Genesis 9:20

And Noah began to be an husbandman ,.... Or "a man of the earth" F3 איש האדמה "vir terrie", Montanus. , 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 Zohar, apud Hottinger, Smegma Oriental. p. 253. 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 Ben Melech in loc. so Abarbinel & Bechai, apud Muis, in loc. ; and some of them F6 Targum Jon. in loc. Pirke Eliezer, c. 23. 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 See Tournefort's Voyage to the Levant, vol. 3. p. 178. Universal History, vol. 1. p. 261. ; which contradicts what Strabo F8 Geograph. l. 11. p. 363. says of the country of Armenia, its hills and plains, that a vine will not easily grow there.