GENESIS CHAPTER 9 PART II

GENESIS 9 PART II

NOAH’S ORACLE (GENESIS 9:18-28)

THE THEME: THE SEED OF THE SERPENT VS THE SEED OF THE WOMAN

Noah had three sons, , and .

Shem was the ancestor of Eber who was the ancestor of . Ham was the predecessor of the Canaanites. Japheth was the father of the (Gen. 10:21).

THE OCCASION: the offense of the son to the father. At times, this ‘offense’ has been thought of as either homosexual offense against his father or of sleeping with his father’s wife. But this cannot be the case if we consider the historical context and the structure of the biblical account.

Genesis 3:14 And the LORD said to the serpent, "Because you have done this, Cursed are you more than all cattle, And more than every beast of the field; On your belly shall you go, And dust shall you eat All the days of your life; 15 And I will enmity Between you and the woman, And between your seed and her seed; He shall bruise you on the head, And you shall bruise him on the heel."

Genesis 9:25 So he said, "Cursed be ; A servant of servants He shall be to his brothers." 26 He also said, "Blessed be the LORD, the God of Shem; and let Canaan be his servant. 27 "May God enlarge Japheth, and let him dwell in the tents of Shem; and let Canaan be his servant."

Genesis 9:25-27 is a prophetic utterance concerning the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman. This appears to be a development of the seed of the serpent through the line of Canaan from Genesis 3:14-15:

 Each is recorded with a foundational disclosure about the interim world order of common grace (Genesis 3:16-19 and 8:20-9:17)

 Genesis 3:14-15 and Genesis 9:25-27 are followed by narratives about developments in the city of man (Genesis 4 & 6, Genesis 10:2 – 11:9) and the redemptive community (Genesis 5, Genesis 11:10-26) respectively.

 Both predict the shape of the future of redemption down to messianic times.

 Both prove to be indexes of the major themes to be developing in biblical history:

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GENESIS CHAPTER 9 PART II

o Noah’s oracle resumes God’s curse on and his followers among mankind. The serpent, and Canaan were cursed by God. o It is also a declaration of conquest through the messianic champion of the seed of the woman. Genesis 9:24-27 is a renewal of the curse with the promise of triumph of the seed of the woman and the redemptive community. o God continues to execute his redemptive plan through the shaping of history.

 Ham in Genesis 9 is depicted as behaving like the serpent. For in the , Satan had contrived to bring and his wife into shameful nakedness. Ham likewise maliciously aggravated the shame of his drunken father’s nakedness (9: 20-23). The malicious acts of Satan and Ham which involved nakedness had elicited these pronouncements.

 Shem and Japheth, by their loving concern to cover Noah’s nakedness emulated the love of the Lord in Genesis 3 when the Lord provided coverings for Adam and ’s nakedness (Genesis 3:21). , THE CURSES AND THE BLESSINGS OF GENESIS 3:14-15 & GENESIS 9:25-27

“It is evident that both curses were directed against agents of evil in the spiritual warfare of the Lord and the seed of the woman versus Satan and his seed. And by the same token, the blessings that are pronounced are those which are correlative to those curses and thus are spiritual. That is, they belong to the sphere of redemption, not to the social- political world of common grace. They are the blessings of the holy kingdom of God realized in the history of God’s redemptive covenants with his saints. To find the application of these curses and blessings in the general history of the world is interpretation that ignores the literary-canonical context. That context demands that the curse pronounced in this oracle be understood as one of exclusion from the kingdom of salvation; and its blessings, as those of participation in the redemptive covenant and kingdom.”1

GENESIS 3:14-17 – THE GROUND IS CURSED

The ground is cursed (v. 17) rather than the man, but it has an effect on man’s dominion over the resulting hostile ground. The curse is from the ground (4:11). This common, temporal curse on the ground (Gen. 3:14, 17, 8:21) is correlative to common grace.

