Eden to Ararat: A Ground-clearing Look at the Genesis Curse - Episode 122

Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot where we raid the ivory tower of a biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel, and if you listen to last week's episode, I got to talk about frame semantics, and I presented it in a way that I hope is really going to help in our Bible study. I created a handout or a printable or something that you can use for your own study or in study in groups that is going to help you understand what frame semantics is and how you can use it in your Bible study.

Now, I'm not gonna be focusing every episode on frame semantics, even though I kind of could, and I'm probably not gonna bring it up too much in this episode. Although I do want you to notice that the things we're gonna be talking about here are going to pair really well with that study in frame semantics [00:01:00] and that methodology because today we're going to be talking once again about language and words and literary design and how those things actually import meaning into the text. It is not just about the words themselves, although, of course the words themselves do have meaning behind them. I'm not trying to say that they don't, but I am trying to say that the inherent meaning of the entire passage is very connected to what these words do in the passage and what they mean in an interconnected way.

Also, pretty excited about this episode because I think I finally hit on something that I have been wondering about for quite a while, which is the question of whether the flood actually cleansed the land of the curse from Genesis three. That might actually sound a bit shocking. And wait, what? What did you just say? kind of a thing. But the story of the flood [00:02:00] is one of the purification of the land. I mean, it did other things as well, but I think that that is one of the things we're supposed to be importing into the meaning of the story. Because again, it's not just about the words, but it's also about the concepts that we're supposed to bring in.

When the Bible mentions water, it's not just about the physical thing of water, but it's also about the meaning of water. What does water do? What does water accomplish? Everything in the first 11 chapters of Genesis is supposed to be foreshadowing and connecting to things in the rest of scripture, because the original audience would have understood it that way since this is the prologue to what they're talking about in the rest of scripture.

So when something comes up, it's not just a matter of, well, of course there was a bunch of water that [00:03:00] flooded the earth, but rather, why was there water and why did God choose to do it this way as opposed to some other way? It's because there is meaning inherent in that water.

Okay, so we're gonna be diving into this question today, and frankly, I did not think that I would ever come to a position where I was pretty darn sure that that is what was going on in the flood story-- at least one of the things that was going on, that the curse of the ground was actually being done away with. I thought, well, we could maybe use this as a possibility or a possible outcome of the flood, but at this point I am pretty convinced of it.

Now, I am convinced because I happen to be really into textual things, right? And literary design and conceptual meaning, and so I put a lot of emphasis on the meaning of the text in those things. [00:04:00] And I understand that not everybody does that. And I don't expect that at this point in time that everybody will do that, because we're not all reading in that Hebraic mindset where we understand the structure of the text, we understand what it's communicating.

This might sound like a whole bunch of speculation, but we all do a whole bunch of speculation when it comes to the Bible. For instance, Genesis never says Adam, the ground is cursed because of you, and the ground is going to be cursed for everyone else after you. It never actually says that, does it? So why do we get that meaning into it? Well, we get that meaning because of the word Adam or Adam. It is more than just his name. He is the epitome and the archetype of humanity. He is what we might say the prototype of humanity.

You see it as the meaning and the concept behind his [00:05:00] name that allows us to go this direction of: this ground is cursed for all of humanity and not just for a single man. We also get the idea because, well, hey, we all toil and we all have to work for our livings and we all sweat and we all have to deal with thorns and thistles in the ground when we grow anything. So we think, of course this is about everyone and everything. But again, is the meaning that we're taking away supposed to be that literal meaning, which I'm not saying it can't be or that it's not there, but there is something behind that. There is a whole conceptual world that we're supposed to be thinking about there rather than just what is plainly said in the text? Right.

Okay, so today we're gonna be talking about Adam to Cain to Noah and their interconnectedness, and we're gonna be talking about the structure of the flood. [00:06:00] Now it's a little bit strange to me that Adam and Cain and Noah aren't connected more often, at least not that I hear, but they are definitely all connected. And studying this will help us understand the relief of Noah and whether or not the flood actually relieved the ground of the curse that we see in Genesis three.

Before we get into all of them, I wanna talk for just a little bit about Noah's wife. I'm going to give you a quote about her name and the ways that people have named her through time. She doesn't have a name in the text of Genesis, and I want you to note the things that tradition has that aren't in the text. This is important because the text itself, the original text of Genesis holds a certain meaning, and we kind of do away with that meaning if we try and figure out some things that aren't there.

All right, so I'm gonna give you a rather lengthy quote [00:07:00] here and forgive the pronunciations for the names I'm gonna be reading here. I'm probably going to be butchering it. And just a note, for those who don't know, the idea of transliteration is the act of taking a word from one language, moving it into another language when the alphabets or characters or writing don't match exactly. So when you transliterate Hebrew, you're taking the Hebrew letters and turning them into English letters. And I just mentioned that because it's going to come up in what I'm going to read here from the Cultural Handbook to the Bible about Noah's nameless wife.

