And now to talk about something completely different.
Welcome to Genesis.
Welcome back, friends. Good to have you back.
Thanks for joining us today.
Sorry,
you had to suffer through
cell phone talk.
I would argue that was Clint’s fault.
Yeah, that’s fair.
[Laughter]
We are in the last,
really the last part of the Noah story,
and it is the weirdest part of the Noah story.
And if that seems
unusual for a story about a guy who had to build an ark
and get in it with all the animals and survive a flood,
hold on, because it actually does get even stranger.
What we see happening from this point on, as
Noah and his sons and their families have arrived,
and they begin to repopulate the earth,
the focus of Genesis for a short time is going to shift on the lineages.
That,
in other words, everybody can now be traced back to Noah,
but by which tree,
by which branch of that tree,
is going to matter in the Scriptures.
And it does this from very much an Israelite point of view
that looks back over this part of human history
and works to categorize or separate people into the divisions
that will be important for the rest of the story.
That’s going to be short-lived because we do have the Tower of Babel in the next chapter,
but we are going to see here a kind of presupposing of that story
that really even jumps past the Bible story.
So let’s jump in and then we’ll try to make some sense of this.
The sons of Noah,
sorry,
verse 18, chapter 9,
“The sons of Noah who went out of the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
Ham was the father of Canaan.
These three were the sons of Noah,
and from these the whole earth was peopled.”
“Noah was a man of the soil and the first to plant a vineyard.
He drank some of the wine and became drunk,
and he lay uncovered in his tent.
And Ham, the father of Canaan,
saw the nakedness of his father
and told his two brothers outside.
Then Shem and Japheth took a garment,
laid it on both of their shoulders
and walked in backward to cover the nakedness of their father.
Their faces were turned away and they did not see their father’s nakedness.
When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him,
he said,
‘Cursed be Canaan,
lowest of slaves shall be he to his brothers.’
He also said, ‘Blessed by the Lord God be Shem and let Canaan be his slave.
May God make space for Japheth and let him live in the tents of Shem
and let Canaan be his slave.
After the flood, Noah lived 350 years.
All the days of Noah were 950 years and then he died.”
So this is the part of the story that I think a lot of people aren’t aware of,
or if they’ve read it before,
they’ve been confused by it
and wondered what the heck is happening.
This is the story of Noah celebrating essentially a crop, a vineyard,
and in the midst of that becomes intoxicated,
maybe on purpose, or maybe just as a result of discovering fermentation in growing grapes that become wine.
However it is that it happens,
for Noah explanation,
perhaps it’s hot, whatever,
Noah ends up passed out in his tent without clothes on.
That seems like an odd story.
It may have meant something to the people of its day
that is not really
apparent to us.
The purpose of this story though is really what happens next.
Yeah, so what I want to just point out here is that we do very much have a continuation
of the flood story.
Remember this idea that God makes a covenant,
there’s this promise, there’s this new day.
And much like Adam and Eve’s story,
there’s a garden,
there’s a vineyard, there’s a place where
produce is made.
And in this case however,
instead of the garden being a place
where the temptation comes from a serpent,
here Noah falls prey to the fruit of the vineyard, right?
He drinks to excess and in doing so he puts himself in a very vulnerable
and in this culture shameful position.
To be caught
naked is not just a bad day.
That is an unfortunate sort of breach of responsibility and conduct.
So what we have here is
the good fruit of living on the other side of God’s blessing,
in this case taking an excess and leading one into a position of shame
and unnecessary transparency or vulnerability.
And this is a problem and it’s only going to be accentuated by his son’s response to it.
Right, and as to the particular of what the offense is here,
scholars have argued this back and forth.
It’s not entirely clear.
It is not entirely acceptable to see your father’s nakedness.
In fact, that phrase itself is problematic.
It
hints at a kind of judgment or ridicule.
Probably though,
what’s more likely is that he goes and tells his brothers.
And so Noah wakes up covered in a blanket.
How did I get this blanket on?
He now finds out that not only did his son Ham see him,
but he gossiped, he told.