1 Kline Meredith G., Kingdom Prologue, [OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2006], pp. 263-265.

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GENESIS CHAPTER 9 PART II

GENESIS 3:14, 4:11, and 9:25 – SATAN, CAIN AND CANAAN ARE CURSED.

Satan is cursed (3:14). Cain is cursed (4:11) and Canaan is cursed (Gen. 9:25). is a typological eschatological intrusion of the final judgment when the redeemed will be blessed, the unregenerate will be cursed. Like the curse on Cain who went out from the presence of the Lord (Gen. 3:16), the curse on Canaan in Genesis 9:25 belongs to the sphere of redemptive judgment. It is akin to the curse on the serpent-Satan (Gen 3:14) in both form and meaning. Each of these curses is so formulated that the curse falls directly on the doomed person: “Cursed are you (Satan)”...“You (Cain) are cursed”…“Cursed be Canaan.” And each concerns the ultimate issue of exclusion from the beatitude of the kingdom of God.

NOAH’S ORACLE OF KINGDOM JUDGMENT (GENESIS 9:18-28)

Noah’s oracle indicates that the enmity instituted between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent in the curse of Genesis 3:14, 15 would come to striking historical expression in the antithesis between Canaan and his brothers. Canaan is the one mentioned in the curse rather than Ham, his father (cf. Gen 9:22).

Actually the particular historical events that were to constitute this curse involved the much more remote descendants of Ham, the first born in Egypt during the Exodus (cf. Ps 78:51) and the Canaanites in the promise land. Not all Canaanites are reprobate. Not all Shemites and Japhethites enter the kingdom. The curses and blessings pronounced on Noah’s sons contemplate the remote historical developments in their lineages and envisage specific episodes or development of a limited segment of the descendants

CANAAN

The curse upon Canaan in Genesis 9:25 is thus a declaration of reprobation. “A servant of servants will he be to his brothers” (Gen 9:25b) expresses this rejection of Canaan over against the election of his brothers. This idiom of subservience is also used concerning Esau and Jacob. It signified the reprobating hatred of the elder brother and the elective love of the younger (Gen 25:23). Paul in Rom. 9:12, 13 interprets this idiom to mean Jacob’s election and Esau’s reprobation.

The name of Canaan rather than Ham introduces a pun. The name Canaan (whatever its etymology), for the verb kana‘ (in the Hiphil) means “subdue.” It is used for God’s subjugation of the Canaanites under the at the time of their entry into their promised inheritance (Deuteronomy 9:3; Judges 4:23; Nehemiah 9:24). And that conquest is the actual event in which the curse on Canaan took effect. ’s warfare against Canaan was a redemptive intervention of God, a historical revelation of the omnipotence, omniscience of the God who is determined to save his people. The conquered Canaanites are representatives of the serpent’s seed, crushed under the heel of

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GENESIS CHAPTER 9 PART II

the redeemed people of the Lord in a typological act of judgment. The final judgment had intruded into that time in history.

SHEM

Shem means “name” in Hebrew and the blessing on his line consisted in their becoming the bearers of God’s name. There is again the wordplay. This benediction on Shem assumes the form of doxology: “Blessed be the LORD, the God of Shem” (Gen 9:26). As the sovereign God differentiates between the woman’s and the serpent’s seeds, he identifies his own name and cause with the former by entering into a covenant relationship with them. They are adopted as his chosen, holy people and they confess him as their God, calling on his name, acknowledging him as Father and thereby naming themselves after him. This was the hallmark of the covenant community in the line of (Gen 4:26). The line of Shem is proclaimed their successors by Noah’s doxological blessing. Noah’s promised blessing of Shem began to work itself out in the period from Shem to Terah, the father of Abraham (Gen 11:10-26).

Subsequently God is identified as the Holy one of Israel, especially by the nation whose distinctive glory it was to be entrusted with the revelation of God’s name in the divine oracles (Rom 3:2). They received the covenantal adoption and the Glory-Presence, the theophanic Name, to bring forth at last the Christ, the name of God incarnate (Rom 9:4,5).