It says, quote, "Noah's nameless wife undoubtedly holds the record for names assigned by tradition. Scholars have tallied 103 names from A to W. Though it is the last letter of the English alphabet, Z is actually the [00:08:00] seventh of 22 letters in the Aramaic or Hebrew alphabet and the sixth of 24 letters in the Greek alphabet. The names of the nameless wives of Noah's sons are not as numerous as those of their mother-in-law, but they add variety to the various lists.

"An eighth century manuscript collected persons mentioned in various parts of scripture bearing the same name. The purpose of this handbook was to help students of the Bible to discriminate among them. The manuscript exists in a few forms and one adds some detailed notes on the identity of some biblical persons. Where did these names come from? Francis lee Utley proposed a variety of explanations, but five general views prevail.

"First, varying methods of transliteration from Hebrew to Latin [00:09:00] account for about half of the list of 103 names. Such transliterations were made ages before the establishment of the international phonetic alphabet, which standardized phonetic laws and symbols.

"Secondly, scribal errors, even intentional tampering, account for a similarly large number of names. Thus, Ham's Wife was named Nachalatha and/or Nahalath, while Japeth's was Aradshishsha and/or Arisisah. The similarity of these names makes it clear that scribal error is probably to blame.

"A third source of names is the Bible itself, or biblical onomastica, a list of names having similar characteristics. What better source for names than the Bible? The similarity of Hebrew names such [00:10:00] as Naamah or Milcah to Noah's Hebrew name was sufficient to list these as names for Noah's wife. Similarly, the trio of similar sounding names in the Vulgate, such as Oola, Ooliba, and Oolibama recommended them as names for the wives of Noah's sons. The main criterion, it seems, was for the name to have a good Hebrew form.

"A fourth source, classical parallels would've been especially appealing to Hellenistic Israelites or Christian apologists. Thus, the names of Pandora, Rhea, Cybele, Venus, Vesta, and Pyrrha appear in a number of lists for Noah's wife.

"Finally, etymological fitness is a fifth source, as we have previously seen in the case of the [00:11:00] unnamed woman at the well. She was called Photina, or Svetlana in the Eastern tradition, because she became enlightened. A number of the names assigned to Noah's wife seem to be etymologically suitable.

"Three other explanations, besides pure invention, are worth considering. Etiology, magic, and ascribed character. Etiology is a story that tells how something originated. Matthew and Luke offer two different explanations of how the field of blood in Jerusalem came to be identified with this name. In Matthew, the field refers to the blood of Jesus. In Luke, the field refers to the blood of Judas.

"Jubilees explains that three cities were named after the wives of Noah's sons: Naeltamauk, the wife of Ham, Adataneses, [00:12:00] wife of Japeth, and Sedeqetelebab, wife of Shem. We know nothing of the existence or location of these cities, nor of Mount Lubar near which the cities were built and where Noah was buried. Nor can we be certain that these are the real names of the wives.

"Since he lived in an age when human beings walked and talked with God, Noah was considered to be a person with extraordinary knowledge and power. Hence, he was associated with good magical practices while his son, Ham, became associated with the devil and black magic. According to Jubilees, an angel taught Noah the healing art especially by means of herbs. Noah in turn shared this knowledge with Shem, his firstborn, whom he loved more than all his sons. Since names are very important in the practice of magic, this could help explain the multiplicity of the names of [00:13:00] Noah's wife. Her names would be important elements of magical formula.

"Finally, Noah's wife gained the reputation of a wicked woman in tradition. She was associated with Eve, Delilah, Naamah, Wahela, Lot's, wife, Pandora, and Semiramis, whose names were also attached to her. Like Eve, Delilah, and Lot's wife, she betrayed her husband to the devil. It was through her, in the legends ,that the devil learned that Noah was building an ark and tried to thwart his efforts. She helped the devil to enter the ark and gnaw a hole in the bottom. Like Eve, she used wine to corrupt her husband. All this evil resulted from Noah's wife, also like Eve, having been seduced by the devil. End quote.

Alright, so note that all of that [00:14:00] is illustrative that Noah's wife isn't any kind of a troublemaker in the text of Genesis, but people made her out to be later on. Because there are details that aren't given in the story and people wanna fill those in. But when they fill those in, they're adding meaning to the story.

And the fact that Noah's wife is not mentioned is a really salient detail that we won't notice if we're not paying close enough attention. Because in the story of the garden, we have Eve who is the first to take the fruit, right? Now in the New Testament, it's described that she was deceived rather than Adam. So that kind of gives her a pass in a way that Adam doesn't have because she was deceived.

