Genesis 9:18-29: Peeping Ham and the Curse of Canaan

In one of my previous posts, I talked about the ancient belief that sin could be inherited but I didn’t dig too deep into the multitude of egregious manifestations of this belief throughout history. I didn’t forget about this, I simply figured there would be many opportunities to discuss it, starting with the latter half of Genesis 9.

Recall that in Genesis 6-8, God decided he was going to drown the entire world because the humans were being shitty. But God decided he’d save Noah and his family, so he told them to build a giant boat and put a pair of every single species of animal on that boat. Then God flooded the world and killed everyone.

Afterwards, Noah and his family were tasked with restarting the world. God promised he wouldn’t destroy everything this time (although he provided a neat little loophole in his promise, in case he changed his mind) so the only thing Noah and his family had to do was procreate and everything would be back to normal.

After the flood, Noah did the next logical thing, he planted a vineyard, made some wine and got drunk. After forty days of tending to a literal floating zoo, Noah needed to kick his sandals off and drink away some of that stress. Now, if you’ve ever been to college, you probably know that the craziest people are the people that have never drank before. And as we know, prior to the flood, Noah was God’s favorite student, so we can imagine he was something of a goody two shoes. This means that when Noah got drunk, he got really drunk. We’re told that, when the party was over, Noah was found naked in his tent.

Unfortunately, Noah was found naked in his tent by his son Ham. Genesis 9:22 tells us “Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father naked and told his two brothers outside.” Now, modern readers tend to read this part and think that it’s rather gross. Nobody wants to walk into a tent and find their dad naked (especially if their dad is 600 years old…) but apparently this would have meant something more to the original readers of this text. We know this because, after Ham tells his two brothers (Shem and Japheth), the brothers walk in backwards and cover their father with a blanket. The reason they walk in backwards is to avoid seeing Noah naked like Ham did. Why take such precautions? Apparently, seeing your dad naked wasn’t just gross, apparently it was a mortal sin. When Noah woke up and found out that Ham had seen him naked, Noah cursed Ham’s son Canaan and doomed his entire bloodline to a life of slavery.

If you’re confused, you’re not alone. Why did Noah curse Canaan when it was Ham who he had beef with? Is it really the end of the world that Ham saw Noah naked? The folks at gotquestions.org are also puzzled by this one, they present a couple of possible answers but even they agree that most of them don’t add up and ultimately, they’ve got questions but no answers. Answers in Genesis, on the other hand, always has the answers. And as usual, their answers misread the text in order to justify their preconceived beliefs. They’re response more or less boils down to, “well Canaan must’ve done something wrong, otherwise God wouldn’t have let Noah curse him.” But apparently there are no Answers in Genesis as to what exactly it is Canaan did wrong.

I’m no Bible scholar but maybe the reason it’s so hard to find an answer here is because we’re expecting it to make sense in our time. We assume that their must be a good reason for Noah to curse an entire bloodline of people, so there must be something the Bible isn’t telling us. But maybe the Bible is telling us all the information it wants us to know. Maybe the Genesis writers have given us all the pieces to the puzzle, but we just don’t like the big picture. Is it possible that this Curse on Canaan happened because Noah was embarrassed that his son saw him naked? Then, when he woke up with a serious hangover, he was pissed off (and perhaps a little drunk still). He was so pissed off that he accidentally cursed the wrong person.

Genesis was probably written sometime between 900 and 700 BC. In the centuries preceding Genesis, Canaan apparently had some rough years. Canaan was a colony of Egypt and many Canaanites are included in a list of prisoners of war to Egypt. So, something happened to the Canaanites that might have led one to suggest that the Canaanites were cursed to become slaves. The Bible has its own account of what happens to the Canaanites and it’s rather horrific, but we’ll get to that later. For now, what’s important is that the writers of Genesis would have been trying to explain why Canaan had drawn such a bad lot. In my view, this bizarre tail of Noah’s nudity and peeping Ham was all just a way of explaining the misfortunes of a fallen nation and perhaps even a way of justifying the actions of the Israelites.

But regardless of the justification for these verses, the problem is the way they’ve been used. In the 18^th and 19^th centuries when African slavery became prominent in America, Genesis 9 was used as a justification for the enslavement of blacks. According to this view, the Africans were descended from Ham and Canaan and since Genesis 9:25 says “Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers,” this apparently means that God ordained slavery.

