NOTES for Gen 9:18-28

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.

As the sign of the covenant, such a bright and radiant phenomenon as the rainbow is chosen. A rainbow appears after rain, when everything around has been washed by water, and leaves and grass sparkle... The rainbow symbolizes the cleansing action of God's mercy. The Lord looked again at the world He had created and perhaps remembered again that all creation was very good. God promises to protect the earth from a flood. He is hardly counting on Noah's descendants being much more righteous than the generation that perished in the flood. Rather, He decides to show them greater mercy.

The tenth chapter of Genesis is devoted entirely to describing the settlement of Noah's descendants throughout the earth. In a certain sense it resembles the pre-flood genealogies, but with one important difference: here there is still a certain geographical anchoring. At least we can speak of the Near Eastern region as the territory occupied by Noah's descendants. Such localization should not surprise us: the flood, although the Bible calls it worldwide, is in fact described as a more or less local event connected with that same Near Eastern area. And the whole Prologue of Genesis has primarily the Near East in view; the territory, for example, "east of Eden," where Cain goes after murdering his brother, in effect takes him beyond the bounds of God's world. Eden, if we follow the sacred geography of the Prologue of Genesis, is in Mesopotamia. The eastern border of Mesopotamia is already the border of God's world.

There is nothing surprising here: the point is not the earth as a whole, but a concrete inhabited world, a territory that the bearers of one civilization or another perceive as their own, so that on it they feel, if not at home, since an inhabited world does not have to coincide with state borders, then at least in their own familiar world. For a Jew of the sixth century before Christ, when Genesis as we know it today was written, the inhabited world was the territory from the Ionian islands in the west to the eastern border of Mesopotamia in the east, and from Asia Minor in the north to Egypt in the south. Everything beyond that was another world, alien and foreign.

If a catastrophe occurs on the scale of the inhabited world, for its inhabitants it becomes worldwide, perhaps even universal. There were quite a few such catastrophes in antiquity that affected the whole Near Eastern civilizational region; hence the traditions about a flood, naturally a worldwide one. And the settlement of the world after the flood also takes place on the scale of the Near Eastern inhabited world, which is entirely logical.

There in the Near East, beginning with the age of the first great civilizations, representatives of three large ethnic, and therefore linguistic, families really did live: Hamitic, Semitic, and Aryan. The last were speakers of languages of the Indo-European family, and even in the first half of the last century scholarly literature called them Japhethites. The world is populated anew after the flood, becoming different and at the same time remaining itself, as always happens after cataclysms and catastrophes.

By the sons of Noah, according to St. Augustine, entire peoples are meant. Here a genealogical table of these peoples is presented, grouped not so much on the basis of ethnic kinship as on the basis of historical and geographical proximity. The sons of Japheth inhabit Asia Minor and the islands of the Mediterranean Sea; the sons of Ham inhabit the southern countries: Egypt, Ethiopia, Arabia, and Canaan, probably in connection with Egyptian domination over it. In the territory located between the places where these ethnic groups settled, the descendants of Shem settled: Elamites, Assyrians, Arameans, and the ancestors of the Jews. Summing up his knowledge of the world around him, the sacred writer affirms the unity of the human race, descended from one ancestor. The scattering is presented, on the one hand, as a consequence of God's blessing and, on the other hand, as a consequence of the human choice that seeks power over a world in which there is no place for God.