And while not everyone is going to agree with this, that probably communicates the message that, guess what? It's not women's fault. Like [00:15:00] women are not supposed to be saddled with the burden for everything bad in the world. And yet as we see with the naming of Noah's wife, people kind of tend to do that.

We see this also with Genesis six and the daughters of men and tradition there because in some explanations of the story of the sons of God and the daughters of men, the daughters of men are innocent. They are seduced by the sons of God. In other iterations of the story, it's the opposite. And the daughters of men actually seduce the sons of God and they act as sirens pulling them and tempting them. So again, we have women who are the fault of everything.

So what I'm saying is don't be insulted that Noah's wife doesn't have a name. It's actually not a bad thing because the fact that she doesn't have a name means that she's so closely [00:16:00] associated with Noah and his goodness that she is not being seen as a problem here, which is very illustrative when we go from Genesis three to Genesis six and all of the problems that we have there.

So now let's get into our main topic here. We went from Genesis three, toil talking about that, to Genesis five, relief from the toil, and we kind of skipped a lot and we didn't even start at the beginning with the ground itself.

In Genesis two, right before the creation of Adam, who gets put in the garden, we see the ground. There's no food because there is no Adam to till the ground. Now the word Adam, Adam, and the word ground or dirt or soil, those are related in Hebrew. We have Adam and we have Adamah, the soil or the [00:17:00] ground.

Now if you go to Genesis two, five, we have the word cultivate in some translations. That word cultivate or to till is the word abad. That's a word that's usually translated serve or servant. But here the sense is to till the ground, we're serving the ground. The Adamah has no worker or no servant to solve the problem of no food.

So God forms Adam from the Adamah. The servant of the ground is made from the ground. Really interesting there, right?

We actually have two linguistic pairs to look at. We have Adam and Adamah, Adam and ground, and we have ish, the word for man, and ishsha, the word for woman. In both cases we have a servant [00:18:00] that is formed from the other, right? We have Adam, who is formed from the Adamah, and we have ishsha, the woman, who was formed from ish, the man. And there's a little bit of crossover usage between those words. In Genesis 2 25, we have the man and his wife, Adam and ishsha, but we don't have the opposite. There's no talk of ish and Adamah as a pair, only of Adam or Adam and being the servant or abad, of the Adamah.

Okay, so we've got all of these ideas that are kind of connected. And if you're reading this in Hebrew, it's going to be pretty obvious to you. When we're reading it in English, less so. So again, when we come about looking at things from a frame semantics way, where you have a word that is going to open up a whole conceptual [00:19:00] world, then you have a word that is also connected to another word in the same passage. And those two words together are going to help flesh out that conceptual world that we have in our minds.

Okay, so now we have the problem of no cultivated ground. God creates man. After God creates man, not before, but after, it's God who plants the garden. We have in Genesis two, nine, "Out of the ground, the Lord God caused to grow every tree." So God is causing the trees to grow. Very interesting that we have trees in specific here.

I mean, of course we have the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge, and those are being highlighted here, but it doesn't say that God's creating all agriculture. Only the trees. And the trees are going to be the thing that give the people food.

After all of that, [00:20:00] the Lord God takes the man, puts him in the garden to cultivate it and keep it in Genesis two 15. Now, this is also before the creation of the woman. Of course, we get the whole debacle in the garden. We get the serpent cursed. We get the woman talked to about her effects from the fall.

Then we have God's speech to Adam in Genesis three, 17 through 19, "And cursed is the ground because of you. In toil you will eat of it all the days of your life, both thorns and thistles shall grow for you and you will eat the plants of the field."

Now note that that's the plants of the field and not the trees. Suddenly there's an emphasis on plants that aren't trees. One idea here is that in the garden, man had the ability to eat fruit, and now after what happened in the garden. He's going to have to work [00:21:00] to produce bread as opposed to picking things off the tree and just eating it directly.

And indeed, verse 19 says, "By the sweat of your face, you will eat bread till you return to the ground. Because from it you are taken, for you are dust and to dust you shall return."

Have you ever noticed that this is the first instance of bread? And if you think about it, bread is a whole lot harder to make than picking fruit from a tree and eating the fruit, right? Like sweat of your face, you will eat bread till you return to the ground. So there's more involved than just picking from the tree.

Now a question for you guys, do you just want to eat fruit? Would you be happy with that kind of a diet? I mean, even if you don't want to eat bread, bread's pretty good, and bread in the past was probably even better than most bread we have today. [00:22:00] It's got more nutrients and less processing going on and all of that, like ancient bread was something that really could sustain you quite well.

So if we're saying that the outcome of the fall is all bad, remember that's kind of the suggestion we often have. Everything that came from the fall is bad, but it seems what we have here is really the introduction of agriculture and produced food like bread.

