Creation's blessing, reissued — with something missing. Verse 1 repeats Genesis 1:28 almost word for word: be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth. But compare carefully what's not repeated: no "subdue it," and no "rule over" the creatures. In their place stands something new and darker — "fear and dread of you will fall on every animal." The pre-flood harmony of a vegetarian dominion (1:29–30) has become a relationship of dread, stated as fact rather than commanded. The old KJV/ASV "replenish" trap discussed at 1:28 applies to v. 1's mil'u here identically — KJV prints "replenish the earth" again, and again it simply means "fill."

Meat, permitted for the first time. Verse 3 explicitly amends the food grant of 1:29–30 ("as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything") — the verse itself cites the old grant while widening it. One restriction comes with it: not flesh "with its life (nefesh) — its blood — still in it." Life resides in the blood (Leviticus 17:11 will say it outright), so the blood is not food. This verse is the root of kosher slaughter's draining of blood, and — a modern connection worth stating factually — it is one of the core texts Jehovah's Witnesses cite in their refusal of blood transfusions; the NWT renders the verse itself much as everyone else does ("Only flesh with its soul — its blood — you must not eat"), the doctrinal weight being carried by interpretation, not translation. Note nefesh rendered "soul" there — see the running note on that word since Genesis 1:20.

The Bible's first stated law — and it's a poem. Verse 6's Hebrew is a perfect mirror: shofekh / dam / ha'adam — ba'adam / damo / yishafekh ("sheds / blood / the human" — "by the human / his blood / shed"), the words folding back on themselves like the act recoiling on the actor. No English can keep the mirror exactly; this translation keeps the word order as close as English allows. The rationale is the theological headline: "for in the image of God he made humankind" — the image of God (1:26–27) survives the fall and the flood intact, and it is precisely what makes murder a capital offense. Note also v. 5's quiet echo: God will demand an accounting "from each one for his brother" — the word that convicted Cain (4:9).

The covenant promised at 6:18 is now enacted — and the word brit tolls seven times in vv. 8–17, a deliberate density. Notice its scope: not just Noah, not just humans, but "every living creature of all flesh" — the animals are named as covenant partners four separate times. And notice its terms: it is entirely one-sided. God binds himself ("never again"); nothing whatsoever is required of the other parties. The Bible's first covenant is unconditional and universal — the later covenants will narrow the parties and add obligations, which makes this baseline worth remembering.

"My bow" — the weapon, not the color arc. Hebrew has no separate word for "rainbow"; qeshet is simply the warrior's bow, the thing arrows are shot from, everywhere else it appears. So the sign is a war-bow hung in the clouds — and readers ancient and modern have noticed that it hangs pointing away from the earth: the weapon of the storm, retired and displayed. Every English version supplies "rainbow" somewhere for clarity (NIV "rainbow"; KJV keeps "bow" throughout); MiSTeR keeps "my bow" because the possessive is the point — it's God's own weapon being set down.

Who is the sign for? Read v. 16 slowly: "the bow will be in the clouds, and I will look at it and remember." The rainbow is not primarily a reminder for humans — it's described as God's own memorandum, the covenant equivalent of a string tied around a finger. The remembering-that-acts verb (zakhar, see 8:1) completes the frame: the flood ended when God remembered; the promise holds because God will keep remembering.

Noah's fall. The flood's righteous survivor plants the first vineyard, drinks the first wine, and lies exposed — the Bible wastes no time complicating its heroes (a pattern that will hold for Abram within three chapters). What exactly Ham did is genuinely debated: the plain reading is disrespectful looking-and-telling — turning a father's shame into gossip — while some interpreters, ancient and modern, hear in "saw his father's nakedness" the darker idiom that phrase carries in Leviticus 20. The text says what it says and no more; this translation adds nothing. What the narrator does spell out, in loving procedural detail, is the brothers' remedy: the cloak on both shoulders, the backward walk, the averted faces — reverence choreographed, in exact inverse of Ham's look.

The curse falls on Canaan — not on Ham. This is the passage's real puzzle: Ham offends; his son is cursed. The narrator prepared for it (Ham is labeled "father of Canaan" twice before the incident), and readings differ — a measure-for-measure logic (the youngest son sinned against his father, so the offender's own son bears the word), or an etiology looking ahead to Israel and the Canaanites, whose subjugation this oracle frames. "The lowest of servants" renders the Hebrew superlative idiom eved avadim, "a servant of servants."

A necessary word about the abuse of this text. For centuries the so-called "curse of Ham" was pressed into service to justify the enslavement of African peoples. Read the verses: Ham is never cursed, Canaan is; the oracle concerns the Canaanites, a Levantine people, not Africa; and race appears nowhere in the passage. That reading was interpretation in the service of an economy — it deserves to be named as such on the record of any honest translation.

The ledger entry left open at 5:32 finally closes, in the exact formula of chapter 5: 950 years — second only to Methuselah — "and he died." The last man of the old world is entered into its book, and the narrative is clear of the flood at last.