Now of course, you could argue, I’m being unfair. There’s nothing in the Bible that explicitly states that the Africans were descended from Ham and Canaan. The slave apologists were being dishonest, and we shouldn’t blame the Bible for the way it’s been interpreted over the years. But my argument is a bit more nuanced. I’m not saying that we should blame an ancient text for having ancient views. What I’m saying is that, when we read the Bible as an infallible, perfect text, we will inevitably just read in whatever views we want to read into it. This is why the Bible has been used to justify slavery, genocide, greed and all sorts of other egregious things over the years. It’s not because there’s anything wrong with the book, it’s because there’s something wrong with the way we read it.

What Christians often fail to understand is that nothing can be read objectively. As the old saying goes “there is no view from nowhere.” You cannot simply read the Bible; you have to interpret it and the way you interpret it is greatly impacted by the culture you’re living in. This is why the Bible has always been used to affirm the status quo, because the human mind is always looking for affirmation of the current form of reality. The human mind is always looking to be told that everything is perfectly fine the way it is and that nothing needs to change. Reading the Bible as the inerrant word of God allows us to read our own beliefs into the text and then ordain them as if they had come straight out of God’s mouth. In this way, Biblical Inerrancy hinders progress and change in society. We can’t change because the Bible says so, and if we can’t change we can’t grow.

Genesis 9:6-7: God’s Epicurean Command

How should I live? This is the answer that most people who read Genesis would have been looking for. You could rephrase it of course, How does God want me to live? What is the purpose of my life? Etc. But however you word it, this is an age-old question and we’re still asking it today. In Genesis 9:6-7, the writers of Genesis attempt to answer it. In Genesis 9:6-7 after Noah and his family have survived the flood and are preparing to start the world anew, God gives Noah and his sons the following command: “Whoever sheds human blood, by humans shall their blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made mankind. As for you, be fruitful and increase in number; multiply on the earth and increase upon it.” Or, in other words, have sex and don’t kill each other. These are the surprisingly Epicurean commands Noah and his family were to carry on into the new world.

These commands are much more concise when compared to the ten commandments, but I think they are just as effective at establishing a moral framework and they cut out nonsense like “I am the Lord your God” and “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain”. These commands seem to be more fitting to a secular person than they are to a religious person.

Have sex and don’t kill each other. Just two commandments, but if we broaden our scope they can be applied to a wide variety of human experiences. Let’s take the first command, the command to have sex. Or, as God put it, “be fruitful and increase in number.” Of course, we could simply take this at face value. Thou shalt fool around with thy neighbor (so long as it’s consensual)! And it’s likely that the Genesis writers would have wanted it to be read that way. In fact, for the writers of Genesis, this God-ordained love making probably only applied to a specific subset of sexual encounters. Namely, a man and his wife. Premarital sex, gay sex, polygamous sex, transamorous sex were pretty much all off the table. But since I’m no longer chained to this book by some religion, I’m going to take some liberties in my interpretation.

For many religious people, sex is a touchy subject and anyone who’s studied the issue can attest to the complicated relationship between religion and sex. So, it’s quite liberating to hear the God of the Old Testament (who is generally the most conservative of God’s many faces) telling us that, contrary to what our preacher might tell us. God apparently wants us to fuck around. Take that GEM Ansco mb e!! So, if God is giving us the liberty to have sex freely, what else are we free to do? When I read this verse, I saw it as a broader endorsement of hedonism. Of course, the God of the Old Testament doesn’t seem like the type to endorse such a thing but then he didn’t seem like the type to endorse sexuality either, so maybe we were wrong about the old guy (we weren’t but play along).

Perhaps, the message here is to enjoy yourself. Indulge a little bit. Eat the tastiest foods, drink the best beers and the finest wines, laugh with your friends, dance with your loved ones, watch reruns of I Love Lucy if that’s what you’re into. Spend the fleeting moments you have on this Earth enjoying every moment because that’s what you were born to do. But there’s a catch, and it comes in the form of the second commandment.

The second commandment, don’t kill each other, is the only thing that should neuter our ability to enjoy ourselves freely. After all, there is a danger in hedonism. We can drink ourselves so drunk that we forget that there is a world beyond our beer. If we do only what’s good for ourselves, we will likely leave behind the downtrodden and the disenfranchised. After all, as we speak, the people of Yemen are starving by the millions because of a Saudi-led Coalition which is endorsed by most western nations including the US, UK and France. And what do these western nations stand to gain? A few billion dollars in defense contracts and more oil to destroy the Earth with? It seems then, that these nations heard the OT God’s first commandment to Noah but conveniently ignored the second commandment.