And there is a sort of
possibility that the implication here is that he laughed at him,
that he made fun of his father,
that he dishonored him or disgraced him.
Now,
all of that is kind of guessed at.
But one thing that is clear in the text,
I want to go back through this.
So I want you to just keep track.
I think it’s three.
But in verse 18,
we get told Ham was the father of Canaan,
right?
Then we get
verse 22,
23, no, excuse me,
22, Ham,
the father of Canaan.
And then when Noah wakes up,
he doesn’t say cursed be Ham.
He says cursed be Canaan.
So interestingly enough,
the text is very concerned with who Ham becomes.
What is Ham’s lineage?
And if you know the Israelite story,
who are the people that live in the land that Israel takes?
Who are their primary enemies?
Who is their most hated rivals?
It’s the Canaanites.
And what does this say about the Canaanites?
Oh, they’re from Ham’s people.
And you know what Ham did?
You know that those people have been cursed.
You know that those people are dishonorable.
You know that those people have acted in this way because they are from that guy.
And there’s a clear sense in which the story is telling us a lot more than what happened to Ham.
The story is prefiguring a tension that lives between Israel and Canaan way,
way, way down the road, and it is setting the origin of that in this narrative.
Be really careful here.
I want to accentuate what you had said leading into the conversation,
Clint.
I’d be very careful in a text that goes out of its way to not say a lot,
to not fill in the gaps.
The honest truth is,
we do not know.
Scholars go back and forth.
There are huge gaps in things like,
and just let me point out,
notice that Noah is not censured in any meaningful way in this text.
There’s no sense in which we’re told explicitly that Noah went beyond the bounds,
that he shouldn’t have drank,
or that what his son did was before God condemned.
No, I mean, he’s condemned and he’s cursed in this case by Noah.
But that’s not divine dictate.
It’s a very interesting text because it’s clearly,
you’ve got to at least recognize
the Canaanite connection.
There’s this long story of the Canaanites in Scripture.
We can’t ignore that.
So the fact that it’s here immediately following this recreation move in Genesis,
and now we see the world coming,
we see in some ways the enemy of the nation
being given its own Genesis story.
This is meaningful.
But what we don’t have here is any particular kind of moralism,
no matter how much you want to go back and ask Noah,
what is this here?
Verse 24.
He knew what his youngest son had done to him.
Well, what was that?
What was done to him?
Well, what exactly is the nature of that?
We don’t know.
That’s the point.
We don’t exactly know.
The writer didn’t find it important enough to tell us that detail.
So a faithful reading of this at some level probably just needs to accept some mystery.
I mean, if you think that’s fair.
I do.
And I think that this is one of those instances where the Bible is telling us a story about
people, but the point is about peoples.
And so we’re not going to do much with chapter 10.
In fact, we’ll probably skip it completely.
But if you read chapter 10,
you get these long lists of the nations that come from each of these sons.
And as you go through that list,
particularly in Ham’s case,
you see the Canaanites.
You see the Egyptians.
You see many of the people with whom the Israelites are going to struggle.
So this is not just a story of the three sons.
This is a story of who the three sons become in the evolution of people,
in the population of people as cities go.
This is about their lineages.
And particularly, it’s about the flawed lineage of Ham because he’s cursed by his father
for this dishonor, this thing that he did.
Though we may not completely understand what that is,
it is an offense.
And by his own dad is he cursed.
And that curse follows down his line as it says here,
“Let Canaan be the slave of Shem.”
“Let Canaan be the slave of Japheth and his people.”
So how is it that these people groups are inferior?
Because they’re from Ham’s line.
And that’s really the meta-story here told in the details of this family story.
The family story is speaking
far beyond the four people involved,
literally to the ends of the earth and the people that populate it.
Don’t miss though,
here we have another child of the main character of a significant
substantial Genesis story missing the mark.
We had that with Adam and Eve.
Of course, their first two sons,
we have the first murder occur.
Here Noah,
we have God miraculously saving him.
He is brought to a place of new life.
In fact, he’s able to grow this vineyard,
right?
