Genesis 9

Notes

1. Reading↩ Back to the text

   Rulings 2, 52

   "Like the green of plant" points back to 1:29–30, where the human was given every seeding plant and the animals "all green of plant" (יֶרֶק עֵשֶׂב) for eating. The allowance now extends to everything that lives, with one exception (v. 4). The rabbis date the permission to eat flesh from this verse (b. Sanhedrin 59b).

2. Decision↩ Back to the text

   Expected: "But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat" (KJV) / "Only you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood" (RSV)

   Rulings 2, 39

   נֶפֶשׁ is "soul" (core), and the English keeps it where the KJV and RSV print "life": the verse is the ground of Lev 17:11, 14, "the soul of the flesh is in the blood," and of Deut 12:23, "the blood is the soul." "Its blood" stands in apposition to "its soul." The rabbis read the verse as one of the seven commandments given to the children of Noah, the limb torn from a living animal (b. Sanhedrin 56a–59a); Acts 15:20, 29 lays "blood" and "what is strangled" on the gentile believers. The WPRB has "life," by its mechanical rule 4.

3. Decision↩ Back to the text

   Expected: "And surely" (KJV, RSV)

   Rulings 2, 20

   אַךְ is "only," restrictive, in v. 4 and 7:23; here, at the head of a new clause and with the conjunction, it is asseverative, "surely," as in 44:28 ("surely he is torn") and 1 Sam 16:6. The split is by construction (20; row at Gen 7). The two uses stand side by side, "only flesh with its soul" and "surely your blood," and the KJV and RSV mark the difference in the same way.

4. Decision↩ Back to the text

   Expected: "will I require" (KJV, RSV)

   Rulings 2, 46

   דָּרַשׁ is to inquire, seek out, ask after: Rebekah "went to inquire of Adonai" (25:22); "inquire after the peace of the city" (Jer 29:7). With blood it is the inquest into a death: "the one who inquires after bloods remembers them" (Ps 9:13); "his blood is being inquired after" (42:22). "Require" makes it a debt; "inquire after" keeps the investigation. "From the hand of a man, his brother" is the Hebrew's "each one… the other" (as in 13:11; 26:31), which also makes every human the brother of the one he kills, after Abel (4:9).

5. Decision↩ Back to the text

   Expected: "by man shall his blood be shed" (KJV, RSV)

   Rulings 1, 46

   בָּאָדָם is read three ways. (a) Agency, "by a human": human courts or avengers carry out the sentence (KJV, RSV; Targum Onkelos, "with witnesses, by the sentence of judges"). (b) Price, "for the human," the בְּ of exchange: his blood for the human's blood (Deut 19:21). (c) Place, "in the human": Rabbi Ishmael in b. Sanhedrin 57b reads "whoever spills the blood of the human in the human," the unborn child within its mother, as a capital crime for the children of Noah. "By" holds (a) and, less easily, (b); (c) is given here. The article of the Masoretic vowels (בָּאָדָם) is kept: "by the human."

6. Decision↩ Back to the text

   Expected: "God" (KJV, RSV)

   Rulings 38, 9, 92

   Three times in this chapter אֱלֹהִים stands where no verb agrees with it in its own clause: "in the icon of Elohim he made" (v. 6), "between Elohim and every living soul" (v. 16), "ADONAI, the Elohim of Shem" (v. 26). Each refers to the one speaking or named: the "he" who made the human is the Elohim of 9:1, speaking of himself in the third person; in v. 16 Elohim names himself, and in v. 26 the word stands in apposition to the singular name. The agreement is by reference, not by grammar, and the capital is printed (9); 92 applies only where the article and the open sense meet (6:2, 4, 9, 11). The case is raised in the report.

