9:18
¶ And the sons of Noah, that went forth
of the ark, were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth: and Ham is the father of Canaan.
19 These are the three sons of Noah: and
of them was the whole earth overspread. 20
And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard: 21 And he drank of the wine, and was drunken;
and he was uncovered within his tent. 22
And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told
his two brethren without. 23 And Shem
and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went
backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were
backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness.
9:24
¶ And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew
what his younger son had done unto him. 25
And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto
his brethren. 26 And he said, Blessed be
the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. 27 God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell
in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.
9:28
¶ And Noah lived after the flood three
hundred and fifty years. 29 And all the
days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years: and he died.
Here
we have the beginning of all of the earth’s mythologies as, after the
dispersion of mankind at Babel, as men and women grew more distant from the
worship of the God who created them and they began to elevate ancestors and
mighty men to the level of gods. Noah will eventually become Odin with his two
birds and his passion for wine and we’ll have more on this topic later.
Cultures will have a memory of patriarchs long dead who will be raised to the
level of gods. When you add this to creating gods to explain so-called natural
phenomenon that Jehovah God causes, to devils themselves demanding worship, and
pure entertainment around a campfire with stories embellished and made more
interesting with each generation you can see how mankind descended into
idolatry.
Abraham
was called out of this religious mess and eventually Moses was given the task
of writing down the truth to always have a record for mankind to compare
history and religious beliefs against. After the Flood things began to get
murky and after Babel things went downhill fast spiritually.
Here
is the spiritual history of man summed up for us, explaining the sexual content
of ancient religion and how it came about.
Romans
1:19 ¶ Because that which may be known
of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. 20 For the invisible things of him from the
creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are
made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:
21 Because that, when they knew God,
they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their
imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. 22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became
fools, 23 And changed the glory of the
uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and
fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. 24
Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of
their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: 25 Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and
worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for
ever. Amen. 26 For this cause God gave
them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use
into that which is against nature: 27
And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned
in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly,
and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.
28 And even as they did not like to
retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do
those things which are not convenient; 29
Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness,
covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity;
whisperers, 30 Backbiters, haters of
God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to
parents, 31 Without understanding,
covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: 32 Who knowing the judgment of God, that they
which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have
pleasure in them that do them.
The
entire earth was eventually settled by the offspring of these three sons. This
is not hard to accept, even from the point of view of modern theoretical
science. Scientists theorize that there may have been many, “severe population
bottlenecks,” of human beings in the distant past based on their assumptions
about evolution.[1]
Of course, their conclusions are filled with speculations and interpretations
based on an atheistic worldview in that they might think, “we don’t know for
sure but it must be so because the alternative of the Bible being true is just
too horrible for us to imagine.” The point is that here is the ultimate
population bottleneck and there may have been others later until humanity got
on its feet, so to speak.
Use
a population growth calculator online and figure the growth rate where it was
for the world in the early 1960s, at 2.2%, and
if I am not mistaken you will find that within a thousand years there can be over 5 billion people, starting
from just two.
It
is possible that, based on the change in conditions, Noah would not have known
that fermentation could take place and that he could get drunk. Or, perhaps the
long voyage and time of struggle surviving and leading his little tribe after
disembarking from the ark made him desperate to get roaring drunk as soon as it
was possible to do so. Either way, that is what happened.
To
see the nakedness of someone carries
with it a very wicked implication.
Leviticus
20:17 And if a man shall take his
sister, his father’s daughter, or his mother’s daughter, and see her nakedness,
and she see his nakedness; it is a wicked thing; and they shall be cut off in
the sight of their people: he hath uncovered his sister’s nakedness; he shall
bear his iniquity.
But,
let’s say, for argument sake, that this is not an idiom suggesting actual
sexual contact with either Noah or Ham’s mother which it appears to be.
Leviticus
20:11 And the man that lieth with his
father’s wife hath uncovered his father’s nakedness: both of them shall surely
be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.
