After almost all the descendants of Adam had chosen with their understanding of good and evil and freewill to reject to do good and their God to do what they wanted by doing evil, were killed in the destructive flood; only the last obeying Adamite, Noah, and his family were saved in an ark.
Once Noah and his family got off the ark, Noah built an alter to God and killed some of the animals on the ark and burnt them as an animal sacrifice to thank God for saving him and his family and part of his pure earthly creation from being destroyed in the destructive flood:
Genesis 8:20-22
“Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and, taking some of all the…animals and…birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it.”
God saw Noah had built an alter to him and sacrificed burn animal offerings on it and smelt the smoke from the burnt offering and was very pleased with this loyal Adamite’s obedience and respect to him:
Because he was pleased with Noah’s loyal obedience, he swore to himself that he would never destroy all life on Earth nor curse the Earth (like he did when Adam broke his Edenic covenant) ever again because of Human rebellion and sin towards him and his covenant: the life God created on Earth as well as the natural seasons; God said they would always exist as he created them:
Genesis 8:21-22
“...The Lord smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: ‘Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done. As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.’”
So like God said, after they were safe from the flood, God then made a new covenant with Noah and all his descendants and even all the pairs of surviving animals for Noah’s faithful obedience:
Genesis 9:8-10
“Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him ‘I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth.’”
The first part of this covenant was God vowing to never destroy all land-living animals and Adamites/humans with a massive flood ever again:
Genesis 9:11
“I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”
God then gave a physical sign of this new covenant:
The sign of this promise was a rainbow in the sky after rain
Genesis 9:12-13
“And God said, ‘This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth.’”
When God sees it in the sky he will remember the covenant he made with Noah/the rest of surviving life on Earth and all their descendants:
Genesis 9:14-16
“Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.”
He then blessed Noah’s three sons; Ham, Japheth, and Shem, to repopulate the destroyed corrupt world with pure Adamites/Humans again:
Genesis 9:1
“Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth.’”
Also In this new world, God was also going to allow them to eat something loyal Adamites seemed to have been forbidden to eat up until this point:
Animal Meat
As apart of the covenant of this new world, God allowed Noah and his family to now eat animal meat along with the grains, fruits, vegetables, and other seed plants he had already given them permission to eat:
Genesis 9:2-3
“...all the beasts of the earth,…all the birds in the sky,…every creature that moves along the ground, and…all the fish in the sea; they are given into your hands. Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.”
But Because animals would now be food for humans/Adamites God would give them a seemingly new fearful nature of humans and each other so they would not all be eaten and save themselves:
Genesis 9:2
“The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea;…”
While eating (and thus killing) animals was now acceptable God did give a warning when eating animal meat about one thing within animal meat that would be forbidden to eat: they could not eat animals with blood still in them (basically, they could not eat blood).
Genesis 9:4
“But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it.”
Along with being able to kill animals for food, God also wanted to discuss another important law he wanted to stress in this new covenant:
Murder
Now murder was already considered a law of God and evil in the adamic covenant but their now would be a major law to hold those who murder another human accountable since this was one of the major evils that was rampant in the former world and made God horrified:
Genesis 9:5
“And for your lifeblood I will surely demand an accounting…I will demand an accounting for the life of another human being.”
This not only applied to a murdered human being, but also to all animals who were murdered for reasons other than to eat:
An animal’s and human’s life were so important to God that he would hold their deaths accountable on who they were killed by and why:
Genesis 9:5
“I will demand an accounting from every animal. And from each human being, too,…”
But a human murdered would especially be held accountable because a human’s live was very valuable because they were made in God’s image:
Genesis 9:5-6
“I will demand an accounting for the life of another human being. Whoever sheds human blood, by humans shall their blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made mankind.”
Therefore if anyone murdered a human then as punishment they were then to be killed and have their life taken away by other humans as punishment.
The promise:
Because of Noah’s obedience to him God would never again try to destroy life on land because of future human disobedience/evil. The sign of this promise would be the rainbow in the sky after rain.
Noah’s descendants were blessed to repopulate the land as well as the saved land animals by having plenty of children.