7. Reading↩ Back to the text

   Rulings 81, 14, 78

   9:6 is lined by the translator under ruling 81(b), for this verse alone. The Leningrad Codex runs it as prose. Its first line is a chiasm of six words, שֹׁפֵךְ דַּם הָאָדָם / בָּאָדָם דָּמוֹ יִשָּׁפֵךְ, spill–blood–human / human–blood–spilled, and the English keeps the order: "spills… blood… human / human… blood… spilled." The colons follow the accents (14): zaqef under the first הָאָדָם, atnach under יִשָּׁפֵךְ. The last line gives the reason from 1:26–27: the human is the icon (core gloss) of Elohim, so the one who spills its blood spills the blood of the icon.

8. Reading↩ Back to the text

   Rulings 2, 37

   בְּרִית "covenant" is held through seven occurrences (vv. 9, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17), and the hiphil of קוּם with it is "make stand" each time it occurs (vv. 9, 11, 17; see the note at 6:18). The covenant is made with "your seed after you" and with every living soul: the first covenant in the Bible is made with animals as well as humans. Its sign is chosen by Elohim, not asked for; its only obligation falls on Elohim.

9. Reading↩ Back to the text

   Ruling 2

   כָּרַת is "cut"; the niphal "be cut off" is the penalty formula of the priestly law (Exod 12:15; Lev 7:20). The same verb "cuts" a covenant (15:18; 21:27). Here the covenant that "stands" promises that flesh will not be "cut off."

10. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Rulings 39, 46

    קֶשֶׁת is the war bow, the archer's weapon (21:16, 20; 27:3; 48:22), and the concrete word is kept (39). "My bow" is Elohim's weapon: "he has bent his bow and made it ready" (Ps 7:13); "he has bent his bow like an enemy" (Lam 2:4); "your bow is stripped bare… sun and moon stood still at the light of your arrows" (Hab 3:9–11). The sign of peace is a weapon set in the cloud. The bow in the cloud returns in Ezek 1:28, the appearance of the glory "like the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud on the day of the downpour." The English "rainbow" would hide the weapon; neither the WPB nor the WPRB prints it.

11. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Ruling 6

    בְּעַנְנִי עָנָן "when I cloud a cloud" is a cognate pair, verb and noun, kept (6); the verb occurs only here in this sense. The noun is the cloud of the wilderness that leads Israel (Exod 13:21) and fills the tent (Exod 40:34).

12. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Ruling 18

    The note on Ham anticipates vv. 22–27 and Gen 10:6, 15–19, where Canaan's sons are listed with the borders of the land Israel will be given. Names of this chapter are in the table below.

    See the table

13. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Rulings 2, 18

    נָפְצָה is "dispersed," from נָפַץ, which also means to shatter (Jer 51:20–23; Ps 2:9). "All the land dispersed": the land stands for those who live in it, as in 11:1, "all the land was one lip." The scattering at Babylon uses another verb, פּוּץ (11:4, 8–9), which is kept apart.

14. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "began to be an husbandman" (KJV) / "was the first tiller of the soil" (RSV)

    Rulings 20, 46

    וַיָּחֶל is the hiphil of חָלַל, "begin" (20), as in 6:1 and 10:8; "a man of the ground" stands in apposition to Noah, and "began" governs "and planted": Noah was the first to plant a vineyard. The KJV makes "a man of the ground" the thing he began to be. The same consonants in other stems mean "profane" (see the note at 4:26), and Genesis Rabbah 36:3 hears it: "he was profaned, made common." Noah was named for comfort "from the ground that Adonai cursed" (5:29); the man of the ground now makes wine, which "gladdens the heart" (Ps 104:15) and undoes him.

15. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Rulings 74, 46

    אָהֳלֹה "his tent" is written with a final ה, an old spelling of the suffix "his" (also 12:8; 13:3; 35:21), which could be read "her tent." Some readers took it so, as the tent of Noah's wife, and joined it to the reading of v. 22 given in the note there. The Masoretic reading "his" is printed. וַיִּתְגַּל is the hithpael of גָּלָה, "he uncovered himself"; the verb is the one of Lev 18 and 20, "you shall not uncover the bareness of…"

16. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "saw the nakedness of his father" (KJV, RSV)

    Rulings 1, 46

    עֶרְוָה is "bareness," the noun of עָרָה "be bare" (Lev 20:18; Isa 32:11), kept apart from עֵירֹם "naked" (3:7) and עָרוֹם "nude" (2:25). In the Torah "the bareness of your father" is a fixed phrase of the incest laws (Lev 18:7–8; 20:11), and the verb "uncover" (v. 21) is its partner. What Ham did is the crux. (a) He saw, and told: the plain sense, and the reason for the brothers' careful backward walk in v. 23. (b) A deed: b. Sanhedrin 70a reports Rav and Samuel, one saying he castrated his father, the other that he abused him; Genesis Rabbah 36:7 has the same pair. (c) Lev 18:8, "the bareness of your father's woman is the bareness of your father": he lay with his father's woman, and Canaan was born of it, which would explain why Canaan is cursed. The verb is "saw" and the noun "bareness," as the Hebrew has them; the English adds nothing and takes nothing away, and the WPRB keeps "saw" and "had done" without saying what was done.

17. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Ruling 46

    בְּנוֹ הַקָּטָן, "his son, the small one," is "his youngest son" by construction (row below), as in 42:13 and 1 Sam 16:11. Ham is listed second among the brothers (5:32; 6:10; 9:18). Hence the readings: Ham is the youngest and the lists are in another order (Rashi); or "small" is "lesser, unworthy"; or the son is a grandson, Canaan, who is cursed next (Genesis Rabbah 36:7). "What he had done to him" keeps the verb the Hebrew has, "done," which says more than "seen" and does not say what (see the note at v. 22).

18. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Rulings 81, 14, 78, 34

    Noah's sayings (vv. 25–27) are lined by the translator under ruling 81(b); the Leningrad Codex runs them as prose. Each is a short line pair, and the refrain "let Canaan be a slave to them" closes vv. 26 and 27. The colons follow the accents (14): atnach under כְּנָעַן in v. 25 and under שֵׁם in vv. 26 and 27; in v. 27 the zaqef under לְיֶפֶת divides the first half. "A slave of slaves" is the Hebrew superlative, as "holy of holies," the lowest slave. עֶבֶד is "slave" (34): the slave is owned, and the curse says so. The curse falls on Canaan, not on Ham, who sinned; the text gives no reason. It became a justification of the enslavement of Africans by a misreading that put Ham in Canaan's place, and the English keeps the name the Hebrew curses.

19. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Rulings 9, 46

    The blessing is spoken over Adonai, not over Shem: "Blessed is Adonai, the Elohim of Shem" (compare 14:20; 24:27). The name of Israel's Elohim is given in the line of Shem, from whom Abram comes (11:10–26). See the note at v. 6 on "Elohim."

20. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem" (KJV) / "God enlarge Japheth, and let him dwell in the tents of Shem" (RSV)

    Rulings 17, 18, 96, 46

    יַפְתְּ is a pun on יֶפֶת "Japheth": "may Elohim make spacious for Japheth" (the hiphil of פָּתָה; row below). English cannot carry it (17). The subject of וְיִשְׁכֹּן is "he": Elohim or Japheth. Targum Onkelos reads Elohim, "and may he make his Shekhinah dwell in the tents of Shem," and the rabbis heard the Temple in it. b. Megillah 9b reads Japheth, with יפת as "beauty": the beauty of Japheth, the Greek language, shall be in the tents of Shem, so the Torah may be written in Greek. "He" keeps both. שָׁכַן is "tent" (96), and the noun אֹהֶל is "tent" too, a declared pair (95): "may he tent in the tents of Shem."

21. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Rulings 91, 18

    The formula of Gen 5 closes Noah's life: "and all the days of… were… and he died" (5:5, 8, 11). Nine hundred and fifty years, in the Hebrew order (91). By the chronology of 11:10–26 Noah lives until Abram is fifty-eight. The producings of Noah (6:9) close here and the producings of his sons begin (10:1).