Genesis 9 opens on a remade world, and the chapter’s first act is to bless it. The same words spoken to humanity at creation — “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth” — are spoken again to Noah and his sons. The renewed creation receives the renewed blessing. But the world after the flood is not identical to the world before; the chapter unfolds the differences.
The first is the relationship between humans and animals. Where the original creation called humanity to imaging God in a vegetarian dominion (Gen 1:29-30), the post-flood world brings animals under human authority more starkly: “the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast.” Humans may now eat animals — “every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you, even as the green herb have I given you all things” — but with one prohibition: “flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.” Blood marks life, and life belongs to God. The New Testament’s Jerusalem council in Acts 15:20↗ will return to this prohibition as one of the few continuing Noahic obligations on Gentile believers.
The second is the prohibition on murder. “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.” The Hebrew tselem here echoes Genesis 1:27↗ exactly. The imago Dei is not abolished by the Fall; the chapter reasserts it as the ground for the inviolability of human life. To shed human blood is to attack the divine image — and the prohibition is universal, given to all humanity through Noah, before any nation or any law.
The chapter’s heart is the berith . God establishes a covenant with Noah, his descendants, and “every living creature… the fowl, the cattle, and… every beast of the earth.” The covenant is universal in scope — every living thing on the renewed earth is included — and it is unilateral: God binds Himself, and the obligation is His own. The promise is simple: “neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth.” The sign is the rainbow.
The Hebrew word for “rainbow” is qeshet — the same word the Old Testament uses for the war-bow. Many commentators have read the choice as deliberate: God hangs the war-bow in the cloud, pointed not at the earth but at the heavens. The bent bow of judgment is unstrung. The sign is not arbitrary; it is the weapon laid down.
The chapter’s closing scene is more troubling, and the Latter-day Saint reader should approach it carefully because of its later history. Noah plants a vineyard, drinks of the wine, and lies uncovered in his tent. Ham, his second son, sees his father’s nakedness and tells his brothers; Shem and Japheth, walking backward with a garment between them, cover Noah without looking. When Noah wakes and learns “what his younger son had done unto him,” he speaks a curse — not on Ham, but on Ham’s son Canaan: “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.” The blessing on Shem (whose line will lead to Abraham and ultimately to Israel) and the blessing on Japheth follow.
This passage was twisted, in the centuries of the Atlantic slave trade and the American debate over slavery, into a “curse of Ham” used to justify the enslavement of African peoples. The reading is wrong on the plain face of the text — Noah cursed Canaan, not Ham, and the Canaanites of the biblical narrative are a specific people in the land later called by their name, not all of Ham’s lineage. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has explicitly disavowed the misreading; its Gospel Topics essay Race and the Priesthood addresses both this passage and the broader pattern of using scriptural texts to justify racial hierarchy, and “condemns all racism, past and present, in any form.” The Genesis text itself does no such work; only its misappropriation did.
The chapter ends quietly: Noah lives 350 years after the flood, dies at 950, and Scripture turns the page. The next chapter will trace his three sons’ descendants into the Table of Nations.
Language & Translation Notes
The curse of Canaan and the misreading of “the curse of Ham.” The Hebrew of Genesis 9:25 is unambiguous: it is Canaan, not Ham, who is named under the curse. Why Canaan specifically — when it was Ham who saw Noah’s nakedness — is itself debated; some commentators have suggested Canaan participated in the act, others that the text intends Ham’s punishment to fall most severely on the son he had most recently named, others that the chapter is composed with later Israelite history in view (the Canaanites being the very people Israel would later displace in the conquest narratives). Whatever the deepest reason, the curse is textually on a single son’s line, a single people group that will inhabit a single region in the later biblical narrative. The genealogical leap from the curse on Canaan to a “curse on all of Africa” or a “curse on all dark-skinned peoples” has no textual basis. It was a misreading invented to justify the inexcusable, and it has been authoritatively rejected — by serious biblical scholars across the centuries, by the Catholic Church in the modern era, and by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints explicitly in the Gospel Topics essay Race and the Priesthood. SumBible names the misreading here because the passage cannot be approached as if its history were innocent. The text itself is innocent of the use that was made of it.
The Noahic covenant as foundational. Genesis 9 establishes the first explicit berith in canonical Scripture, and the rest of Scripture’s covenants — the Abrahamic (Genesis 17↗), the Mosaic at Sinai (Exodus 19↗), the Davidic (2 Samuel 7↗), the new covenant in Jeremiah 31:31–34↗ and Christ’s institution at the Last Supper — build on the structure laid down here. The pattern is consistent: God names the parties, states the promise, gives the sign. The Noahic covenant differs from all later covenants in one respect: its scope is universal (with “every living creature”) and its terms unilateral (Noah is asked for nothing in return). It is closest in shape to the structure of pure grace. Latter-day Saint teaching also identifies Noah as the angel Gabriel and as next in priesthood authority to Adam (LDS Bible Dictionary, “Noah”); the New Testament’s Gabriel appearances at Luke 1:19↗ (to Zacharias) and Luke 1:26↗ (to Mary) take a different weight on this reading.