Discovery BoxGenesis 9:17-20 
Context9:17 So God said to Noah, “This is the guarantee of the covenant that I am confirming between me and all living things 1 that are on the earth.”
9:18 The sons of Noah who came out of the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. (Now Ham was the father of Canaan.) 2 9:19 These were the sons of Noah, and from them the whole earth was populated. 3
9:20 Noah, a man of the soil, 4 began to plant a vineyard. 5
1 tn Heb “all flesh.”
2 sn The concluding disjunctive clause is parenthetical. It anticipates the following story, which explains that the Canaanites, Ham’s descendants through Canaan, were cursed because they shared the same moral abandonment that their ancestor displayed. See A. van Selms, “The Canaanites in the Book of Genesis,” OTS 12 (1958): 182-213.
3 tn Heb “was scattered.” The verb פָּצָה (patsah, “to scatter” [Niphal, “to be scattered”]) figures prominently in story of the dispersion of humankind in chap. 11.
4 sn The epithet a man of the soil indicates that Noah was a farmer.
5 tn Or “Noah, a man of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard”; Heb “and Noah, a man of the ground, began and he planted a vineyard.”
