Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Genesis · About this commentary
Blessing renewed, and the life in the blood
Genesis 9:1-7
1 God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, “Be fruitful, multiply, and replenish the earth. · WEB
The commission of Eden is restated to a family of eight, with two changes and one prohibition grounded in the image of God.
God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, "Be fruitful, multiply, and replenish the earth." The words are Eden's, spoken again to eight people standing beside an altar. Whatever the flood did, it did not cancel the commission given at the making of the world, and the human race resumes under the same charge.
But two things have changed, and the passage is honest about both.
The first is the relation to the animals. In Eden it was dominion; here it is the fear of you and the dread of you will be on every animal of the earth. The words are not the language of stewardship. Something in the arrangement has been damaged, and what governs the animal world now is not the man's authority but its terror of him.
The second is diet. Every moving thing that lives will be food for you. As I gave you the green herb, I have given everything to you. In chapter one the food appointed for humans and animals alike was plants Genesis 1:29–30. The permission to eat flesh is given here, after the flood, and is stated as an addition to what was given before rather than as the original arrangement. That sequence is worth holding: the world as God made it had nothing killed for food in it, and what is granted to Noah is a concession within a changed world.
And the permission arrives with an immediate limit: But flesh with its life, that is, its blood, you shall not eat. The reason is supplied inside the sentence — the blood is identified with the life. Whatever else is permitted, the life belongs to God, and the restriction is stated to the whole human race here, long before Israel exists. It is repeated in the law Leviticus 17:11, and it is one of the four things the Jerusalem council asked Gentile believers to observe Acts 15:20.
Then the sentence rises from animals to human life and becomes an accounting: I will surely require accounting for your life's blood. God states that he personally requires it, from animals and from men — and the phrase at the hand of every man's brother reaches back to a field where a brother's blood cried from the ground.
The principle is then given in a line built like a proverb, with the reason attached: Whoever sheds man's blood, his blood will be shed by man, for God made man in his own image.
The ground of it is the image, and that is the whole argument. Human life is protected not because people are useful, or good, or numerous, but because they carry the likeness of God — which is stated of every person, after the fall and after the flood, without qualification. The same premise that makes murder the gravest offense against a neighbor also makes contempt for any human being an offense against the one whose image is being despised.
And the paragraph closes as it opened, with the blessing repeated: Be fruitful and multiply.
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