Notes 6: A drunkard's indiscretion (9:18-29)

SYNOPSIS: Noah gets drunk and exposes himself. The brothers cover him.

• Text of the passage in Nawat

What follows is an odd little story involving Noah and his three sons, focusing in particular on Ham (xam), who is put in a negative light by this narrative, with clearly symbolic intentions. The passage begins by repeating (cf. 5:32, 6:10 and 7:13) that Noah had three sons: Shem (shem), Ham and Japheth (yáfet, yéfet). Evidently the reason why these names are repeated so often is not just so that we will know the names of everyone in Noah's family (we are never told the name of his wife!), but because of their special mythical significance as the ancestors of the three branches of the human race into which all of post-diluvian humanity is divided. Here I am anticipating the next passage which gives all the details: the Table of Nations (ch. 10), and my reason for the anticipation is that the listeners to the story before us no doubt also had that foreknowledge and brought it to bear on their understanding of it. The point is this: the Israelites themselves were in their own view classed as part of the Shem branch (hence they are called Semites, i.e. "Shem-ites"), and (surprise surprise) as such they had a "few issues" with the descendants of brothers Ham and Japheth. They seem to have been particularly eager to establish their own moral superiority to the children of Ham, which is where the Israelites classified their immediate neighbours in Canaan in patriarchal times: viz. the Canaanites. The present story persistently drums this into us: (9:18) w'xam hu avi kh'ná‛an 'Ham is the father of Canaan', and again (9:22) xam avi kh'ná‛an 'Ham the father of Canaan'. After that as the story develops it doesn't even bother with Ham any more and just talks directly about Canaan, as if this were a synonym for Ham but clearly taking jabs at the historical Canaanites with every sentence: (9:25 wayyómer arur k'ná‛an ‛éved ‛avadim yihye l'exaw 'he said: / Cursed be Canaan, / The lowest of slaves / Shall he be to his brothers' (JPS). Obviously no love lost there. The same idea is insisted upon again in vv. 26 and 27. Okay, we got it. Vv. 25-27 are thought likely to have come originally from another (older) source, as a poem about Canaan no doubt, and the textual shenanigans just described might then be traces of an editorial endeavour to integrate that poem into the genealogy.

And indeed, this is all rather tol'dot-ish: here we are concerned with genealogy, with the family tree, and within the tree, sorting out the nice branches and the not-so-nice, the good, the bad and the ugly. Noah survived the mabbul and so did his three sons who are now the three fathers of humankind, and it's time to follow the family tree forward, and the story in this passage is one of those anecdotes, which in this case involves the three sons of Noah so this is where it has to be placed. As such anecdotes go, we are treated to rather more detail than is so often the case (see the Adam to Noah passage in ch. 5-6 and my comments there). The details in question are a bit weird, and it makes one think, if this is representative of the sort of story details the authors have omitted from other anecdotes as irrelevant or unedifying (as commentators sometimes suggest), then maybe it's just as well!

9:20 wayyáxel nóax...
This construction with the verb x-l-l 'to begin' is hard to interpret, and the translations are correspondingly vague and inconsistent, cf. (KJV) And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard, (ESV) Noah began to be a man of the soil..., (RV) Y comenzó Noé á labrar la tierra, y plantó una viña (and sim. LXX and Vulg.), but (CEV) Noah farmed the land and was the first to plant a vineyard, (EAS) Noah, a man of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard (JPS sim.) and (EF) Now Noah was the first man of the soil; he planted a vineyard. The question seems to be whether Noah wasn't a farmer before and now became one, whether he was the first farmer (let's not worry about Cain, 4:2), or whether it was he who invented viticulture, a reading which Speiser (p. 61) says "is entirely consistent with Heb. idiomatic usage." Be that as it may, it is leading up to the fact that in the next verse Noah got drunk. I wonder if this, worded as it is, was supposed to be a slight against farmers, who would have had easier access to alcohol, I suppose, on account of their sedentary lifestyle which gave them time to grow and make the stuff, and so might have been thought of by the Israelite sheep herders as immoral drunkards.