And I don't think we're supposed to see bread as a negative element here. Like we're cursed eating bread. Oh no, that's terrible. Like some of us might think that because of our diets and the way our bodies react to bread, but in reality, bread is a great blessing and it is seen as a blessing in scripture, right?

So not everything connected to the outfall of the fall is necessarily bad, is it? But what we have [00:23:00] here is there is no suggestion that he's eating fruit anymore, right? So even though bread, it doesn't have to be bad, he's not eating fruit. That could be a real point here that we're talking about, and I suggest this is a pretty important point.

Now, fruit is still mentioned very shortly after this. But let's first go into some linguistic connections here in Genesis three. Instead of being a servant or an abad to the adamah, Adam is now the reason, the abor, for its curse. So it seems like we have another linguistic connection here.

Now, he doesn't stop being the abad or the servant of the adamah, but Adam seems to lose fruit. Man's special food that animals weren't supposed to have. The special food that was [00:24:00] designated for mankind. And of course, Adam and Eve lose access to the tree of life, the fruit that sustains them forever.

Now we move into Genesis four and Eve talks about her firstborn child in a strange kind of a way. She says, I have gotten an ish, a man, from the Lord. So now we have the ishsha, the woman, who was formed from ish, has now given birth to an ish. So think of these conceptual things of one thing coming from the other. Is it true that Eve genuinely gave birth to a manchild? Well, obviously, yes. But there is a meaning that is beyond that, that we're missing if we're not seeing these words and connections here.

Now Cain is described also in an interesting way. Cain himself [00:25:00] becomes an abad, or a servant, of the adamah. And Cain tries to bring fruit of the adamah as an offering. So really interesting that we're having the word fruit here. Now, is that against the idea of grain and bread? Well, no, I don't think it is, but it's a linguistic connection to the garden and the tree and the fruit of mankind.

Of course, Cain's offering is rejected by God. Now, is that because it came from the cursed ground? Well, some people think so. I think the text shows that it's more about his heart. The text shows a contrast between Cain's offering and Abel's offering. Abel gave the best, and Cain isn't described as giving the best. But he is the tiller of the ground that we needed back in [00:26:00] Genesis two. Right? You'd think that this is a good thing. He's supposed to be doing this.

Now, we've talked before about sacrifice and things like that and how grain offerings are perfectly acceptable sacrifices. And personally, I think that we might be missing some of that ancient context that people originally would've picked up on. But if nothing else, there is a suggestion that once again, a failed servant of the soil.

There's a curse on Cain in regards to the ground. Is it the same curse? Is it a different one? Is it an intensification of the curse? I think quite likely it might be the last option because that is what we see throughout these chapters is intensification of previous things that happened. But we can presume that the problem is spreading, right? And he kind of waters the ground with [00:27:00] Abel's blood. Another connection back to these words.

Are there any other references to agriculture between the garden and the flood? Well, we have Adam and we have the curse on the ground because of Adam. We have the curse on the ground because of Cain. We have Lamech's pronouncement about Noah. So again, it's not just spreading, but it seems to be getting worse.

And actually, let's back up to the previous Lamech. The Lamech from Genesis four. A lot of people wonder why Genesis four and Genesis five seem to have similar names and connections. It's like, oh, well, did they just accidentally copy the same thing twice in a different way or what?

Well, I think there's other connections here. The Lamech from chapter four is the first man to pronounce a judgment in the Bible. But he's [00:28:00] a corrupt ruler. He is an ish killer and an ishsha taker where he took two ishsha, wives, for himself. So that's obviously, putting him in a bad light.

Then we have the second Lamech, and is he pulling the ideas from the first Lamech into the story? Or is he an opposite? Here's the difficulty about concepts and trying to make conceptual connections, because two things can be connected in a one-to-one correspondence where the one is calling up the other in a way that says, I am similar to you.

But then there's another thing that can be done where a later mention is calling up an earlier mention and saying, I am the opposite of you. Sometimes it's kind of hard to tell the difference. But there's nothing negative that we see about the second [00:29:00] Lamech of Noah's father.

Okay, so now let's talk about Noah. We have a son of a new Lamech. So here we are at the end of Genesis five before the flood. Remember that Adam was meant to be an abad, or a servant of the soil. He failed. Cain failed. The ground is doubly cursed. We don't have the tree of life. There's a real emphasis on death. Like if you look at Genesis five, there's, " and he died" over and over and over. We have a whole bunch of disobedience, don't we? Up till now, we don't have any good judgment. So now we're wondering, is Lamech right? Is he judging this correctly? Is this a real prophecy or is this another failed attempt?

We have the emphasis of [00:30:00] men and women being opposed and against each other, right? Lamech is domineering over his two wives. He's killed people. None of that looks particularly good or particularly helpful. And we're left wondering how on earth is Noah supposed to do anything about it?