JAPHETH

In the blessing of Japheth (Gen 9:27) the focus of Noah’s oracle moves beyond the stage of the Mosaic Covenant and nation Israel to the messianic age and the church’s universal embrace of the nations. Japheth’s descendants were eventually to have entrance into the covenant which would have been almost exclusively confined to the line of Shem in the days of the old covenant.

THE IMAGERY OF THE COVENANT TENT-DWELLING

The imagery used to convey this union of Shem and Japheth within the covenant of God is adopted from the occasion of the oracle. Together these two brothers had entered the tent of their father to perform their godly act of love. Hence, the covenant is imaged as a tent-dwelling, which they will occupy together.

Israel under the old covenant already dwelt in the covenant tents. Noah’s prophetic prayer for Japheth proceeds to the prospect that Elohim (just identified as the covenant “God of Shem,” 9:26) would open the dwelling-places of Shem for Japheth so that he too might reside there. The narrator uses a rare verb “pathah” for “open” for securing wordplay on the name Japheth. The result is “May God yapht (open wide the tent) for yepheth (Japheth)

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GENESIS CHAPTER 9 PART II

This prophecy was realized in the apostolic mission to the Gentiles, most particularly in Paul’s mission to the , whose own traditions traced them back through Hellen and Prometheus to Iapetus. The early church missionaries’ report of their penetration of the world with the gospel, rehearsed how God “had opened a door of faith unto the Gentiles” (Acts 14:27; cf. 1 Corinthians 16:9). Midway between Noah and Paul, Isaiah had prophesied this expansion of the covenant community among the Gentiles by the use of similar tent imagery, urging Israel to extend the curtains of her habitation in anticipation of the numerous children she would yet welcome there, when her seed possessed the nations (see Isaiah 54:1-3. Note the explicit reference to the Noahic context in vv. 9, 10, and cf. Isaiah 26:2; 60:11-14).

Noah’s oracle continues the unfolding revelation of the primal messianic prophecy of Genesis 3:15, with the spiritual warfare of the ages, with election to and exclusion from the redemptive covenant. And thus properly read it emerges as an astoundingly rich and profound and farseeing vision of the future of the kingdom of God2.

2 Kline, Meredith G., Kingdom Prologue, [OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2006], pp. 263-265.

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GENESIS CHAPTER 9 PART II

GENESIS CHAPTER 9 PART II DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

NOAH’S ORACLE OF KINGDOM JUDGMENT (GENESIS 9:18-28)

1. Review Genesis 3:14 – 19.

a. What kind of world order resulted from the sin of ? b. What kind of world order is it after the flood (Genesis 8:20-9:17)

2. What was the event that precipitated the oracle of Noah (v. 20-24)

3. What did Noah predict concerning his three sons?

Ham Shem Japheth

4. In what way was Ham’s offense similar to the serpent’s in Genesis 3?

Who was cursed in

Genesis 3:14, Genesis 4:11 Genesis 9:25

5. What was the result of Eve’s sin? (Genesis 3:10-11). What was the sin of Ham? (Genesis 9:22). What does this reveal about Ham?

6. What kind of behavior was seen in Shem and Japheth? Who do they emulate? (Genesis 3:21)

7. When did Canaan become the servant of Shem and Japheth as predicted by Noah? What does it mean “for one to serve the other”? How does Paul interpret this idiom in Romans 9:11-13?

8. What happened to the Canaanites after the exodus when Israel entered the promised land of Canaan? Who is the ancestor of the Israelites? From which son of Noah did Jesus...the messiah...the seed of the woman descended from?

9. Who are the descendants of Japheth? (see Isaiah 54:1-3. Note the explicit reference to the Noahic context in vv. 9, 10, and cf. Isaiah 26:2; 60:11-14). (Acts 14:27; cf. 1 Corinthians 16:9).

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GENESIS CHAPTER 9 PART II

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