Tidbits and Trivia

             Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it. The Lord smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: “Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done. 

Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth. The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea; they are given into your hands. Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.

 “I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you  and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth  I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.” (Genesis 8:20-9:3 & 9-11)

 

After Noah, his family, and the animals came from the ark, God issued a new, one-sided covenant with man and with all the animals that included two vows:

He would never curse the ground again.

He would never destroy all living creatures with waters of a flood again.

We’re all familiar with the rainbow as the sign of God’s promise that He would not flood the world again. We may not be as aware of the other vow. Does this mean that God removed the curse of Genesis 3:17? Did something about the flood waters or their source have physically changed enough that the curse was wiped out? Or does it just mean that God won’t put another curse on top of the one from Genesis 3:17?

One other flood-related idea. Back in Genesis 2:10-14, we’re told about rivers and lands around Eden. People have searched for the garden and argued about its location, mostly based on the location of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The first and biggest problem is that the whole earth was flooded. Eden was flooded, destroyed, and wiped off the map.

The second problem is that the earth flooded. What’s the chance that rivers would end up in the same place after a worldwide deluge? Were the current Tigris and Euphrates named after rivers that Noah and his family remembered? Or did God specifically maintain those rivers so that He could identify where the destroyed Eden had been when He inspired Moses to write Genesis?

And the answer is… we don’t know. What’s more, it doesn’t matter because Eden was destroyed. I know. It’s disappointing – a nostalgia for somewhere we’ve never been has been taken from us.

There’s one other tidbit of information about which we can speculate. God tells Noah that people are now permitted to eat meat, and that fear and dread of man will fall on the animals. Originally, all the animals and man were given plants to eat. We tend to assume that, at least before the fall, animals liked people. We know that during the time on the ark, animals coexisted somehow (caged in some cases?) and (probably) ate plants. We know from the story of Cain and Abel that they sacrificed animals.

Did the people between Adam and Noah eat only plants? Or is that one of the ways in which they were evil? Were animals not afraid of people during the same period, or did they lose their fear for the time on the ark? Again,  the answer is that we don’t know.