Meat!

In a bit of hurry this morning, so I may may this one kinda quick.
Also, I found a way to indent my paragraphs on Blogger, so when I get some time to mess around in the CSS I'll fix up the formatting on these.

Back to Genesis!

[Genesis 9: 1-4]
After the flood, God allowed meat-eating. Mainly because the lifespan-shortening He wanted to do would go a lot faster if He put man on the track to discovering double quarter-pounders.
Originally God did not allow meat-eating, because death of any sort wasn't in His plan. Even when He finally allowed it, He did not allow them to eat the blood with the meat because the blood represented the life of the animal. To God, eating the blood was devaluing the life of the animal and not taking the fact that there is now death when there shouldn't have been too lightly. Even though we are not held to the letter of the old laws anymore, we can still use the law to find out something about the character of God. God respects all life, and we should never spill blood casually. Even in hunting, at the very least eat it or skin it or sell it.
They say an early sign of a kid being a psychopath is cruelty to pets and other animals. It makes sense, since God, who made us in His image, values all life, and so losing that fundamental bit of our intended nature is a sign that something has gone horribly wrong.

[5-6]
Even more so with human life. Spilling animal blood willy-nilly got you punished, but God required your life for spilling human blood.
Like I said back in the first chapters, never forget that, while all life is valuable, human life is far more valuable.

[7-17]
God tells Noah and his family to begin repopulating, and also irons out some details on the promise He made to not destroy Earth again. More specifically, He meant He'll never destroy Earth with a flood again, leaving Himself a nice little loophole to destroy it with fire during the apocalypse.
Also the rainbow He uses as a reminder of this promise is a fun one for creation scientists who hold the canopy theory. If the water canopy was really around the earth, it makes sense that it would screw with the humidity in the air and the conditions would never be right for a rainbow. Since the flood theoretically destroyed the canopy, there can be rainbows now, which is why there hadn't been one until this promise.
So every time it rains and you see a rainbow afterwards, maybe God was thinking about destroying everyone then went "Oh, right, that."

[18-29]
They start settling down and deciding who's going to do what, and Noah takes some farming duty. Noah grows some grapes and later gets plastered off the wine. I suppose if you'd just seen literally everyone in the world except you and your family die, and were probably still finding dead bodies laying around everywhere, you'd need a strong drink too. Anyway, he gets wasted and ends up passing out naked in his tent. One of his kids finds that hilarious and goes and tells the other two, who smack him upside the head and tell him that he's one of seven people alive at the moment so he should really stop being an idiot. The other two go in the tent backwards with a blanket so they can cover Noah up without looking at him. They get commended by Noah and Canaan gets a curse for his troubles.
Since these guys are effectively the first generation of a new era and a new covenant, God has to lay down some precedents. It sounds like there wasn't a lot of consequence before them (not counting...you know... the flood) and that God is establishing some rules now that there haven't been before. Even though there are rules and consequences that God takes very seriously, He was still not into publicly shaming people who do something stupid. Noah over-drank and embarrassed himself, but, even with more consequence now than usual, it wasn't good to make a big deal out of it beyond what needed to be done.
We need to always be helping each other grow, but we can respect privacy in the process. There is a time to involve others, especially when the person we're trying to help is being stubborn and it's for their own good, but always try to keep it between as few people as possible. When there's nothing more to be done, especially when it's not habitual, let's cover each other up and help each other save face.