http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mdrunknoah.html
At the end of the article, we have:
Then why did:
?
In Gen. 9:20-27 we see Ham “looking upon the nakedness of his father” and Noah waking up and upon finding out what Ham did curses Ham’s son Canaan, a seemingly harsh reaction to a mildly embarrassing event. So what exactly happened?
Here we must examine what the phrase to look up nakedness means. There are three possible interpretations. The first is the he merely saw his father’s naked form. This interpretation fails to makes sense of the harsh curse Noah puts on his grandson. The next is that the phrase has homosexual implications, but this does not explain why Noah cursed Canaan, and not Ham.
From looking at similar texts were the phrase “to look upon nakedness” occurs, especially Lev. 20:17; 18:6-18, we see that this phrase can refer to incest, particularly maternal incest, for “looking upon the nakedness of your father is the nakedness of your mother”. This is confirmed when we look at another example of a father becoming drunk, Lot. Here because their husbands have died, the two daughters of Lot get him drunk and lay with him so that they could have children and not loose their line.
But why did Ham do this? If we study the cases in which maternal incest was committed we find the reason. We find that Reuben, the son of Jacob, had relations with one of his father’s concubines and was cursed because of it (cf. Gen. 29:32, 35:22, 49:3-4). Absalom does the same thing to King David (cf. 2 Sm. 6:16-18). They were both trying to usurp their father’s authority, Reuben trying to get Jacob’s blessing and authority, and Absalom drives out King David and takes the throne. By sleeping with the father’s wife or concubine, the son would thus claim birthright and authority. Thus we can see that Ham, who isn’t the Noah’s first-born and wouldn’t naturally get the authority and inheritance of his father, trying to get his older brother Shem’s birthright. Only thus can we make sense of Noah cursing Canaan, Ham’s son and product of the incestuous relation, and not Ham himself.
The Ancient Israelites would have immediately picked up on the importance of this story. They are about to march into Canaan, the land of the descendents of Canaan, and they, the descendents of Shem, were about to reclaim their inheritance that was stolen from them. This made sense of their mission, grounded it in a oral history and gave them the moral right (or at least the sense of it) to take the land they were about to invade, for it rightly belonged to them. It also warned them of the Canaanite practices (cf. Lev. 18:16-18, Ex. 32:21-22) that they were to avoid, the Canaanite fertility rituals that involved incestuous relations, and told them the origins of why the Canaanites behave and have the practices they do. Life father, like great great grandchildren.
Mendicant, welcome to the Straight Dope Message Boards, we’re glad to have you here. You might want to read the Staff Report What’s up with the biblical story of the drunken Noah (Part 1)… it would have saved you the time and energy of typing up what’s already in that Report.
AngeloB, welcome to the Straight Dope Message Boards, we’re glad to have you with us. My point in the translation “footnote” is that, yeah, he was naked, but it was not just lying-around-naked, but engaged-in-some-sort-of-sexual-activity naked. Thus, Shem and Japeth needed to cover him up with a robe, but that was only part of what was going on. That help?
Thank you for the welcome.
Actually, reading the report was what prompted me to reply in the first place. In the report, none of the explanations brought up was that Ham had an incestuous relationship with his mother, with Canaan as the result. Nor are any of the offered explanations as satisfactory in explaning the curse on Canaan as the one that I put forward. At least in my opinion
You’re going to fit in just fine here.
What? No you can’t borrow fifteen dollars. Get away from me
My deepest apologies, Mendicant, it’s been one of those days. I read your first post too quickly, and I’d forgot exactly which theories I had put into the Staff Report. I did comment that there were lots of interpretations, and I picked the most plausible and most commonly accepted.
The problem with assuming that Ham was committing incest with Mrs Noah to give birth to Canaan is that the story begins with Noah’s drunkeness/nakedness, not Ham’s. Hence, it’s a bit of a stretch.
However, that’s nothing compared to the stretch that will come in Part 2, where the curse on Canaan itself is twisted far beyond the plain meaning of the text.
Yes, that’s clear, but, what if Ham and a duck park on a… oh, never mind.
Part 2?!! Nooooooooo…
AngeloB was probably asking why they had to cover him up if he was “engaged”. Or are you saying he was still engaged, but unconscious? What a man.
You left in a conjectiure in the “plain reading”: in the part that is discussing the face value text, you say “he got drunk and engages in some sexual hanky-panky”
Also, you mention that “I’ll use the traditional King James translation of Genesis 9:20-25, since that was the one read from pulpits in pre-Civil War America,” but that can’t possibly be in general true can it? I thought Catholics considered KJV heretical clear into the twentieth century.
Hey if you didn’t like my post, there wasn’t any need to be nasty or insulting 
I think the implication is that he was no longer “engaged” (as you so quaintly put it), but in a drunken stupor. However, no one today knows exactly what was going on.
There are several other stories from Genesis, the oldest parts of the bible, that are written in a short-hand: the people of the time understood the story and so didn’t need it all spelled out. (Regardless of who you think wrote it down or when, those stories are clearly among the oldest and were clearly told orally before they were written down.) The same was done, for instance, in movies during the Code – explicit sexual behavior wasn’t allowed, so a simple view of an open bedroom door was enough to convey what was going on. Someone watching that movie today, unaware of the short-hand narrative technique, might not catch the reference.
