PREFACE. The things which happened after the flood up to the birth of Abraham, Moses diligently narrates in the three next following chapters of this book — the ninth and tenth and the greater part of the eleventh. Yet he does not pursue everything, for that would have been both too long and least of all necessary; but only the more notable things, either for knowledge of that first age after the flood, or for the instruction of posterity. But the things which in this ninth chapter are set forth by Moses, if they be gathered into certain heads, are roughly these: First, God blessed Noah and his sons, granting a great fecundity of generation for the swift and numerous multiplication of the human race. Second, He permitted them and their posterity the eating of flesh, which He had not done before the flood. Third, He forbade all eating of blood. Fourth, with most severe words He assailed murderers, the penalty of retaliation (talion) being established against them. Fifth, God confirmed His promise of no flood ever to come thereafter by a sign conspicuous to all — the heavenly bow [rainbow] — so that the sight of it might make the minds of mortals secure of a flood never to come. Sixth, Noah — as a help to human infirmity and as a remedy and solace for so many evils by which the life of mortals after the flood began to be tried and harassed — when…²

…when, the vines planted by himself and the grapes produced [from them] having been made into wine, he had drunk it, he fell unawares and unwilling into drunkenness and lay naked. Seventh, his son Ham was not ashamed to look upon the shameful nakedness of Noah, and divulged it not without mockery and insult to his father: but Shem and Japheth, by a memorable example both of modesty and of piety, having turned away from the sight of their naked father, with backward approach to him, threw a cloak [over him] and covered his nakedness. Eighth, Noah, being made aware of this when he was loosed from sleep and drunkenness, cursed Ham in his son Canaan, foretelling that his posterity would be made subject to the service of the posterity of Shem and Japheth: but on the contrary he blessed Shem and Japheth, foretelling the felicity of their posterity. Ninth, the whole time of Noah's life is fixed at nine hundred and fifty years: of which he lived six hundred before the flood, but three hundred and fifty after the flood.³

From which it appears that Noah survived for many years after Abraham was born. For according to the Hebrew and Latin chronology, which counts two hundred and ninety-two years from the flood to the year of Abraham's birth, Noah lived after the birth of Abraham fifty-eight years: but according to the Greek chronology, which — the generation of Cainan being added — extends the time intervening between the flood and the birth of Abraham to three hundred and twenty-two years (about which matter we shall dispute accurately below in the sixteenth book), Noah lived after Abraham's birth only twenty-eight years. If, therefore, Pliny marveled at it as a thing of the rarest example — that Augustus Caesar saw the grandson of his granddaughter, Junius Silanus, begotten in the year in which he died — how much more would he have marveled that Noah survived many years after the birth of Abraham, who had been begotten from him after ten generations? These, then, are the chief heads of the things narrated in the ninth chapter of this book, which we have proposed in this book not only to explain with clear Commentaries, but, wherever there shall be need, to illustrate also with learned disputations.⁴