The flood waters have receded and Noah’s family is still standing around the altar as we pick back up where chapter 8 stopped.
(Those pesky chapter breaks! If you want to be a better student of scripture, ignore them. Read the whole context until the narrative itself suggests a stopping spot.)
Something I hadn’t paid much attention to before: God repeats the Edenic Dominion mandate to them. Twice. 9:1 & 7. I’ve heard people say that Adam & Eve forfeited dominion to the serpent so now it’s just gone til Jesus comes. But is that true? If God repeated to Noah and family the call to exercise dominion on His behalf, umm, when exactly did it go away?
Again, this is not dominion over other humans but over the plants, waters, earth, air and animals. How are we doing on that? Have the people of God abandoned this call to the environmentalists and earth-worshipers? I’m not going to elaborate more (however much I am tempted).
Then we have the icky incident in the tent. It takes a good working knowledge of Leviticus 18 to tease out (for our clunky 21st century minds) what is being relayed here. By the way, heads up, this is adult content. Here are 3 data points from Leviticus 18 necessary to understand Genesis 9:
- The wicked behaviors addressed are said to be characteristic of Egypt and Canaan. (V3)
- Verses 19-20 make it clear that “exposing the nakedness” is an OT euphemism for sex.
- Verse 8, “exposing the nakedness of” (to have sex with) “your Father’s wife” = “your Father’s nakedness.”
Credit to Dr. Michael Heiser for confirming what I suspected for a long time. That this wasn’t a “peeping Tom” incident. He explained that this was actually fairly common practice in the ancient world. When a younger man sought to assert his dominance over the tribe and become the new leader, he would incapacitate the weaker old man and have sex with that man’s wives and concubines. David’s son Absalom did this. In public. 😳 See 2 Sam. 16:21-22.
It seems that Ham is doing the same here. And gets Noah’s wife pregnant. Could this woman have been his own mother? Probably. Extra-biblical sources give her the name Naamah. (So now you can stop calling her “Mrs. Noah”) Why would we suspect she became pregnant? Well, hang on. This about to get as weird as that song, “I’m My Own Grandpa.”
First…Canaan. If you recall, Genesis chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8 have made it very clear that Noah has three sons; Shem, Ham, Japheth. They have wives. Where did the new guy come from? Ham is his father. But Shem and Japheth are his brothers and uncles. So they have to have the same mother.
We can work this out from the curse pronounced by Noah: “Cursed be Canaan: a servant shall he be to his brothers.”
Then, “Blessed be the Lord God of Shem, and Canaan shall be his servant.”
And, “May God enlarge Japheth…let Canaan be his servant as well.”
Who is Canaan to be a servant to? His “brothers.” Who are his brothers? (To whom is he a servant?) Shem and Japheth.
In order to be brothers you must have a shared parent. But we notice that Genesis 9:18 makes it very clear that while Noah is the father of Shem, Ham, and Japheth; “Ham was the father of Canaan.” The only way to get here is Ham getting his own mother, the wife of Noah and mother of Shem and Japheth pregnant with Ham’s child.
This offspring of incest became the ancestor of every problem the Israelites will have for the rest of the OT. Think I’m exaggerating? This is why we don’t skip genealogies. Who enslaved the Hebrews? Egypt. Egypt was called “Mizraim” in ancient times. Who was the father of the tribal founder, Mizraim? Ham. Ham begat Cush who begat Nimrod. I’ll not even open the huge can of ancient worms that is Nimrod except to point him out as the founding father (literally) of Babylon and Nineveh. Who dealt the death blow to the Northern Kingdom of Israel? The Assyrians. Capitol: Nineveh. Who ended the Davidic dynasty in Judah? Babylon. What tribes were the perpetual thorn in Israel’s side, luring them into occultism and detestable idolatry? The Canaanites. Gen. 10:6-20 reads like a Who’s Who of the enemies of God’s people.
Bible student tip: remember what you’ve read. This isn’t short-term cramming just to pass a test and promptly forget it. School taught you that habit. I’m sorry. Ask the Lord for help to break out of the read-it-and-forget-it pattern if that’s you. From now on, when you read something, think about it for the purpose of remembering it. This is an epic story and the characters we read about now will pop up again later.
Finally we get to the Tower of Babel. Let’s pause to remember the last command God gave to humanity: “increase, multiply, fill the earth, have dominion.” Contrast that with the tower builders when they say- let’s make bricks and a city and a tower and a “name for ourselves lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the earth.”
Make no mistake, the tower project is fundamentally rebellion. It’s all of humanity in agreement to choose themselves over YHWH. By the way, no atheists in this lot. Shem was still alive who knew his great-grandpa Methsulelah who knew Adam. The flood wasn’t a debated myth. They knew YHWH was real. They just didn’t want to obey Him.
Oh, and I strongly suspect that when they said they intended to “reach into heaven,” that wasn’t as silly as we tend to think. Let’s not assume these antediluvian people thought they were going to build the ancient equivalent of a space elevator. I hope you don’t think of the spiritual realm as make-believe. That’s what they were attempting to access. On their own terms. Humans have learned nothing. There are still people pursuing access to the spirit realm on their own terms. Astral projection. Psychedelic trips. Spirit guides and shamans. Please don’t brush off Babal as a quaint story of knuckle-dragging ancients who cutely thought they could build a brick tower to touch the sun and moon. If it were only that, God would’ve sat back laughing, rather than personally doing an intervention.
At the request of my Bible study group, I’m inserting here a comment about Babel that I shared on our group chat…
🧱 Babel was built of bricks. Bricks are simpler to build with. They’re uniform. They conform to a system, a pre-determined standard. You can scale-up brick production with an assembly line and crank out structures.
Bricks are interchangeable. In a stack of identical bricks, it doesn’t matter which one goes where. Their worth is only as part of the whole.
But God never builds with bricks. God never asks people to build with bricks. God’s building projects involve natural stone. Sometimes “hewn” (Solomon’s Temple), sometimes “unhewn” (altars of Israel). Stones are unique. And because they are, it takes patience and expertise to fit just the right stone into just the right space. Each one may be valued for BOTH its individual beauty AND its place in the whole structure. The 12 foundations of New Jerusalem are made of precious stones. The walls are made of jasper stone. Peter calls believers “living stones” that God is building into a spiritual house. Jesus is the Cornerstone of that house. Then there’s Isaiah:
“Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness, you who seek the Lord: look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were dug. Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you; for he was but one when I called him, that I might bless him and multiply him.” – Isaiah 51:1-2 ESV
“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” – Romans 12:2 ESV
Don’t be a brick in Babel. Don’t conform to the world system and be an obedient little cog in the machine.
Be organic. Be a living stone.
🗿🧱
Babel is the final story of God interacting with ALL of humanity until we get to the book of Acts. For the next 2000 years, the Gentiles are on their own. The people didn’t want YHWH to be their God, “Ok” God says. “Have it your way.”
When YHWH commissions Paul to preach to the descendants of these Babel rebels, here’s what he says to them:
“And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us,”
Acts 17:26-27 ESV
Groping in the dark. Blindly feeling around for something solid. Trying to grapple in the darkness with reality and truth like Plato’s man in a cave watching the shadows. That’s what the nations will be doing from this point until Acts.
If humans don’t want to be in relationship with YHWH, then YHWH will make a new people- His very own. From scratch. That’s what happens next.
To The Reader 