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and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not
cease" (8: 21, 22).
With Noah, "the eighth person", God makes a covenant, and his covenant is referred
to eight times afterwards (9: 9, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17). This covenant, said God, is
"between Me and you and every living soul of all flesh"; it was for "perpetual
generations (generations of the Olam or age; and so was called an everlasting covenant,
or, a covenant for the Olam or age). This age lasts as long as the earth remaineth, and
under the terms of this primitive covenant mankind as a whole still receives the
providential mercies of God, and is under the assurance that no more will He bring a
flood of waters to destroy the earth. God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them,
"Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth"; this places Noah in the position of
Adam, for at Adam's creation the self-same words were uttered. In Gen. 1: 28 it is
recorded that God said to Adam:--
"Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it: and have dominion
over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that
moveth upon the earth."
This is parallel with the words of 9: 2:--
"And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and
upon every fowl of the air, and upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the
fishes of the sea, into your hand are they delivered."
Following the blessing upon Adam comes the provision of his food:--
"Behold I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the
earth, and every tree in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for
meat" (Gen. 1: 29).
In the same way similar words follow the blessing upon Noah:--
"Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I
given you all things" (Gen. 9: 3).
Here we observe a most important change, for the first time in Scripture do we read of
flesh being given as a part of man's dietary. To those who have any knowledge of the
ways and means of spiritism, the change will be most suggestive, for anyone to attain to a
high position in spiritism vegetarian diet is essential, as also is abstinence from marriage.
To preserve the race from the universal effects of another irruption of spirit beings this
change is made; here there is a further foreshadowing of the end:--
"Now the spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall apostatize from
the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of demons. . . . forbidding to
marry, and commanding to abstain from meats" (I Tim. 4: 1-3).
Again, as in Gen. 1:, reference is made to the fact that man was created in the image
of God, and upon this fact is based the law of capital punishment (Gen. 9: 6).