The Covenant of the Rainbow
1And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. 2The fear and dread of you will fall on every living creature on the earth, every bird of the air, every creature that crawls on the ground, and all the fish of the sea. They are delivered into your hand. 3Everything that lives and moves will be food for you; just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you all things. 4But you must not eat meat with its lifeblood still in it. 5And surely I will require the life of any man or beast by whose hand your lifeblood is shed. I will demand an accounting from anyone who takes the life of his fellow man: 6Whoever sheds the blood of man,by man his blood will be shed;for in His own imageGod has made mankind. 7But as for you,be fruitful and multiply;spread out across the earthand multiply upon it.” 8Then God said to Noah and his sons with him, 9“Behold, I now establish My covenant with you and your descendants after you, 10and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock, and every beast of the earth—every living thing that came out of the ark. 11And I establish My covenant with you: Never again will all life be cut off by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.” 12And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between Me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: 13I have set My rainbow in the clouds, and it will be a sign of the covenant between Me and the earth. 14Whenever I form clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, 15I will remember My covenant between Me and you and every living creature of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. 16And whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of every kind that is on the earth.” 17So God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between Me and every creature on the earth.” Noah’s Shame and Canaan’s Curse
18The sons of Noah who came out of the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. And Ham was the father of Canaan. 19These three were the sons of Noah, and from them the whole earth was populated. 20Now Noah, a man of the soil, proceeded to plant a vineyard. 21But when he drank some of its wine, he became drunk and uncovered himself inside his tent. 22And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father’s nakedness and told his two brothers outside. 23Then Shem and Japheth took a garment and placed it across their shoulders, and walking backward, they covered their father’s nakedness. Their faces were turned away so that they did not see their father’s nakedness. 24When Noah awoke from his drunkenness and learned what his youngest son had done to him, 25he said,“Cursed be Canaan!A servant of servantsshall he be to his brothers.” Shem’s Blessing and Noah’s Death
26He also declared:“Blessed be the LORD, the God of Shem!May Canaan be the servant of Shem. 27May God expand the territory of Japheth;may he dwell in the tents of Shem,and may Canaan be his servant.” 28After the flood, Noah lived 350 years. 29So Noah lived a total of 950 years, and then he died. About this chapter
Genesis 9 reissues the commission from Genesis 1 — be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth — but to a world that has visibly changed. This time, for the first time, humans are given permission to eat meat, and in the same breath are given the first explicit prohibition against taking human life, backed by the reasoning that people are made in God's image. The chapter is effectively drawing a new baseline for a post-flood world: more permission in one area, a firmer boundary in another.
The rainbow covenant that follows is unusual among biblical covenants in one respect: it asks nothing of Noah or his descendants in return. It's a one-sided promise never to destroy the earth by flood again, sealed by a sign God says is for his own remembering as much as humanity's. The chapter's final scene — Noah's drunkenness and his sons' very different responses to seeing him exposed — lands as an uncomfortable coda, a reminder that surviving judgment doesn't make a person or a family immune to the same old failures. Even the man singled out as righteous in chapter 6 is shown, a few verses after a covenant bears his name, at his most compromised.
Berean Standard Bible · A modern, readable English translation. Public domain (CC0).
