Genesis 9:20
Ver. 20. And Noah began to be an husbandman,.... Or "a man of the earth" {c}, 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 {d} 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 {e}; and some of them {f} 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 {g}; which contradicts what Strabo {h} says of the country of Armenia, its hills and plains, that a vine will not easily grow there.
{c} hmdah vya "vir terrie", Montanus. {d} Zohar, apud Hottinger, Smegma Oriental. p. 253. {e} Ben Melech in loc. so Abarbinel & Bechai, apud Muis, in loc. {f} Targum Jon. in loc. Pirke Eliezer, c. 23. {g} See Tournefort's Voyage to the Levant, vol. 3. p. 178. Universal History, vol. 1. p. 261. {h} Geograph. l. 11. p. 363.