I’m not well enough versed to know what Catholics read, but the KJV was certainly the Protestant standard… and is the one quoted more commonly in the writings over the centuries as justifying the “curse of Ham.”
A more accurate translation of the Hebrew, would be something like this one (by Everett Fox, from his The Five Books of Moses:
Well, now, I’ve been eagerly awaiting this Staff Report since Dex first mentioned its pending arrival in December. That post by the way, quotes (and refutes) my own wherein I doubt that nakedness always means sexuality in the Bible. Hence my anticipation.
However, I am left unenlightened.
In other words, all the convoluted interpretations Dex catalogues are based on the assumption that a reasonable Noah would not get so worked up over mere nudity.
In his second aside, Dex notes
I assume then, there is another word for nakedness outside the context of sexuality? I repeat my caveat from the other thread that I am no Hebrew scholar. Can we be sure the two terms are meant to connote the difference between “naked” and “naked and in the middle of doing something naughty”, rather than the difference between an unclothed shoulder and an unclothed groin, a distinction drawn by mankind since time immemorial?
The point I was making in the other thread, and now here, is that if you assume what would pass as a modern standard of reasonableness on the part of the characters in the Bible, you must resort to jumping through hoops to explain some of their actions in this area. However, if you assume that parts of the Torah are written by someone who believed that having one’s uncovered groin within the view of others is one of the great eternal evils (and imbued God and the biblical patriarchs with the same attitude), then a lot of things fall into place. Such people exist in the world. Who says they can’t write?
A parallel is drawn to the story of Lot and his daughters, but in the translations I’ve seen, the term used is “laid with him”, rather than “uncovered (his) nakedness”. Again, perhaps the original Hebrew uses the same term in both cases, in which case I would stand corrected.
This is what I think most people do. They read through Genesis, and the Noah story, have a “WTF was THAT all about?” in the back of their heads as they continue on until Leviticus, where it certainly seems that the passage referred to here must really be referring to various incestuous practices, because nudity ain’t so bad, is it? So they retrofit this interpretation to the references to nakedness earlier.
But hear me out: if the “nakedness” term refers to the uncovered crotch, and the author has a serious problem with people seeing each other’s uncovered crotches, then the Leviticus passage can be read as “These are the people whose nude genitalia you shouldn’t even look at, much less do anything else with that might be in your filthy little mind.”
I don’t see anything in Dex’s SR that must definitively dissuade me from this interpretation.
In that regard, it’s mostly just assertion, rather than proof. Saying that there are people who interpret it that way, is different than saying it is definitely to be interpreted that way.
We should stick to the straight dope.
What’s with all this uninformed speculation? I thought it was obvious what Ham’s sin was. He was drunk (on whiskey instead of wine), and was engaged in masturbation with the founder of a clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Hence the well known phrase “Ham on rye with Mayo hold the pickle.”
That so horrible that it’s difficult for an appropriate reply to be mustard.
Oh, I’m sure with a little effort you could ketchup to Bibliophage in the bad-pun department.
From the Staff Report:
I’m skeptical about this, and about most of the explanations offered. My New Oxford Annotated Bible [3rd ed.] (2001) dismisses suggestions of incestuous behavior, saying
This is seen as part of the series of depictions of the breakdown of familial relationships after the Fall seen in chs. 3 and 4.
My one-volume Oxford Bible Commentary (2001) says:
Even my copy of Etz Hayim (JPS, 2001), which seems to have been a principle source for the Report, states that
It seems to me that although some scholars disagree, the concensus opinion (and the most parsimonious explanation) is that ancient Israelite society had a hang-up about nudity (common to many cultures ancient and modern), and that Ham’s sin was not simply seeing his father naked, but failing to care for his incapacitated father appropriately and to protect his honor–serious violations in any traditional society.
As for the curse falling on Canaan, it strikes me as unlikely that there would be a (missing) oral tradtion to explain it. As the Report noted, both Ham and Canaan were narrative proxies for the Canaanites. I suspect that a pre-existing “Curse on Canaan” was edited into a story about Ham’s sin to make it clear that the etiological aspects of the story more explicit (and possibly because there wasn’t a similarly memorable verse using Ham’s name.) The NOAB claims it’s more likely that the curse was modified to point to Canaan rather than Ham for the same reasons. Either way, I imagine it would have seemed quite natural to substitute the son for the father (or vice versa) in the story, and wouldn’t have required any oral explanation.
Granted I am assuming that The Teeming Millions have not already discussed this point, in which case you can probably ignore what I am about to say.
Simply put, the episode of Noah’s naked drunkenness, like Amnon raping his half-sister, David ordering Uriah into deadly combat in order to take Bathsheba for himself, and the apostles running like scared rabbits when Jesus was arrested…
well, as one commentator put it, “No [other] book has vibrated with such agonizing honesty.”
By and large the Scriptural record bodes ill for the human race, from the events in Eden to the time of Jesus’ death. I would be hard put to find such candor in other writings revered as divine revelation…
I would think Virginia Mayo would be more likely.
Oh, and I always figured he was called Ham because his activities weren’t kosher.
I once heard this line on a TV sitcom: “Don’t go to Rochester–he’ll put you in Jack Benny’s safe!”