Genesis 9-11

Genesis 9

9:1 God gives Noah the same charge he gave Adam and Eve - be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth.

9:2 He adds that all animals are afraid of them.  And reminds Noah that he is in authority over animals.

9:3 God adds living creatures for food.

9:4 I was taught that this was a command to not eat raw meat.

9:6 This doesn't seem like a new command, though I don't think it was spelled out before.  The point is that human life is valuable.

9:7 the command is repeated

9:13-17 God declares that the war on mankind was over.  His symbol of this was that he hung up his bow, the way a warrior would, on a wall, after the battle.  God hung his up in the sky - and it has the shape of a bow and arrow.  I had always thought of a rainbow as the type of bow that ties up a pretty package, not the type that is a weapon of war, hung up because it's use is over.  But I'm pretty sure the weapon is the intent here.

9:19 They fulfill the command.

9:25 The wrong done by Ham affected all of time after that.  The Canaanites would always be enemies of God's people.

10:5 Each group had their own language.  I wonder if this was before the tower of Babel?  I'm guessing that it's a summary over time, and after the tower...  But I don't know.

10:8 Nimrod was a powerful hunter - it's interesting what gets called out...

10:18 The Ham descendents scattered.

10:20 The Ham descendents also had their own languages.  It has to be after Babel.

10:22 Shem's sons are more familiar in name to me - probably because it's repeated through the Bible in lots of geneologies. 

11:1 So yes, all this spreading out and different languages happened after this story.

11:4 This is the second mention of a city - Cain also built one.  It couldn't be the same one Cain built - that would have been destroyed in the flood.

Their purpose is to build a name for themselves and to not scatter.  There's problems with both purposes.  God is supposed to have the famous name, and He told them to fill the earth, not stick together in one place.

It's a funny twist in this story that we're never told WHO they were.  We have no idea. We can speculate, but they wanted so badly to make a name for themselves, and ended up nameless.

The commentors who wrote our curriculum for middle school consider this group a subset of all mankind, not everyone all together.  The Bible isn't clear on it.

11:8 God increased his involvement for just a bit, and enforced His command by confusing their speech and scattering them.

Is the tower of Babel in what became Babylon?

This is actually one of my favorite stories in the Bible - because I like languages, and because so much of life is spent trying to communicate (I do integrations at work - make my software communicate with other software)....  When I was in college, I worked on maps, and mapping software - and it was the same thing.  Everyone says something a little differently, and it's very difficult on a computer-level to make it all match up. Thanks to this group of people trying to make a name for themselves and build a tower.

11:10 After the flood, men became fathers in general before 50, and lived only half the time their ancestors had.  

11:18 By Peleg that life expectancy was halved again, so they were living 200 ish years.

11:30 I wonder if the point of Sarai's infertility was so that the miracle of a child would be recognized later?