. All the efforts of all the righteous of the pagan world are enough only to maintain the status quo.

This is not enough for God: He wants to change the situation radically. It is important to Him not merely to draw the world back from the precipice, but also to direct it onto another path and in the end to save and transform it so that the world becomes a full part of His Kingdom. Here all the righteousness of the pagan world is not enough; special efforts are needed, a special revelation and a special people who will become its bearer and guardian, and finally the Messiah, through whom the Kingdom will enter the world, transforming it.

In Noah's time all this history still lies ahead, but God's plan already exists, and He has already begun to act. Only the first step has been taken, but without the first step there will be no following steps, and therefore no whole history of salvation.

Two things are not easy to understand. First, Ham's guilt seems out of proportion to the punishment; we tend to minimize his guilt, especially in the face of such a terrible punishment. And second, it is unclear why Ham sinned, but his son Canaan and all the line that followed were cursed: not Ham and all his line, but precisely from Canaan onward.

In fact, we must consider Ham's sin on the same scale as the fall of Adam and Eve or the sin of Cain, as a very important event described in highly symbolic language, an event that affected the fate of many, many people in later generations. A person and another person's sin, Ham and Noah's sin: this is the original situation. How should one relate to another person's sin? Noah's nakedness becomes the key point. There is nothing scandalous or ill-mannered here. Here, as in the account of the fall of Adam and Eve, nakedness means a self-willed departure from under God's protection, defenselessness. The one who has sinned is defenseless, and the one who is nearby must return that protection to him, even if not in full, as it was in Eden, then at least in the form possible in the fallen world. The symbol of this protection, already familiar to us from the fall of Adam and Eve, is the covering of nakedness. This is precisely what Ham does not do.

Why, then, was Canaan cursed, and not Ham? According to the interpretation of St. Philaret (Drozdov), "Noah spared Ham, respecting the blessing of God in which he had participated after coming out of the ark". He adds that perhaps there is also a prophecy here about future sins. Other interpretations can surely be given as well.

It is important to understand that such is the law of sin: it has the power to penetrate through generations of people, it is inherited, and this is one of the chief and most terrible properties of evil. This is not at all about the vindictiveness of God or of His people, such as the patriarch Noah.