Wine is a biblical sign and symbol of blessing, over and over again in the Old Testament. It is also, often, a sign of cursing, so there is some ambivalence in the symbol. However, we’re meant to see this as a positive, even exciting development in Genesis 9. The man of rest, Noah, has achieved his mission and planted a vineyard. He’s going to stay in one place and drink the drink that is given as a gift to gladden our hearts (Psalm 104).

In a previous post, one of my most read, I explored what happened between Noah and Ham in Genesis 9. There are two particular possibilities, both plausible, though I come down on one side in that post. However, I’d like to nuance what I said previously, by exploring Noah’s relationship with wine.

Noah sometimes gets lambasted as a drunkard. You occasionally see these lists of sins going around, which suggest that all of God’s ‘heroes’ were terrible sinners: Noah was a drunkard, Jacob was a liar, David an adulterer etc. The point usually is to say, ‘do you really think God can’t use you?’ It’s a good point. However, good rhetoric softens what the Bible is actually saying. Was Jacob a liar? Yes, but that’s forcing a frame on the story that elides as much as it clarifies. Was David an adulterer? Obviously, but what he did was much worse than that.

But was Noah a ‘drunk’? That seems a stretch.

Noah’s Story

We’re in Genesis 8 and 9. Noah has survived the flood, with all the animals in his floating box-zoo. He builds an altar to the Lord and offers some of every sacrificial animal and bird on it. That’s interesting, since the Law hadn’t yet been given. It does explain why he brought 14 of every sacrificial animal. Noah is the first person in the Bible to offer an ascension offering. Abel had brought a different kind of sacrifice, and the implied sacrifice that God makes to clothe Adam and Eve isn’t given a specific term.

In response to the smell of the ascension offering, God makes a covenant to never again curse the soil because of our sins, and never to wipe away all living things. Then the Lord makes it clear that Noah is another man like Adam by giving him and his sons the command to be fruitful and multiply (9.1). Noah is in essence the ‘second’ Adam in the Bible, of which there are a long succession, Jesus being the last (1 Corinthians 15). Of course there’s a different, more theological sense that Jesus is the ‘second’ to Adam, which is why Paul in that same passage calls him the ‘second man.’

The Lord then treats Noah like Adam, telling him what he can eat—the animals this time, not the fruit of the garden—with some prohibitions. Then the sign of the cloud-bow (rainbow) is given so that they will know that in the future wrath will point up, not down. There’s a similarity here to the promise made to Eve in Genesis 3.

Then, just before the incident with Ham, we’re told that Noah ‘began to be a man of the soil,’ a man of the adamah. The link with Adam could not be stronger. But, unlike Adam, the sentence finishes telling us that he plants a vineyard. Then he drinks of the wine and becomes ‘drunk.’

A Man of Wine

Noah, which means ‘rest,’ is the hope of the world. He’s a new Adam, he’s been put in what is essentially a new world after the last one was steadily decreated into watery chaos.

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