Okay, so now we're gonna look directly at Noah and what he has done and what the structure of the story can tell us. Alright, so let's talk about the fun chiasm of the flood. Now a chiasm, if you don't understand what a chiasm is, I suggest you go listen to previous episodes where I've talked about chiasm and describe them a little bit more fully.

But a chiasm is kind of a mountain in a story. You have the beginning at the base of a mountain, the story climbs up to the top of the mountain in the center of the story. Then the story climbs back down to the base of the mountain on the other side. [00:31:00] So you can kind of picture that hill or triangle shape or a sandwich or however you wanna describe that to yourself. You have a center and you have two radiating sides that match each other, right? We've talked about this before and I've talked about the flood chiasm, which is one of the most obvious chisms that I don't think anyone really disagrees that there's a chiasm here.

But here's the big, but I think I need to change what I've told you about chiasm in the flood before. I think I had the ending wrong, and I think pretty much everyone else has the ending wrong as well.

And as I look at it, I'm thinking, how did we get here? How did we get this wrong? Because it's really strange. Okay, so let's look at the beginning and ending of the chiasm here. We're not quite so interested in the middle part. We're looking at the beginning of the chiasm and the ending of the [00:32:00] chiasm.

So pretty much everyone agrees that there is a beginning of a chiasm in Genesis six nine. Actually the more I look at it, the more I think conceptually it begins earlier, but linguistically for sure, we can say that Genesis six nine is part of this chiasm that connects to the ending of the flood, we might say.

Now, again, I think that we need to be a little bit more careful about this. I think it's a little bit wider than we're seeing normally, but okay, let's look at this. Normally we're talking about the beginning of the chiasm being in Genesis six nine.

Genesis six nine says, quote, "These are the records of the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his time. Noah walked with God." End quote.

I am reading the NASB 95 [00:33:00] version there. Now let's look at Genesis six 10.

Genesis six, 10 says, quote, "Noah became the father of three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japeth." End quote.

Okay, so we have the records of the generations of Noah, emphasis on Noah being a righteous man, blameless, et cetera, in Genesis six nine. Genesis six 10, we have Noah and his sons. Okay. Important to notice there, right?

Now we're gonna go to the end of the flood. The end of the flood is going to match the beginning of the flood in a mirror way, so it's going to be opposite, right? Okay.

Genesis nine 19 says, "These were the sons of Noah, and from these, the whole earth was populated." End quote.

This is where everybody says the flood chiasm ends.

[00:34:00] What is the problem? What problem do you see here? The problem is, in Genesis six, nine, it's focused on Noah, a man of righteousness. Genesis nine 19 is focused on the sons of Noah. Where do we have the sons of Noah in the Chiasm? They're the second element, not the first one. So this doesn't match up with the very beginning. It just doesn't.

Okay, so what does Genesis nine 20 say in the NASB 95 version, it says, "Then Noah began farming and planted a vineyard." End quote.

Oh, here we have focus back on Noah. Now, this doesn't seem particularly like Genesis six nine, where Noah is the man of righteousness, but that's [00:35:00] because we're reading it in English.

If we were reading it in Hebrew, do you know what it would say? Instead of saying, "Then Noah began farming and planted a vineyard," it would tell us that Noah was a man of the soil. An ish adamah.

The reason I think people don't connect Genesis nine 20 to the beginning of the flood chiasm in six nine is because nine 20 seems to begin a whole new section, right?

And so we think, well, that can't be part of the chiasm, but a chiasm does not actually have to be confined to a particular structural section in a book. It can cross sections. That's not really against the rules for a chiasm. And I would further argue that this shows that the chiasm doesn't just go from six nine to [00:36:00] nine 20, either. That in fact, we need to expand the borders of the chiasm beyond these verses before six nine and after nine 20.

We like to end it here because this seems like a whole other section that isn't really connected to the flood. It's just the outcome of the flood, right? But I would suggest that it's not disconnected.

Now, I don't really have time to go into all of the really nitty gritty details here, but if you look at Genesis nine 20 through the rest of the chapter, and you have the whole thing with Noah's nakedness, and if you go into the idea there that this was about Noah's wife and a transgression with Noah's wife, which is a connection you can make from language that Leviticus has about seeing the nakedness of the father. Then you go back to before the flood [00:37:00] starts with Genesis six and the Sons of God going into the Daughters of Men. Oh yeah, maybe that's a conceptual linkage right there for the chiasm.

We also have the fact that the flood basically interrupted Noah's genealogy. You can actually take out a whole section, read the genealogy from the beginning to the end of chapter nine here, and that flows like a normal genealogy. So it's like the flood just kind of interrupted that and it's like, oh, excuse us. We're telling a story now, and it's going to continue here. So I think, from a literary design, we need to be able to see these connected and see their relationships with one another.

