Joe Dude's Bible Thoughts: Genesis 9

There's that whole "fruitful and multiply" thing again, just like before.

But now we have something new -- there's no happy relationship between man and animal any longer. The fear of man is now in them, which goes along with the other new thing -- man is now permitted to eat the animals, but not their blood. I've heard it put this way -- "why bother with finer commands like 'don't eat the animals' when man is still having trouble with weightier moral concepts like 'don't murder each other'". I don't find direct support for that, but it's an interesting thought.

I think it's interesting that God does not permit the eating of animals with the blood still in them. I take that to mean "don't eat them raw" though I suppose you could still drain the blood out and not cook the meat. I don't know why the command was given. Raw meat really could cause a person some internal trouble, so perhaps there is a dietary motive behind it from a compassionate God who knows that people don't know a thing about bacteria and other really small things yet.

The next part is one of the places people jump to when drumming up support for the death penalty -- "whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image." One could spin this a couple of ways, but the straightforward reading to me seems that we're talking about justice here -- though it also seems to me that God is more saying how it is going to be rather than issuing a hard command. I.e. "Because you are made in my image, you have this sense of justice inside, and will therefore dole out punishments that fit the crime." I could be off the mark, but it seems reasonable.

God's promise that the earth will not be destroyed by flood makes me at ease about the polar ice caps melting. Not really, that was just a bad joke. :-) It however seems to say something about God when he makes a promise with "all flesh" -- not just man, but every living creature. God does care about his creation.

The whole "Ham saw his dad naked" thing puzzles me. There's a lot of theories, but if I just start with what I read and try to draw solid conclusions from that, I come up a fair bit short. Ham did something he shouldn't have and Noah cursed his kid for it. I started to read some detailed commentary on this, and my head hurt. But I did notice this -- the Bible doesn't say that God cursed anybody here, only that Noah did. Could it be possible that we read too much into the account, and what we have here is a drunk guy waking up and getting ticked off at his kid for doing something stupid or outright sinful? I don't know, but it seems there is an awful lot of speculation around these parts in scripture.

Really I think God just puts up with a lot of our silly ideas (including my own) and just lets them be as he works on more important things in our lives. Just flip ahead and look at the way Jesus speaks to various groups, including his own disciples and the religious leaders -- the way they ask some things speaks to "weird" ideas about God, and Jesus just kind of glosses over it and tells it like it is9