Surprisingly, I’ve found some agreement here with the writers of Genesis and I think that if more people followed these two commandments to Noah we’d be living in a much nicer world.

Or, as a wiser man than I once said, “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” -JRR Tolkien

Genesis 6-8: Noah, the Flood and the Not-So-Good God (Part 2)

God Flip-Flops on Murder

There’s something very awe inspiring about the story of the Noachian Flood. The grandeur and enormity of it hearkens to a mythical age that I wish I actually believed in. It reminds me of the story in the Song of Ice and Fire series about Brandon the Builder crafting an enormous ice wall with the help of giants. The writing is lacking in detail compared to the poetic Epic of Gilgamesh or other ancient epics, but the underlying story is pretty cool as far as myths go.

However, it’s a disturbing tail for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it shouldn’t be ignored that the underlying assumption of the story is that killing animals is no big deal, but I already discussed the Bible’s views towards animals and nature in my post on Genesis 1, so I won’t belabor the point. Second, by the end of the story, after God has flooded the world and killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, God realizes that mass murder won’t solve the problems of the human heart.

In Genesis 8:21, God says to himself “Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done.” Which at first glance, might seem like an apology from God, but it really isn’t. Here God is saying he’s just not going to kill humans for being bad anymore since it seems to be in their nature. Of course, as many of us know, he will go on to kill more human beings for being evil, he just won’t destroy the entire Earth again, but I suppose we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. So, long story short, God was angry because human beings are evil, so he killed all the humans. Then after he was finished, he decided he wouldn’t do that again because human beings are evil, and they can’t really help it. Pretty toxic behavior from the man upstairs.

A Comforting Promise

I’m losing sight of my goal with this whole project so to get back on track, let me try to step in the shoes of an ancient reader. The ancients probably would have perceived God as being unforgiving since they were living in a world prone to famines and drought. A world where, in the blink of an eye, nature could snatch away everything they worked for. Maybe their crops wouldn’t grow, maybe their children would grow sick and die, maybe they would be unable to have children. At the whims of God, everything could be taken away in a matter of seconds and God, it seemed, didn’t need any justification for doing so.

So, this story, where God changes his mind and decides that, even though humanity isn’t perfect, they’re still worth keeping around, is actually quite beautiful, if we look at it through an ancient lens. It also starts to make a little bit more sense when we look at it this way. First of all, if the writers of Genesis had created a God that fit the modern standards of a perfect God, the ancient readers would’ve called bullshit right away. If God had been portrayed as loving and kind, or even rational, the ancient readers would never have believed it. Most of these readers probably lost children and family to starvation or harsh winters, so if the writers of Genesis had portrayed God as being someone who was understanding and patient, it would obviously have been nonsense to readers at the time. The only reason we expect such a thing today is because we are insulated from the harsh reality of nature.

The only way to get readers on board with the promise made in Genesis 8:21 is to first demonstrate that the God who’s making the promise, is in fact God. So, the Flood becomes a necessary device for describing the God that the ancient people would have been familiar with. It wouldn’t seem out of character for God to flood the Earth since he was prone to allowing children to starve and women to die in childbirth. So, an ancient reader would probably think, if nothing else, the writers of Genesis are talking about the right God. Once the writers of Genesis got the ancient people on board with their story by depicting God accurately, they tacked a hopeful promise on at the end. They promised that, no matter how bad things get, God is not interested in destroying you (anymore).

Genesis 8 closes by offering the reader a reassuring mantra. “As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.” I kind of like this verse, it’s a little bit like the old saying that life goes on. If nothing else, the ancient people could know that the sun would rise tomorrow.

Genesis 6-8: Noah, the Flood and the Not-So-Good God (Part 1)

God is perfect. God is good. These are truisms in modern religions but as we turn back the clock to ancient times, these beliefs aren’t always commonplace. For one, in many polytheistic traditions there are mischievous, trickster gods such as Loki or Hermes. But furthermore, there are also many examples of the King of Gods, who we might expect to have his shit together, having tremendous character flaws. So why then, has it become such a truism that God must be perfect when it wasn’t always that way?