This is a form of God’s blessing.
And even in that blessing, once again,
we see the children demonstrating the lasting effects
of that sin that we saw demonstrated in the very beginning.
I think we’re not going to be surprised to find out.
In fact,
tomorrow,
as we turn to the next
major story and we look at the Tower of Babel,
we’re going to see that once again,
Ham’s story becomes writ large to the peoples
or to a larger group.
It is once again going to encircle the globe.
There’s once again going to be a concerted effort to try to reach God
and to try to claim what’s God’s.
Sin still exists.
That’s the point.
God does this judgment,
this flood that wipes out all the living things on the earth.
But yet,
on the ark,
there’s stillborn this original seed of sickness,
this virus that affects the deepest part of the human soul,
and it lives on in these sons.
The text doesn’t go out of its way to make it clear to us what actions or moral level
is being transgressed.
Nor did it in the Cain and Abel story.
It wasn’t entirely clear there either why God had found one sacrifice to be lacking over the other.
Here,
we don’t exactly know what made Noah mad in particular,
but the point was that sin continues and it will remain the problem.
This is coming to the end of this first part of the book of Genesis.
We’re going to transition into a different mode.
So, in some ways, we’re beginning to wrap up that first theme
with another theme that is sort of harmonic with it.
Yeah, and not to travel old ground again,
but remember that there are a couple of sources
present here.
So, in the 10th chapter,
when we get the listing of all the sons and where they go,
we get a kind of restatement of that.
So, the 10th chapter ends with the idea that the peoples and their languages
are spread upon the earth by the dissemination of Noah’s sons.
In the 11th chapter,
we get the far more familiar version,
which is the Tower of Babel in which God has a hand in spreading people and languages.
And then we go back to one of the sons of Noah Shem,
which delivers us to the character Abram.
And what we learn in that transition is that Abraham and all that comes next in the nation
of Israel with Abraham as the father is the lineage of Shem back to Noah.
And again, this matters to the people who tell the story.
It may not seem like it matters to us,
but as they told their story,
and particularly the family narrative of their story,
these are important details,
that it is this particular son
who inevitably and eventually gives birth to the nation of Israel.
And consequently, it is this other son,
sketchy and cursed,
who gives birth to our enemies.
Yeah, and don’t miss that from a Christian context,
even the New Testament authors found it important to trace lineages all the way back for Jesus.
So, though this may not seem incredibly relevant to people who live thousands of years after Jesus,
even more thousands of years after these texts were written,
this is applicable because Jesus was born in a context where this was a hereditary reality,
that this family tree did matter.
And so as those who are engrafted,
if you were with us in the Roman study,
though we may not be physically related in a way that these original authors would have cared about,
we are spiritually related.
And so this narrative of the one who is cursed versus the one who is blessed,
these things continue to have meaning.
And in fact, Christian theologians have teased out in different times
how they continue to have spiritual meaning.
And I find that interesting and helpful that we can come to the text,
and though it may not necessarily resonate with that exact first intention,
it is still applicable for the Christian to realize that there still is
that one who is cursed and that one who is blessed.
And what does that mean?
How can we be those who are faithful,
seeking to follow in the way of the one,
Jesus Christ, who was eternally blessed and who has blessed all who follow him?
So,
though it may not be a direct one-to-one sort of connection,
friends, there is meaning here and I hope it’s encouraging.
Yeah, it’s an odd story.
I personally find the odd stories interesting.
It is that if you grew up in a small town,
it is likely that there was some family that others referred to as, you know,
“Oh, well, you know, he’s a Jones boy,” or “He’s a love-all kid.”
And that carried with it a kind of explanation that was more than just information.
That wasn’t just about who your parents were.
That was something about the character of that family.
And that’s what’s happening in the Ham story.
And in the Shem story,
though, in a different way.
And we will look at that transition tomorrow.
Another story I think that you’ll be familiar with tomorrow,
another odd, ancient story.
Maybe less weird than this one, a little,
but interesting.
Thanks for being with us,
friends.
We will see you tomorrow.
Have a good one.
Bye.