Genesis 9:2, commentary and pictures

Immediately after Noah came out of the ark, he looked at the powerful and ferocious beasts of prey brought out with him and at his family of only eight people, and he greatly feared his family would be destroyed by the animals. In answer God sent His angel to assure Noah that the fear and dread of humans would rest on every beast of the earth, every fowl of the air, everything that moves on the earth, and all the fishes of the sea. They were thus delivered into human hands to protect the eight people and to place the animals under human control.

The verse belongs to the re-peopling of the earth after the flood, when humanity began to multiply again. At that restart God entrusted His wisdom to people more sparingly, giving only the ability needed to carry out His great plan, while the greater knowledge, valuable ideas, and arts of the long-lived antediluvian race perished in the waters because they perverted their God-given intellect to glorify self with continually evil imagination. The verse also opens God's first permission to eat animal food, allowing people to eat the flesh of the clean beasts preserved in the ark because every green thing had been destroyed, whereas before they were to subsist wholly on what the earth produced.

Animals thus delivered into human hands remain lesson books, for by studying their formation and habits and the use they make of their bodies and the weapons provided them, people gain knowledge for devising apparatus for every kind of work. Soon afterward the multiplying race forgot God, corrupted their ways, and grew increasingly intemperate. The Genesis account is inspired Scripture and literal history, and Noah's generation prefigures the character of the age before Christ's return.