Ver. 26. "_And he said: Blessed be Jehovah, the God of Shem; and Canaan
shall be a servant to them._"--The Patriarch Noah,--a just man, and one
who walked before God (Gen. vi. 9),--a man raised on high, as David
says of himself in 2 Sam. xxiii. 1,--a man whose utterances are not
mere individual wishes, but, at the same time, prophecies,--sees such
rich blessings in store for his son, that, instead of announcing them
to him, he immediately breaks out into the praise of God, who is the
Author of them, and from whom the piety of Shem,[3] the foundation of
this salvation, was derived, just as Moses, in Deut. xxx. 20, instead
of blessing Gad, blesses him by whom Gad is enlarged. The manner in
which God is here spoken of indicates, _indirectly_, what that is in
which the blessing consists. _First_,--God is not called by the name
_Elohim_ (which is expressive of merely the most general outlines of
His nature), but by the name _Jehovah_, which has reference to His
manifested personality, to His revelations, and to His institutions for
salvation.[4] _Secondly_,--Jehovah is called the God of Shem,--the
first passage of Holy Scripture in which God is called the God of some
person. Both these circumstances indicate that God is to enter into an
altogether peculiar relation to the descendants of Shem; that He will
reveal Himself to them; establish His kingdom among them, and make them
partakers of both His earthly and His heavenly blessings. Thus _Luther_
says: "This is indeed perceptible and clear, that he thus binds closely
together God and his son Shem, and, as it were, commits the one to the
other. In this, he indeed indicates the mystery of which Paul treats in
Rom. xi. 11 sq., and Christ, in John iv. 22, that salvation cometh from
the Jews, but that, nevertheless, the heathen shall become partakers of
it. For [Pg 37] although Shem alone be the real root and trunk, yet
into this tree the Gentiles are, as a strange branch, graffed, and
enjoy the fatness and sap which are in the elect tree. This light Noah,
through the Holy Spirit, sees, and although he speaks dark words, he
yet prophesies very plainly, that the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ
shall be planted in the world, and shall grow up among the race of
Shem, and not among that of Japheth." As yet Shem and Japheth were on
an equal footing. In the preceding part of the narrative, nothing had
been communicated by which God had, in His relation to Shem, given up
His nature as