Beginnings · Not dated
Chapter 4
The Rainbow
I set my rainbow in the cloud, and it will be a sign of a covenant between me and the earth.
For parents
This chapter tells how Noah got drunk and lay naked in his tent, and how his son Ham saw him (Genesis 9:20–24); his brothers cover him without looking. Noah then curses Ham’s son Canaan. It is told plainly, without detail.
The smoke of Noah’s offering still hung over the hillside when God blessed him and his sons. “Have children and grow in number,” God told them. “Fill the earth. Every animal on land and every bird in the sky will be terrified of you, and so will every creature that creeps along the ground and every fish in the sea. I’ve put them in your hands. Whatever lives and moves, . As I once gave you the green plants, now I give you everything.
“But meat with its lifeblood still in it, you must not eat. Your own lifeblood I will demand back. I’ll demand it from any animal that kills you, and from any person who kills another, his own . Whoever sheds a person’s blood will have his own blood shed by a person, because God made people in . As for you, have children and grow in number. Spread across the earth and fill it.”
The animals that had come out of the ark kept clear of Noah and his sons now, watching them from a distance. God spoke again to Noah and the sons who were with him. “Listen. For my part, here is my , made with you and with the generations that come from you. It is with every creature alive beside you too, the birds, the livestock and the wild animals, every one that left the ark. Here is what I promise you. Floodwaters will never again wipe out all life, and no flood will ever again destroy the earth.”
“And this is the sign I give,” God said, “of the covenant that binds me to you and every creature with you, for generation after generation. I’ve put my up in the clouds, to stand as the covenant’s sign between me and the earth.”
Noah looked up, and there it was, a rainbow arched across the clouds over the hills.
“Every time I gather clouds above the earth,” God went on, “and the bow shows in them, I’ll remember my covenant, made with you and every living thing, and the waters will never swell into a flood that destroys all life again. The bow will be there in the clouds. I’ll look at it so that I remember the covenant that stands forever between God and every creature alive on earth.”
“That bow,” God told Noah, “is my covenant’s mark, set between me and every living thing on earth.”
Three sons had come out of the ark with Noah, , Ham and Japheth, and every people on earth would come from them. Ham was ’s father; Canaan was born to him after the flood.
Noah took to and planted a vineyard. The vines grew, and when the grapes came in he made wine. He drank some of it and got drunk, and he sprawled asleep inside his tent with nothing covering him.
Ham, Canaan’s father, saw his father , and he went outside to tell his two brothers.
Shem and Japheth spread a cloak between them, across their shoulders. Side by side, slowly, feeling for the way with their heels, they walked into the tent backward and covered their father. They kept their faces turned away the whole time, and they never saw him naked.
Noah woke under the cloak, his head thick from the wine. Sober, he knew what had been done to him, and that his had done it. “Canaan is cursed,” he said. “He’ll serve his brothers as the lowest of their servants.”
He went on, “Praise the Lord, Shem’s God! May Canaan be Shem’s servant. May God give Japheth , and let him live in Shem’s tents, and may Canaan serve him.”
In the three hundred and fifty years Noah lived after the flood, the rain came and went, the bow stood in the clouds after it, and no flood came. The earth that had been empty when he came out of the ark filled with his sons’ families. Then, at nine hundred and fifty, Noah died.