Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Genesis · About this commentary
The bow in the cloud
Genesis 9:8-17
8 God spoke to Noah and to his sons with him, saying, · WEB
God binds himself by a covenant made with every living thing, and hangs the sign of it where he says he will look at it.
The covenant announced before the flood Genesis 6:18 is now established, and the passage is unusually insistent about it. In ten verses the word covenant appears seven times, and establish three, which is the style of a formal instrument rather than of a narrative.
What is striking about its terms is that they run one way. Noah is not asked to do anything. There is no condition, no requirement, and nothing he might fail at — the whole content is what God undertakes. All flesh will not be cut off any more by the waters of the flood. There will never again be a flood to destroy the earth.
The parties are stated with equal insistence, and they are wider than any covenant that follows. It is made with Noah, with his offspring, and with every living creature that is with you: the birds, the livestock, and every animal of the earth. The phrase every living creature recurs four times. This is God binding himself to the animals as well as to the family, which is consistent with a book that has had him blessing sea creatures and remembering livestock by name.
And then the sign: I set my rainbow in the cloud, and it will be a sign of a covenant between me and the earth. The word is the ordinary one for the weapon — a bow — and it is set in the sky at rest, pointed away, appearing precisely when the rain is falling and the memory of water is nearest.
What is said about its purpose is the most remarkable thing in the paragraph, and it is easily misread. The sign is not given so that people will remember. I will remember my covenant, God says, and then again: The rainbow will be in the cloud. I will look at it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant.
God appoints a reminder for himself. This is the same vocabulary as God remembered Noah — not a repair for forgetfulness but the language of acting on a commitment — and the effect of putting it this way is to move the security of the promise entirely off the human side. The bow does not depend on anyone seeing it or understanding it. It hangs where God says he will look.
The covenant is called everlasting, and its scope is the earth and all flesh on it. It is the first of the great covenants of Scripture, and it is worth noticing what kind it is: unconditional, universal, made with a whole world rather than a chosen people, and signed with something visible to everyone.
So the flood narrative, which began with a corrupt earth and a sentence of destruction, ends with a promise God made to the guilty and secured against himself. The next thing the chapter records is Noah drunk in his tent, which is the writer's way of showing what kind of world the promise was made to.
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