A Covenant?

 Genesis 9-10

            Through the great flood, God pressed reset on the earth. He had washed the worst of human sin off the earth, and in Genesis 9:1 He reiterated the command of Genesis 1:28 to be fruitful and multiply. The particular proof of that new start was God’s covenant.

            Covenant is an important word in the Bible, appearing over 300 times. It’s first used in Genesis 6:18, and it’s repeated seven times in Genesis 9 alone. Unfortunately, it’s not a word that we use much in modern English, so it takes a little explanation.

            In its most basic sense, a covenant is simply an agreement, a legal agreement. In the ancient Near East, there were several kinds of covenants, two of which are most prominent in the Bible. First, there is a royal grant covenant, in which a king or superior of some kind gives an underling some kind of gift. Such a covenant was unconditional and irrevocable, at least in the lifetime of the grantee. That’s the kind of covenant we have in Genesis 9. The Lord makes a promise to Noah and his descendants and with the living creatures: Never again will I flood the earth like that. The sign, the reminder, of that promise is the rainbow. It is interesting to me that in Hebrew the word for “rainbow” is really just “bow,” as in “bow and arrow.” The idea is that God is hanging up His bow; it’s no longer pointed at the earth; it’s pointing harmlessly skyward.

            The second kind of covenant is called a suzerain-vassal covenant. This is also made by a king to an underling, but this one is conditional. It lays out mutual obligations: “I, the king, the suzerain, will provide protection, etc., but only as long as you, the underling, the vassal, do these things.” The covenant that the Lord makes with Israel at Mt. Sinai is of this type.

            Distinguishing these two kinds of covenants is hugely important for understanding the Bible. The covenant of Sinai looms large through the pages of the Old Testament, but, as Paul teaches in Galatians 3-4, the Sinaitic covenant also only applied to Israel until the Messiah appeared. Therefore, we latter day readers need to be very careful how we apply the ‘if/thens’ of the Old Testament. We’ll have many opportunities to think about this over the next two years.

            Two other things to note briefly: first, it’s important that humans are given permission to eat animals (properly prepared) after the flood. I take that as an indication of how thoroughly the world was changed by the flood. Even nutrition is harder to come by. This is also indicated in the rapidly declining lifespans in chapter 11 (an issue for tomorrow). Second, the incident with Noah’s drunkenness shows us that the world may have been reset by the flood, but the problem of human sin was not cured. Noah is implicitly criticized for his drunkenness and Ham is outright cursed for his shamelessness and immodesty.