And why is that important? Because this is where the meaning is. This is where we see what happened. A lot of people will also end the flood at the [00:38:00] end of chapter eight. This is where Noah builds the altar and God smells the soothing aroma. And God says, I will never again curse the ground.

Now I've asked before, does that mean that he's never going to re-curse the ground, or is that a suggestion that the curse of the ground is, in fact, over?

I thought before that we wouldn't be able to get to a point where we would even really be able to say definitively one way or another. But now I think we can. I think we can say that the curse has been done away with. Now, that doesn't mean that there's no problems after this, right? Because we're used to thinking of these stories in very chronological way, right?

We have the beginning and the beginning affects everything else, and you just go on to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. And that's how we're reading the [00:39:00] story. And we end up thinking, well, everything that happened in Genesis three is now going to last throughout time. The reason we all have toil is because of Adam. The reason all of these problems in the world exist is because of Adam.

We just perpetuate that all. What if it's the case that the reason we have problems is because we're human and we keep messing up. And we're not gonna not keep messing up until we get a reason and a way not to do that, right? This is what I think we can see, and it's hard for us to understand that when we're so steeped in that normal idea that, well, it all started with Adam and went downhill and it's just been going downhill.

When it could just be the case that Adam is our archetype and our head, because we keep doing the same things that Adam does. [00:40:00] We're not guilty of Adam's sin, contrary to what many people say. And that is not what Romans five 12 says. We aren't guilty of Adam's sin, but we all die because we all sin and we all do bad things, and we all have the same situation over and over and over.

So instead of a start and then a continuation, we can see that cycle and that pattern of it starts and it just keeps going in continuing the pattern, right? So the fact that we have a reversal of the curse on the ground here does not mean that we don't have continued problems with the ground.

It's that God is not cursing the ground on account of man. Like why does God say in Genesis 8 21 that "the intent of man's heart is evil from his youth and I will never again destroy every living [00:41:00] thing as I have done." He's like, he just cleansed the earth with the flood. We only have Noah and his family, and God is still acknowledging the evil of man.

Is that because he thinks Noah did something wrong or somebody in Noah's family, or does he just recognize, okay, the pattern is going to continue, but the pattern might be adjusted for each individual or each generation, I might say.

So you have the end of Genesis eight with the altar and God's saying he'll never again curse the ground. The very last verse of Genesis eight is a little poem.

Genesis 8 22 says, quote, "While the earth remains, seed time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease." End quote.

There's a big emphasis on agriculture here. Agriculture's going to continue. Is that part of the [00:42:00] curse or is that a blessing? Well, it seemed to be a curse because of the toil of the ground, and we wanted relief from that. But now it's like, well, guess what? Agriculture's going to continue.

And do you think we're not toiling when agriculture happens? Some want to claim that, oh, well, if we hadn't had the curse on the ground, we wouldn't have thistles and thorns. But that kind of doesn't make sense because think of a blackberry bush. A blackberry bush has delicious fruit on it, but blackberry plants are terrible at spreading, and you don't want your blackberry bushes in other plants.

If they get into other plants, then that's a bad thing. Does that make them terrible and evil and like blackberries shouldn't exist? Do we presume that if God hadn't cursed the ground, that he would then cause the ground [00:43:00] to only grow things in neat ordered rows? I don't think that's what we have, because otherwise why is man tilling the soil and man is going to work the ground?

So I think that we're missing the point if we're so focused on the fact that we have to do some weeding, that that is the curse on the ground. I think weeding is part of our original mandate to make things grow and part of this agricultural process and that agricultural process is not a bad thing, even though it's going to cause us to sweat.

Okay, so you have Genesis nine. We have the covenant, we have the rainbow. This is still where we have the chiasm going strong here at the beginning of Genesis nine, and through most of it. In Genesis nine, we have a redo of creation. This is the undoing of the curse. God blesses Noah and his sons. They're fruitful, they multiply. They [00:44:00] have food. There's the idea of eating beasts here, which that's a whole other topic, right? But we again, have animals mentioned.

Chapter nine continues to show the curse was lifted by the multiplication, by the mentioning of animals. This is like a renewal or a redoing or a recreation from Genesis one and two.

And I think that the connection between Genesis nine 20 and back up to six nine is a big piece of this as well. Genesis six, nine, Noah is a man of righteousness. This is the first time we have the word righteousness, and we've got to load in a lot of ideas about righteousness here that aren't just inherent to the text, since this is the first time it's mentioned and we don't have a whole lot of detail as to what righteousness is going to mean.

But if you think about the people who [00:45:00] originally received this text, whether that was from Moses in the wanderings or later on, it doesn't really matter because either way they're going to have an idea of what righteousness means, and that idea of righteousness is connected to covenant, even to sacred space. All of these ideas, right?