Main laws:
Sacrifice your animals and fruit as sacrifices/offerings to God.
Make a decision with your knowledge of good and evil to either choose to do good or do what you want (evil).
Do not murder another human or animal (that is any other reason that is not for food or any other reasonable reason: like self-defense): if a human is murdered other humans have a responsibility to kill the one that murdered.
Other laws:
Wear clothes to cover your nakedness.
Honor the sabbath.
Tend to the earth you are given and rule over animals on earth.
Worship and do what God wants you to do.
Permitted to kill animals for food and eat their meat, but to drain their blood out completely before eating them.
So with the establishment of this new covenant with Noah and his descendants Noah continued to follow his God, but what about his sons and their descendants would they choose to obey God by following his commands and do good?
The Noahic covenant almost immediately broken
Although God most likely hoped that Noah’s descendants that he made this covenant with, would choose to do good and obey/worship him unlike the former Adamites that choose to do evil and rebel against him.
But sadly it seems in less than the 3rd generation from Noah (that would be his great-grandchildren or even his grandchildren or even some of his very own sons who God originally made the covenant with!) at least some of his descendants (called Noahites) were already choosing to do evil by teaching other Noahites/their own descendants to worship false gods that did not exists and to teach them other evil things like rebelling against God’s command to spread out to the new vacant lands so their descendants could live in the land as a large group and once again care and farm the land:
While in a later generation of Noah’s descendants a major portion of them (if not all of them) began to move away from their original home Mt. Ararat in Anatolia towards the southeast and found a plain in the middle of two rivers that was very fertile; later called Mesopotamia (called here Shinar):
Genesis 11:2
“As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar (that is Mesopotamia) and settled there.”
There the Noahites began to rebel against being spread any farther apart like God desired them to be to repopulate the land on Earth:
Genesis 11:3
“They said to each other,…’Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.’ ”
Even only a couple generations after Noah and his sons left the ark, many Noahites (also Sethite Adamites) were already choosing to do evil by rejecting God’s will for them to spread apart from one another (they were breaking the Noahic covenant God had made with them through their ancestors Noah and his sons). For their open rebellion towards God, he went to this new city and made them speak new and different languages so they would not understand one another and not be able to work or live together anymore and thus be forced to be scattered and live in the vacated lands.
Genesis 11:7-8
“...the Lord confused the[ir] language (changed their original language they understood to many different languages)… So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city.”
After God punished these rebellious Noahites for their rejection of his command, they seemed to have learned absolutely nothing from their punishment to not only be separated from their new glorious home in Mesopotamia and other Noahite brothers forever, but to also speak a new language and not be able to understand anyone else except those who maybe also spoke their language (most likely their family).
Once they claimed their new land after being scattered from their city in Mesopotamia, they seemed to have continued to worship false gods and teach others/their family and children to worship them and do other evil things like murder by sacrificing other humans (human sacrifices) to their false gods they choose to worship.
Eventually after some more generations passed since the punishment of the rebellion at the great city in Mesopotamia, these rebellious Noahites seemed to have been so deceived by what they had been taught by their ancestors/parents they didn’t even know about God nor the covenant he made with them through their ancestor Noah:
All they began to know was their new man-made religions/worldviews and what they taught. Thus about around the 9th or 10th generation of Noah’s descendants pretty much all the Noahites had forgotten about God and his special covenant with them to worship other false gods and believed/did the lies of their man-made religion.
Thus pretty much all the Noahites (and thus Adamites) once again choose to do evil and reject God and break his Noahic covenant.
Once again God’s human creation had chosen to reject him and do evil, but instead of getting angry God did something very different: he let these Noahites pretty much do what they wanted out of ignorance/rebellion because they choose to reject him so he would reject them; but he had mercy on only one know Noahite who was most likely as ignorant and rebellious in that ignorance as any other Noahite on Earth and who had most likely broken the Noahic covenant himself:
This Noahite was a S(h)emitic Hebrew named Abram; and God would make a special new covenant with him and reteach him about God being the one true God and his promises and laws that would forever change his descendants and the entire world.