To
keep from delving into aspects of this event that incite prurient interest in a
reader or listener let’s say for argument sake that this event involved only
vulgar disrespect and mocking. God had already blessed Noah and his sons in
verse 1 of chapter 9. So, Noah cursed Ham’s son, Canaan, and this curse was
fulfilled in Israel’s conquest of Canaan hundreds of years later. Noah blessed
Shem and Japheth further, due to their respect and merciful deed toward him and
their mother, one assumes, and prophesied that Canaan would be their servant,
which proved very true as Palestine, where Canaan dwelt, became the victim of
many conquests from Israel to the Persians to the Turks to the Crusaders and
the Turks again to the British and French with many in between. Palestine was
an avenue of conquest between the warlike culture of Babylonia and Assyria to
Egypt.
So,
why Canaan. We don’t see in the text that Canaan had anything to do with his
father’s disrespect of his grandfather. Saying something, “must be so,” that is
not in the text is not much of an argument. And why would Canaan be cursed for
things remote descendants many generations in the future would do? I see this
curse as a prophesy. The descendants of disrespectful Ham hundreds of years
from now in the land that the descendants of his son, Canaan, will inhabit,
will be a stench in God’s nostrils and thorn in the side of the Jews who are
given their land by God.
Noah
didn’t curse Canaan. He stated a prophetic fact that Ham’s descendants through
Canaan would be a cursed people and be the servant of Shem’s descendants, one
strain of which would become the Jews.
There
was a myth fostered and promoted as a justification for racial slavery in the
United States, although it had a small number of voices before, that Ham was
the father of the black, African races, thereby making the supposed curse on
Canaan really a curse on Ham and all of his descendants. This myth gained
ascendancy in Antebellum America and is still popular among racist preachers
and congregations. The most exhaustive study of this myth I have read is by
Stephen Haynes, a professor of Religious Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis,
Tennessee.[2]
While
a literal view of this passage reveals that Canaan was said to be cursed, a
condition we will see was literally played out as proved in the Bible
narrative, we will also soon see that Ham was not just the ancestor of African
populations. In fact, let’s make something clear. The idea that Noah walked off
the Ark with three sons; one of whom was a white guy, one a black guy, and one
an Asian guy is so patently absurd that it can only be dismissed as the raving
of a lunatic who has an agenda. Mankind would have been brownish with dark hair
and eyes at this time, with some variation possible which foundations were
already in the genetic code God had placed in man and God operated with each
cell division and each generation. Race, a social construct, that has little
bearing in physical reality, based more on politics, geography, and culture,
will come about later, over time. Some geneticists estimate that the classic
white skinned, blue eyed Caucasian came about between 5 and 6,000 years ago as,
in their elongated time frame based on their dating methods, early Europeans
were dark-skinned, brown-eyed, and dark-haired. There are a number of genetic
studies confirming this belief of the modern geneticist. Unfortunately, we are
still using classifications from the racist 19th century that
alternately render black people between being, as a group, naturally villains
or fools, and impulsive victims of their own biology. Such nonsense should not
be honored in a Christian church.
Galatians
3:28 There is neither Jew nor Greek [grades
of ethnicity or race], there is neither
bond nor free [grades of social class],
there is neither male nor female [grades of gender] : for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.
Colossians
3:11 Where there is neither Greek nor
Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but
Christ is all, and in all.
The idea of white as a race is a
relatively new thing. In 1619 when the first black slaves were dumped off at
Jamestown by a Dutch ship there were no white people there. Or at least they
didn’t regard themselves as particularly white. They viewed themselves as
English or some other cultural tag. The process of making white a characteristic
of the ruling class and black the permanent peasant, serf, slave class happened
gradually as the English molded the way they treated the Irish, the poor,
indentured servants, etc. into an effective economic system and a method of
social control. American slavery came about as a process and regarding Africans
as an inferior race cursed from ancient times also came about over time as one
part of its justification drawing on a few scattered commentaries from late
antiquity and the Middle Ages.
Noah
lived for several centuries after the Flood to see several noteworthy events,
perhaps to his further shame.
[1] John Hawks, Keith Hunley, Sang-Hee Lee, Milford Wolpoff, “Population Bottlenecks and
Pleistocene Human Evolution,”
Molecular Biology and Evolution,
Volume
17, Issue 1, Pp. 2-22.
[2] Stephen R. Haynes, Noah’s
Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002).
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