John Gill Commentary Genesis 9:20

"And Noah began to be a husbandman, and planted a vineyard:" — Genesis 9:20 (ASV)

And Noah began to be an husbandman
Or "a man of the earth" ^F3 , not lord of it, as Jarchi, though he was, but a tiller of the earth, as he had been before the flood, and now began to be again; he returned to his old employment, and which perhaps he improved, having invented, as the Jews ^F4 say, instruments of husbandry; it may be, the use of the plough, which made the tillage of the ground more easy; he was expert in husbandry, as Aben Ezra observes, and which, as he remarks, is great wisdom; and though he was so great a man, yet he employed himself in this way:

and he planted a vineyard ;
not vines, but a vineyard; there were vines before scattered up and down, here one and there another, but he planted a number of them together, and set them in order, as the Jewish writers say ^F5 ; and some of them ^F6 will have it that he found a vine which the flood brought out of the garden of Eden, and planted it; but this is mere fable:

where this plantation was cannot be said with certainty; the Armenians have a tradition that Noah, after quitting the ark, went and settled at Erivan, about twelve leagues from Ararat, a city full of vineyards; and that it was there he planted the vineyard, in a place where they still make excellent wine, and that their vines are of the same sort he planted there ^F7 ; which contradicts what Strabo ^F8 says of the country of Armenia, its hills and plains, that a vine will not easily grow there.

---

FOOTNOTES:

• F3: (hmdah vya) "vir terrie", Montanus.
• F4: Zohar, apud Hottinger, Smegma Oriental. p. 253.
• F5: Ben Melech in loc. so Abarbinel & Bechai, apud Muis, in loc.
• F6: Targum Jon. in loc. Pirke Eliezer, c. 23.
• F7: See Tournefort's Voyage to the Levant, vol. 3. p. 178. Universal History, vol. 1. p. 261.
• F8: Geograph. l. 11. p. 363.