9:21 b'tokh oholo
'Inside his tent.' The noun óhel 'tent' occurs in 19 verses in Genesis and over 300 times in the whole Hebrew Bible. It seems to have been the normal dwelling of the main characters of Genesis. It has been mentioned once before, in the list of Cain's descendants, where Jabal (yaval), one of Lamech and Ada's sons, is described as (4:20, JPS) avi yoshev óhel umiqne 'the ancestor of those who dwell in tents and amidst herds.' AVD p. 20: "A tent was generally erected with three sets of three poles; the longest poles were set up in a line down the centre with the two shorter sets of poles on either side, and all were tied to one another with ropes. The canvas or fabric was stretched tightly over the top and made fast with cords to stakes in the ground." The "canvas or fabric" would be made of animal skins, and the H verb used in association with óhel to convey the idea of 'to pitch (a tent)', n-T-h, basically means 'to stretch'. This is first used of Abram: wayyeT oholo 'he pitched his tent.'

9:22 wayyagged lishne exaw baxutz
Apparently what Ham should have done when he accidentally saw his drunken father expose himself was to discretely cover him up and say nothing about it. He didn't; instead, he went outside and told both his brothers what he had seen, and let them deal with it. Now this might actually be a rather good example of a certain kind of situation which poses an interesting question for a debate on ethics. Interestingly, the text of the story suggests that Noah bore no part of the blame for what happened; apparently it isn't about what he did, it is about what Ham did in the situation. Perhaps we might be tempted to view the characters' attitude to the problem of Noah's momentary nudity as prudish by modern standards, though that would depend on whom we ask, no doubt, but I rather suspect that the reason why this story provokes some discomfort, and is rarely discussed, is that our society is in fact even more prudish than that of the story's authors. At least they raised the question about proper behaviour in an awkward situation, whereas we don't seem to feel like even discussing it! All the commentaries I have on hand skip over these verses as quickly as they can, so I have had to go out on a limb with my own brief and inexpert reflections here.

9:24 b'no haqqaTan
Lit. 'his small son', and commentators agree that this must mean in the context 'youngest son', yet Ham is nowhere listed last among Noah's sons and normally sons are listed in their order of age. This is mysterious and suggests that these words ultimately originate from a different source to the one we have been reading from, with a slightly different tradition.

9:25 arur k'ná‛an
On arur, see  my comments on 3:14 etc.

‛éved ‛avadim
This is a typical BH construction: the same noun occurs twice, first in the singular construct and then in the plural absolute, literally meaning, here, 'slave-of slaves', but the effective meaning is something like 'the utmost of slaves.'

9:26 barukh YHWH elohe shem
This is an unusual and interesting formulation. YHWH is clearly a proper name and is described as 'Shem's God' or '(the) God of Shem'; it is equally clear that elohe (construct of elohim) is a common noun meaning 'god/God.' The only sensible way to understand this phrasing is if "Shem" stands for or symbolizes Israel, naturally opposed to "Canaan" standing for the non-Israelite neighbours (as it usually does in Gen.) who did not worship YHWH.

lamo (also in 9:27)
An archaic form found in poetry, 'to them' (= lahem). Consists of l'- and an old pronominal suffix -mo.

9:27  
The actual meaning of these verses is frankly obscure.


yaft elohim l'yéfet
A name game, attempting to explain the name yáfet or yéfet through the verb y-p-t, which is said to mean 'to make room' but is a hapax legomenon in this sense. In OH, the words that appear vocalized yaft and yéfet respectively would presumably have been pronounced the same or similar.

w'yishkon b'ohole shem wiyhi kh'ná‛an ‛éved lamo
The literal meaning here is clear ('and let him [i.e. Japheth] dwell in the tents of Shem; and let Canaan be a slave to them'), but what is all that about? Well, nobody seems sure, but here is one hypothesis which I quote from Speiser (pp. 62-3, additions in square brackets are mine, reflecting Speiser's suggestion): "The most likely period that would seem to fit the conditions here reflected is the turn of the twelfth century B.C., when the Israelites [= Shem] were struggling against the entrenched Canaanites [= Ham] at the same time that the recently arrived Philistines [= Japheth] were trying to consolidate their hold on the coastal strip. By the end of the eleventh century, the Canaanites [= Ham] were no longer a major political factor in Palestine, and the advangateous coalition of Philistines and Israelites gave way to bitter conflict between the two successors." This hypothesis implies a dating of the poem to the short-lived period of coalition between "Japheth" and "Shem" to defeat "Ham." This, it must be emphasised, is only a guess.

9:28-9
The notice of the length of Noah's life is ascribed to P and is in standard tol'dot form; we thus seem to be past the anecdotal material about Noah and his sons now and back "on track" with genealogical information flowing. This will be made "official" in the next verse, the first of ch. 10, which commences with the habitual text marker w'élle tol'dot...