GENESIS CHAPTER 9
This chapter gives Noah’s family and personal fall, and the judgment on Canaan, son of Ham. It is Noah’s personal history and prophecy; but it was the fall of the head of the [p. 56] new world, with all its consequent history. Babylon was another thing — association to make a centre to themselves without God. Then God constitutes nations out of a family, or three families, at most. It is the actual basis of the state of the existing world — the world such as it is.
— 2. What a different dominion from Adam’s! (chapter 2: 19, 20). God there, as Creator, puts all living animals under Adam’s power; he names them. Here, God is a preserver, soter, but the animals are merely placed in Noah’s power, and fear, the character of relationship; Noah is their destroyer, whom they fear. Blood is put into his hand in the way of government, for blood shedding, life taking, was in the earth. It is clearly a setting of the whole thing upon a new system, and footing (compare chapter 1: 28, 29).
— 6. This puts evidently the image of God on a different footing from moral qualities.
— 20. The history of Noah, and his patriarchal prophecy.
— 26, 27. Is it intended, the difference of Shem and Japheth? Jehovah, the name of relationship with Shem — Jehovah, the God of Shem; and Elohim, simply the fact of divine power and providence — “God shall enlarge him”; he gets the world, as such, when direct relationship is not established in the world; this is the basis of the world’s history.
The whole chapter gives the relationship of God with the new world and its order; this is the world’s history in general, in prophetic plan according to God.