No More Water, But the Fire Next Time

The notion of ancestral guilt seems central to the Bible. The story of Adam and Eve and the apple and original sin is not the only example. We also have the story of Noah and his sons.

According to a superficial reading of the tale in Genesis, Noah is the one righteous man on Earth. So God preserves him and his three sons, and their wives, in the ark, as the rest of the world dies. Kind of like the coronavirus.

When the flood abates, Noah emerges, plants vines, grows grapes, and makes wine. He gets blind drunk. While he is drunk, his son Ham comes into his tent and sees him naked. As a result, Noah curses him and all his descendants.

Noah began to be a farmer, and planted a vineyard. He drank of the wine and got drunk. He was uncovered within his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers outside. Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it on both their shoulders, went in backwards, and covered the nakedness of their father. Their faces were backwards, and they didn’t see their father’s nakedness. Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his youngest son had done to him. He said,

“Canaan is cursed. He will be a servant of servants to his brothers.”

But a superficial reading does not seem possible. Noah is the one righteous man on earth, and here he does not seem to be acting righteously. Is it clear Ham has done anything wrong? Doesn’t Noah bear more responsibility, for getting drunk? What is so terrible about seeing your father naked? And even if Ham looked deliberately, why should his children or grandchildren be punished for it?

The key, I suggest, is that “seeing a man’s nakedness” is a euphemism for having sex with his wife. The Bible uses this euphemism repeatedly elsewhere. Genesis itself says that man and wife are “one flesh.” See Leviticus 18: “‘You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father’s wife. It is your father’s nakedness.”

So what actually happened is that Noah and Mrs. Noah got blind drunk, and Ham took advantage of this to have sex with his mother.

Noah presumably indeed bears some responsibility for getting drunk. As the first to plant a vine, he might not have known wine’s effects. Nevertheless, to get so drunk, he must have overindulged. It would have been overindulgence of a natural appetite at this point even had it been non-alcoholic grape juice. He liked what was happening, and kept going. The sin is eerily similar to that of Eve in eating the apple because it “looked good to eat.”

The more serious sin of the son echoes again the subsequent sin of Cain against Abel. First you overindulge a natural appetite, which seems harmless. But over time, by the next generation, the habit of indulging appetites leads to more serious places, like rape, incest, and murder.

In our chosen translation, the World English Bible—chosen only for copyright reasons—Noah does not actually curse Ham. He only says he IS cursed. “Canaan is cursed.”

Some other translations make it an act of Noah’s will: King James says “Cursed be Canaan.” But both translations are obviously possible. Young’s literal translation has only “cursed Canaan.” No verb.

So we can legitimately read Noah as only making an observation. Ham has demonstrated moral depravity. Ham has shown no filial piety. He will presumably also show no regard for proper parenting in turn.

We have spoken before of the problem of idolizing parents and ancestors. Unreflective children naturally take their parents as the measure of all things. Noah foresees that Ham is going to pass that moral depravity on to his children, and children’s children, into the indefinite future, so long as individual descendants do not make a conscious and painful effort to exile from their families and seek truth and righteousness on their own. Noah foresees a family tradition of moral depravity.

This, in the minds of those who wrote the Bible, could explain the observed depravity of the contemporary Canaanites, Ham’s descendants, who notoriously practiced child sacrifice.

In this way, the sins of the fathers do visit the sons, unto the third or fourth generation.

Possibly a relevant thought in this time of coronavirus. Not to mention plagues of locusts, and unchecked wildfires in Australia and Thailand.