So they already have an idea of what righteousness is, so the people reading the text are going to understand the word, even though the contextual concept is not explained right? So it matters what people who are reading the text are thinking originally.

Noah is presented as being righteous. And how? Because he is the one finally who is obedient to God. He does what God asks him to do. He builds the Ark.

He is completely and absolutely the righteous man here. Then at the [00:46:00] end of Genesis nine, we think he botched it. He became drunk, and that's sinful. It does seem to be the case that drunkenness is seen as a negative throughout the rest of scripture. Not that drinking alcohol is bad, but abusing it to the point where you're insensate is not a great thing.

So we think this is where the sin comes in. And I'm not quite convinced of that fully. Even though that's a very common explanation. But let's go back to Noah planting the ground, being the man of the soil, planting not just any kind of thing, but a vineyard. What does a vineyard have? A vineyard has fruit.

And remember, in a chiasm, you connect the parallel ideas. So if Genesis nine 20 is related back to Genesis six nine, which I don't see how [00:47:00] you could not connect those things, then there is a connection between the man of righteousness and the man of the soil. And many people have made this connection.

Many people have seen this. Which is really why I cannot understand why everyone ends the chiasm at Genesis nine 19 when clearly it goes into Genesis nine 20. Linguistically and conceptually. You don't really get an end to the chiasm as started in Genesis six, nine until Genesis nine 20. Now, people who have seen the connection of the man of righteousness with the man of the soil, then we need to ask, what does that mean?

Is there a change? There's some sort of duality here. And being a man of the soil, being a man of the adamah, is a good thing, right? That's what our original [00:48:00] creation was supposed to be.

Now, here's a few ideas that different scholars have come up with for this connection. Gerhard Von Rod has said that Genesis six nine shows Noah as being a man of integrity versus the corruption of his time. And in nine 20 he returns to the soil and we have the establishment of civilization and agriculture. But we certainly had agriculture before and I don't think that is the point here.

Walter Brueggemann suggests that these two passages are about covenant and transformation. Noah is at first righteous. That shows a separation between him and the other people, and then he returns to the ground and that shows a continuity of something going on with Noah and the land. First, he's separated from the land and people, and now [00:49:00] here at the end he is returned. There is a continuity here.

And I think that maybe Brueggemann gets the closest to looking at this as showing how what is going on in the flood is that cleansing of the land and the reestablishment of what should be, which, that in and of itself is not an idea that is disputed.

But the question is, what happens after the flood and does it continue? So no matter what's going on with sin after the flood, God's not cursing the ground again. So if there is a restoration and a reinstitution of the divine mandate going on here, then the ground is not cursed.

Another idea from EA Spizer, he talks about divine favor and human responsibility. He connects this back to Eden and human relationship with the earth [00:50:00] as he rightly should, in my opinion.

Of course, there are many other interpretations here, but it's not uncommon that people are talking about renewal, continuity, covenant, restoration.

Here's another point. Remember how Lamech from Genesis four was the first man to pronounce a judgment? Well, here we have the situation at the end of Genesis nine, with Noah and his sons. Noah does become drunk. He's uncovered inside the tent in Genesis 9 21. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brothers outside.

Now his two brothers did something about it. So Ham is the one who is cursed or rather Canaan. Remember, curse is often about fertility and production of offspring. The ability to live by growing crops or having [00:51:00] children.

And then what happens? In Genesis 9 24 and forward, Noah is the one who judges. He is the second person in the story to actually judge versus God judging. Now, in spite of Noah becoming drunk, what he's doing here is pronouncing a judgment that I think we can presume is a righteous judgment because it comes to pass. And if it is a righteous judgment, then we can think back to Genesis six, nine, where Noah is described as the man of righteousness.

So is this another fall that is just like Genesis three? Well, I think clearly we do have sin. Is it Noah's sin or is it Ham's sin? It just says that Noah became drunk. Now that might be a bad thing. It might have led to what happened here because Noah [00:52:00] wasn't able to protect his wife, we might say.

Here's another question. Are you going to be able to become drunk if you don't have enough rest from your toil in order to do so? Is this in fact not a point against Noah, but a point showing that he had managed to give enough relief that he was able to relax enough to become drunk to begin with?

That's just an idea I'm suggesting, and it seems to fit the pattern of what we have going on here.

If the land got purified and Noah was able to plant a vineyard and he got to the point where, Hey, I don't have to work continually so I can relax a bit. That shows that Noah was a success after all. The fact that Noah doesn't get a bad ending here should suggest something to us. What about Ham? The father of [00:53:00] Canaan? Well, technically he doesn't get a bad ending either because it's Canaan who is cursed, but Canaan is the offspring of Ham.

