1–7. God’s first postdiluvian speech to Noah affirms man’s solidarity with the rest of the animal kingdom—the covenant He goes on to spell out is, emphatically, with all flesh, not just with humankind—but also modifies the arrangement stipulated in the Creation story. Vegetarian man of the Garden is now allowed a carnivore’s diet (this might conceivably be intended as an outlet for his violent impulses), and in consonance with that change, man does not merely rule over the animal kingdom but inspires it with fear.

6. He who sheds human blood / by humans his blood shall be shed. “By humans” might alternately mean “on account of the human.” In either case, a system of retributive justice is suggested. As many analysts of the Hebrew have noted, there is an emphatic play on dam, “blood,” and ʾadam, “human,” and the chiastic word order of the Hebrew formally mirrors the idea of measure for measure: shofekh/spills (a), dam/blood (b), haʾadam/of the human (c), ba’adam/by the human (c'), damo/his blood (b'), yishafekh/will be spilled (a'). Perhaps the ban on bloodshed at this point suggests that murder was the endemic vice of the antediluvians.

7. hold sway. The translation here follows some versions of the Septuagint, which read uredu, “and hold sway,” instead of urevu, “and multiply,” as in the Masoretic Text. The latter reading looks suspiciously like a scribal transposition of urevu from the end of the first clause. The entire line, of course, picks up the language of 1:28 as the process of human history is resumed after the Flood.

12. And God said. This is the first instance of a common convention of biblical narrative: when a speaker addresses someone and the formula for introducing speech is repeated with no intervening response from the interlocutor, it generally indicates some sort of significant silence—a failure to comprehend, a resistance to the speaker’s words, and so forth. (Compare Judges 8:23–24: first Gideon declares to his men that he will not rule over them. Seeing their evident resistance, he proposes a concrete alternative they can understand, the collection of gold ornaments to make an ephod.) Here, God first flatly states His promise never to destroy the world again. The flood-battered Noah evidently needs further assurance, so God goes on, with a second formula for introducing speech, to offer the rainbow as outward token of His covenant. The third occurrence of the wayomer formula, at the beginning of verse 17, introduces a confirming summary of the rainbow as sign of the covenant.

20–27. Like the story of the Nephilim, this episode alludes cryptically to narrative material that may have been familiar to the ancient audience but must have seemed to the monotheistic writer dangerous to spell out. The big difference is that, for the first time in Genesis, the horizon of the story is the national history of Israel: Ham, the perpetrator of the act of violation, is mysteriously displaced in the curse by his son Canaan, and thus the whole story is made to justify the—merely hoped-for—subject status of the Canaanites in relation to the descendants of Shem, the Israelites. (Ham also now figures as the youngest son, not the middle one.) No one has ever figured out exactly what it is that Ham does to Noah. Some, as early as the classical Midrash, have glimpsed here a Zeus–Chronos story in which the son castrates the father or, alternately, penetrates him sexually. The latter possibility is reinforced by the fact that “to see the nakedness of” frequently means “to copulate with,” and it is noteworthy that the Hebrews associated the Canaanites with lasciviousness (see, for example, the rape of Dinah, Genesis 34). Lot’s daughters, of course, take advantage of his drunkenness to have sex with him. But it is entirely possible that the mere seeing of a father’s nakedness was thought of as a terrible taboo, so that Ham’s failure to avert his eyes would itself have earned him the curse.

27. enlarge Japheth. The Hebrew involves a pun: yaft leyafet.

28–29. These verses resume the precise verbal formulas of the antediluvian genealogy in chapter 5. The story of Noah is given formal closure with this recording of his age, and the stage is set for the Table of Nations of the next chapter, which will constitute a historical divider between the tale of the Flood and the next narrative episode, the Tower of Babel.