King James Version · Before the nations
Genesis 9
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And and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they . Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things. But with the life thereof, which is thereof, shall ye not eat. And surely your of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man’s brother will I require the life of man. Whoso sheddeth man’s , by man shall his be shed: for in the made he man. And you, be ye fruitful, and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein. 8And spake unto , and to his sons with him, saying, And I, behold, I establish my with you, and with after you; And with every that is with you, of the fowl, of the cattle, and of every beast of the earth with you; from all that go out of the ark, to every beast of the earth. And I will establish my with you; neither shall any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth. And said, This is the token of which I make between me and you and every that is with you, for perpetual generations: I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a between me and the earth. 14And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: And I will remember my , which is between me and you and every of ; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy . And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the between and every of that is upon the earth. 17And said unto , This is the token of , which I have established between me and that is upon the earth. And the sons of , that went forth of the ark, were , and , and : and is of . These are the three sons of : and of them was the whole earth overspread. And began to be an husbandman, and he planted a : And he drank of the , and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent. And , of , saw the his , and told his two brethren without. And and took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the their ; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their ’s . 24And awoke from his , and knew what his younger son had done unto him. And he said, be ; a servants shall he be unto his brethren. And he said, be of ; and shall be his servant. shall enlarge , and he shall in the tents of ; and shall be his servant. 28And lived after the flood three hundred and fifty years. And all the days of were nine hundred and fifty years: and he .
The 1611 translation, public domain. Its original printing included the Apocrypha, which is why the deuterocanonical books can be read here. Notes and cards are EKLI’s own.
The world at this moment · Before the nations, 2600 BC to 2100 BC ›
The opening chapters, from creation to Babel, told on a scale that covers the whole earth before the story narrows to one family.
- The neighbours' own stories
- Mesopotamia told its own versions of these events. Atrahasis and the eleventh tablet of Gilgamesh tell of a flood, a survivor, an ark, and birds sent out to find land. Enuma Elish tells of a world made from a defeated sea. The resemblances are close enough that scholars have argued about them for a century and a half, and the differences are where the argument gets interesting: Genesis has no quarrel among gods, no accidental humanity, and a flood sent for moral reasons rather than because people were noisy.
- Babel and the ziggurat
- A tower with its top in the heavens, built of brick and bitumen on a plain in Shinar, describes a Mesopotamian ziggurat exactly. Dozens were built, the best known at Ur and Babylon, of mud brick because southern Mesopotamia has no stone. The detail about brick instead of stone is the kind of thing someone writes who has actually seen one.
- The wider world
- If these chapters are placed anywhere in ordinary chronology, the surrounding centuries are the age of the Egyptian pyramids, the Sumerian city-states, the Indus Valley cities, and the first phase of Stonehenge. Writing was a few centuries old and existed in two places on earth.
All of Genesis