And while you might say he's also the offspring of Noah, Noah's offspring is a wider tent than Canaan, right? So you might say that Noah got cursed in a sense in that some of his progeny ended up cursed. But isn't that gonna be the case for the absolute head of humanity? Because you're gonna have some of humanity who are going to continue righteous and some who will continue wicked. And the fact that some of them are wicked doesn't necessarily reflect on Noah as a whole.

I've seen many people say, oh look, this is another fall narrative where Noah took from the tree, the vineyard and sinned, and there might be a hint of that going on. I don't think it has to be a strict either or. [00:54:00] Either it's Noah who sinned or it's Ham. I don't think we're supposed to presume that Noah's righteousness means that he never did anything wrong. This might be showing, hey, even the best of us are going to do things that are wrong, but being righteous presumes that when you do something wrong, you correct it. Being righteous isn't just about not sinning. It's about being in relationship to God in a justice way where yes, there might be some punishment, but there's going to be restoration.

Somebody who's righteous is not going to necessarily not sin, but if they sin. They're going to do something to restore things to a point that is correcting what they did wrong, and that might be what we see in Noah's judgment. Noah did something wrong, it resulted in something bad, and [00:55:00] Noah then corrected it via the judgment that he had.

Noah seems to be a real standout here compared to Adam. He is seen as a second Adam, but he is seen as an improved Adam, a righteous Adam. This is like what we have in Genesis three, but it's also not like what we had in Genesis three. Adam was given one command, don't eat from the tree. Cain was commanded not to be mastered by sin. Neither one of them accomplished those.

But for Noah, God commanded him to build the ark. He commanded him to gather all the animals. He commanded Noah to gather the food and save all the living creatures. So there's an increase in responsibility and Noah accomplished it. Noah obeyed. We are reminded at least four times that Noah did as [00:56:00] God commanded. We have it in Genesis 6 22, in Genesis seven, five and verse nine and verse 16.

So I really suggest to you that just like Lamech prophesied, Noah does find rest in the restored relationship with the ground. He's able to drink wine and rest. Now, just like Adam, a curse follows, but Noah is the judge.

Because of Noah's righteousness and his obedience, he is able to be promoted in a sense. His task is enlarged. He is not only lord over the animals, he is not only a servant of the ground, but he's also a judge over other men, pronouncing curse and blessings. I don't think we can understand how huge of a point this is.

Now, of course, in spite of Noah's [00:57:00] obedience, we still have death. We still have things that are negative that we can't do anything about. We're still going to be sinning. We're still going to be doing things that are against God's will.

So the fact that the curse of the ground was mitigated and fixed, we might say, doesn't mean that anyone in history doesn't need Jesus or doesn't need a relationship with God, right? Because what we see in Noah's righteousness is that he is in alignment with God. Without that relationship and without that alignment, we've got problems.

Now, after this, we could go into a really big study on Jesus and Noah and bread and wine and all of that. And in fact, I am going to be getting into all of that. And if you haven't heard about the online conference that the Two [00:58:00] Trees Podcast is putting on, I suggest you go find out about that.

I will try to remember to put links in the show notes. I was blessed to be asked to be part of that, and my contribution to that conference is going to center on Jesus in relation to some of these things. So I'm going to try to bring out some of this stuff in my podcast here to help connect with what I'm going to present at that conference. It's going to be really cool stuff.

So definitely stay tuned for that. Definitely check out my frame semantics handout, printable, whatever you wanna call it, study guide thing that I've produced. I will probably also link it in the show notes just to make it easy to find. If you listen to episode 1 21, I explain what frame semantics is and hopefully that's really helpful to you to understand what's going on [00:59:00] in the material that I'm presenting in the handout.

So I'm really hoping that some of you might dive into that and see if it's useful. I'd love to get feedback and if you're interested in helping me produce additional material or revise the material I've already created, I would love for you to help me with that. You can contact me on Facebook or you can contact me through my website at genesis marks the spot.com.

I hope that this episode was fruitful for you and that you got a lot of stuff to think about and to consider. I would love to hear feedback. What do you guys think? Did the flood cleanse the ground from the curse and was the curse over by the time of the end of the flood or not?

If you don't think so, tell me why. I want to see why, because I am pretty convinced that it was. If you [01:00:00] have an argument against that, I would love to hear it.

So let me know, and if you have any other questions, I'd love to hear those as well. Thanks as always for listening. Thanks for your participation. I really hope that this information about frame semantics and these Bible study materials are going to bless you. I would love it if you would use them in a group or with other people in some form and tell me how that goes.

I feel like this might be a way to help other people get into the study of biblical theology in a way that really meshes with personal Bible study. I am very grateful for you guys and your listening here and the support that you give me. Thank you for those of you who help support me financially as well. You guys, absolutely rock. Thanks for all you do. I wish you a blessed week and we will see you later.