It’s hard to say really. On the one hand, it does say that God is good in several places in the Bible but on the other hand, it was pretty common for God to act in ways which would generally be deemed as vicious and cruel. Furthermore, we can see in the writings of someone like John Edwards that people in the 18^th century didn’t view God as the teddy bear that he seems to be in the minds of many modern Christians.

It seems to me like this conclusion could follow from monotheism. What I mean is, if God is the sole creator of the universe, then he should be the sole writer of the rules that govern the universe. It doesn’t seem likely, then, for God to write rules that he could not or would not follow. And if a good God follows from monotheism, it’s easy to see why this idea is so prominent since roughly 60% of the world’s population identify as some sort of monotheist. But how can we be sure that God is good? Especially since belief in a good God wasn’t always such a truism. What if God were evil? Or perhaps, since the word evil is a bit loaded, what if God’s interests were in some way contrary to ours?

This idea isn’t too farfetched. After all, think about the creator of a TV show. This creator, who functions as the God of the TV show, would have to build in struggles for their characters in order to make the show entertaining. The characters, in this case, want to be happy but the creator wants to entertain their audience, which in some sense demands that the characters suffer. Is God good in this case? You could argue one way or another but God certainly doesn’t have the best interests of the characters in mind. This idea, that God is not necessarily good, is known as dystheism and I think this idea may have been built into some of the early texts of the Bible including the story of Noah and the Flood.

For those of you that may not remember this famous tale it’s pretty simple. Basically, after a few centuries of civilization, God determined that he was sick of humanity, so he decided to scrap the whole project and start over. The Bible isn’t clear on exactly what God was so worked up about, but apparently it pissed him off so much that he decided to flood the world. God fails to specify what all the non-human animals of the land did to deserve this fate, but it is clear that they will also be killed in this watery holocaust.

From the beginning this seems out of character for a good God. Genesis 6:5 says “the Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.” Now, I’m not an engineer, and I’m certainly not God, but to me it seems like if “every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time” then there may have been a design flaw. In other words, if literally every thought that human’s have is evil then it seems like God designed us to be evil. And yet here he is acting all surprised at how evil humans are.

On a different, but related, note, this is also out of character for an omnipotent God. If God is all powerful and all knowing, as is often suggested, then God would have known from the beginning that humanity was evil, and he could have simply opted not to create them. But he didn’t, instead God created humans, instilled them with this evil seed that made them incapable of good and then spent the next couple millennia gas lighting them for it. This hardly sounds like the actions of an omnipotent God and it definitely doesn’t sound like a good God.

It could, however, be possible that the writers of Genesis were not really interested in portraying God as being either good or omnipotent, as we typically assume. Take for example, The Odyssey. In the beginning of The Odyssey, Odysseus angers the god Poseidon and for the remainder of the story, Poseidon keeps Odysseus from returning home. In the case of this story, it’s rather obvious that Homer wouldn’t have intended for us to think Poseidon was omnipotent or good. Instead, Poseidon would just be a personification of an otherwise abstract force, namely that of the sea. This personification could act in ways that are helpful or harmful to Odysseus, but whether or not these actions are good or bad seems to be irrelevant. It seems to me that it’s possible that the writers of Genesis could have been writing the story of the Flood in a similar manner. Perhaps God isn’t supposed to be portrayed as being good or evil or omnipotent. Perhaps God is just a personification of a set of abstract forces. The writers of Genesis could very well have been thinking that God generally acts however he wants, indifferent to our well being and indifferent to some concept of “goodness”. To me, the story of the Flood seems like a coping mechanism for the ancient people who often felt like they were at the whim of a series of abstract forces that they couldn’t fully understand. I could imagine that attributing these forces to the belligerent actions of some higher being would rationalize some of the pain. It would give them someone to shake their fists at, someone to beg for mercy and even if these things never resulted in any meaningful change, at least we felt like we had the power to do something.

But so far, we haven’t talked about the main character of this little narrative. Noah, we’re told, was the exception to the rule. Everyone else in the world was a piece of shit except Noah, who was basically perfect. So, when God decided that every single human being on the planet was going to meet a watery grave, he whispered in the ear of this cosmic teacher’s pet and told him to build a boat. In this way, Noah is the antithesis of Odysseus. Where Odysseus angered the gods and brought about their wrath, Noah groveled at God’s feet and so was spared. But the lesson here is generally the same, God is not on your side. So the best you can do is stay in line, follow the rules, and hope that God whispers in your ear before the rain starts to fall.