We begin with what happens after the floodwaters go down.  God tells everybody on the Ark to get off it, along with all the living things they brought with them.

Noah makes a sacrifice, which pleases God. 

God realizes that people are not perfect and says “I will never curse the soil again,”

God tells Noah that fear of humans will fill all wildlife and all the birds of the sky.  They are given to Noah.  Green plants also.  However, he cautions, don’t eat the blood.

“Bear fruit and be many,” God tells Noah.  God promises never to send another flood that will “bring the earth to ruin.”  God sets the rainbow in the clouds as a sign of God’s contract with humans, and also to remind God of God’s promise.

Moving on with the story, Noah plants the first grapevines.  And in due course, he invents wine.  Noah gets drunk on the wine and lies around drunk and nude.  His sons see this and cover their father’s nakedness, which ticks off Noah.

In all, Noah lives for 950 years.  We get a list of Noah’s sons and the sons’ sons and so on.  These sons become the peoples of the Middle East: Cush, Babel, Accad, Canaan, etc.  And the clans scatter.

Now the whole earth speaks one language, until some of the people settle in Shinar and decide to build a city and a high tower to “make ourselves a name.”  God doesn’t like that.  “This is only the first of what they will plan to do,” God says.   So God confuses the people with different languages so they can’t understand each other.  The city  is called Babel (Babble), and God scatters the people all over the Earth.

Finally, we get some more generations, this time of Shem, until we get down to Abraham.

Food for Thought

Why doesn’t God want everyone to speak the same language?  What does God think they’ll do?