Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Genesis · About this commentary
The altar, and never again
Genesis 8:15-22
15 God spoke to Noah, saying, · WEB
The first act on dry ground is worship, and God's response is a promise grounded in the very fact that had provoked the flood.
The waiting ends the way it began, with a word from God: Go out of the ship. The command answers the come into the ship of the previous chapter, and Noah, who did not open the door, does not leave until he is told.
The instruction includes the animals and the reason for including them: that they may breed abundantly on the earth, and be fruitful, and multiply on the earth. The blessing spoken over the creatures on the fifth day is being restated on the far side of the judgment, in the same words. Whatever the flood destroyed, it did not revoke that.
Then the first recorded act of the new world, and it is not shelter, planting, or an inventory. Noah built an altar to Yahweh, and took of every clean animal, and of every clean bird, and offered burnt offerings on the altar. This is the first altar in Scripture. It also explains the extra clean animals loaded in sevens, and it costs him something at the moment he has least to spare — a man with a single breeding population of every kind takes from it and gives it back.
God's response is described in a striking phrase: Yahweh smelled the pleasant aroma. The language is deliberately physical and is used throughout the law for sacrifice accepted. What follows it is the most important promise in the chapter, and it is spoken in his heart rather than to Noah — the reader is admitted to God's own resolve before Noah hears any of it.
I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake because the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth.
The word because in that sentence is one of the most surprising in the Bible. The identical assessment of the human heart was the stated reason for sending the flood Genesis 6:5. Here it is the stated reason for never sending another. The same fact appears on both sides, and what has changed is not humanity but God's declared way of dealing with it. Judgment by inundation would have to be repeated endlessly against a condition that persists, so God binds himself to another approach — and the rest of Scripture is that approach.
The promise is then made concrete in a way a farmer can check: While the earth remains, seed time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night will not cease. Six pairs, covering the agricultural year and the daily round. The reliability of the seasons is not presented as a fact of nature but as a commitment God has made, and every harvest since is offered as evidence that he keeps it.
And the phrase while the earth remains is quietly honest about the limit. The promise concerns floods and it concerns this age. It does not promise that the world continues forever, and Scripture elsewhere is explicit that it will not 2 Peter 3:7.
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