Genesis 9 invites us to wrestle with a familiar tension: our desire to understand how versus God’s insistence on showing us what it means.

After the Flood, God establishes a covenant—not only with Noah and his descendants, but with every living creature and even the earth itself. This covenant is unconditional: never again will all flesh be destroyed by floodwaters.

The sign of this covenant is the rainbow.

Scripture does not explain how the rainbow works, whether it existed before the Flood, or whether the atmosphere changed. Those questions—interesting as they may be—are not answered because theology does not depend on the answer.

In Genesis 9:13, God says, “I have set my bow in the cloud.” The Hebrew word for “bow” (qeshet) is the wor ...