It’s like the silly old riddles regarding how you would survive if stranded in the Sahara Desert without food: You’d live on the sandwiches there (“sand which is there”).
{brief pause for groans}
My wife said her parents had a topper to that: “You could depend on the tribes of Ham, which are bred and mustered there.”
Just to emphasize what I thought was clear in the Staff Report: The plain meaning and plain reading of the text is that Noah got drunk and naked. Ham saw him lying naked in his tent, went out and giggled about it to the brothers. The brothers walked in backwards and covered him up. Noah cursed Canaan, Ham’s son, almost certainly reflecting the national situation of the Israelites and the Canaanites many generations later. That’s the plain reading. Period.
The thing is that this story has sparked endless commentary and speculation over the last 2000 years or more. The speculation arises because (1) Noah is described as a “righteous man in his generation”, and that doesn’t seem to be very righteous behavior; (2) the curse seems to far outweigh the sin, and (3) the curse seems to be directed at the wrong person.
There is no “Straight Dope” (in that sense) because no one knows what the actual story really-and-truely meant. The “Straight Dope” is the history of the interpretations, the variety of interpretations that have been attached to it over the centuries, and the next part of the Report will discuss the (horrible) implications that followed.
Tracking down the various appearances of the word “nakedness” won’t help much, it’s always used in a sense of embarrassment, and often with the implication of more than simple nudity. We’re not going to be able to resolve speculation and wild imaginings of experts and authorities for millenium. Lower your expectations.
scotandrsn the “reasonableness” standard (item (2) above) is not today’s – some of these interpretations of the story date back to 200 AD or thereabouts.
Alan, yes, Etz Hayim is the one volume summary of the JPS five-volume set, that’s the reference to Sarna at the end of the Report.
:smack: Yes, of course it is. I wasn’t even comparing it to the list of sources in the article; my eyes skipped those entirely, but I also wouldn’t have recognized the connection without your reminding me. I certainly wasn’t meaning to imply any duplicitousness on your part, Dex.
And yes, the plain reading of the text was clear from the Report, but you also seemed to imply that the plain reading was widely considered inadequate by scholars. That may have been the case traditionally, but I don’t think (based on my quick survey of literature at hand) that it reflects the consensus of modern scholarship. (And of course Eiz Hayim claims that the earliest commenttaries took the words literally and at face value.)
I also happen to think that the plain reading, as I said, is the most parsimonious explanation, and don’t really see what the fuss is about–the story makes sense to me as written. If you (like many other) think the plain reading is less than self-explanatory and you read the scholarly consensus as agreeing with you (what constitutes the scholarly consensus is always open to interpretation) then you’ve presented your own best reading of the facts based on your research and your informed opinions. Which is all anyone could ask of you. I’m just disagreeing is all… 
But it also says “Now Noah was the first man of the soil; he planted a vineyard”, which can certainly be read as a suggestion that he was an innocent victim of scientific research into food storage, gone wrong.
What would an Arab or, say, Tuareg say about the affair today?
But that seems to be another question. At any rate,
which brings it pretty close.
Perhaps the clue is in that it has come down to us as an oral tradition?
Also: Ham had sex on the Ark - was this activity, by any chance, interspecies - thus giving rise to the name for the cured pork product we enjoy with our eggs at breakfast?
And if so, why do our Jewish friends so abjure it?
I know this is a joke, so sorry for stepping on it, but what is it that has come down to us as an oral tradition?
Yes, but they at least in part derive from the notion that exposure of one’s naked body should not result in the received punishment, as you yourself say in your post:
(Aside: Jacob wasn’t no saint, neither, but he and his descendants are the chosen people or God in the Bible. Obviously, there’s a different standard at hand.)
Unless of course, the author regards it as among the greatest of sins. Your post in the other thread seemed to me to suggest that mine could not be a valid interpretation, which I presumed to mean that there was some clear evidence that the author plainly didn’t think along the lines I suggested.
I haven’t seen that evidence yet.
Well, here we have the fact that the stories were written not too long after the invasion of Canaan by the Israelites
The curse upon Canaan emphasizes the idea that Israel’s subjugation of Canaan was pre-ordained. The listing of Ham’s descendants include the patriarchs of all the Israelite’s enemies in the Bible. The curse against Canaan is there to justify the fact that the Israelites went so far as to take their country and destroy their civilization, a fate that did not necessarily befall the other “sons of Ham”.
I’m not sure what you’re arguing here. This is essentially what I said in the Noah Staff Report:
The Staff Report is tracking two different things:
(1) What we, as moderns, think is the most likely “original” meaning of the text; and
(2) The way the text has been interpreted (and misinterpreted) over the centuries.
The variety of interpretations is fact. We may say that they were blowing hot air, that’s fine, but it’s silly to try to deny that many, many people accepted the speculative interpretations, over many, many centuries. And the other historical fact is that those (mis)interpretations had serious, severe consequences – to be discussed in Part II.
Perhaps it was a mistake on my part to split this into two parts, because there seems to be some sort of notion that I support these speculative interpretations. That’s not so. I thought I was very explicit on the plain meaning of the text and the most reasonable explanations.
That’s why I objected to the “So he got drunk and engages in some sexual hanky-panky, in the privacy of his tent.” It appears, to me, in the context of the staff report, to not be someone else’s speculation, but an assertion of fact on your part.
This is pure guesswork but I’ve been wondering about this possibility RE the Curse upon “Canaan”.
“Cain” derives from the Hebrew word for “gotten” or “gained” (when Eve bore him she said “I have gotten a man from The LORD.”_ Gen 4). I’ve read that Canaan translates as “merchant”, “grabber”, even “pirate” or “robber”, and derives from the same Hebrew root.
So here’s my idea- Noah in his curse is referring to Ham as “Canaan”- “Cain Jr.”, a taker of his father’s honor as Cain was a taker of his brother’s life. Ham takes the name as a badge of honor & sticks it on his son, whose descendants then live down to the name.
Possible?
Hi Dex. I always enjoy your biblical reports.
Is this theory from one of your sources, or is it what you think (I can’t tell from the format of the report)? It is psychologically smart, but is it traditional?
Early Christian writers felt it was unacceptable for a great patriarch to be involved in such a sordid situation, and came up with various excuses for Noah’s drunkeness, including old age, that he got drunk fast never having had wine before, that he didn’t know wine would make you drunk (failed husbandry experiment as someone else mentioned). Therefore, it wouldn’t surprise me to see an early source for the quoted material, but it does sound modern (maybe it’s the “survivor guilt” thing).
Even later, here’s how Aquinas put it:
And just in case you might be interested with respect to part 2 of the report, here is Milton’s use of the curse on Canaan in describing how sin results in tyranny (as opposed to pure slavery):
I have now had input from Chaim and Zev, and I shoulda done that earlier but … blame senility (my Hebrew computer Tanakh and search function didn’t get copied onto my new computer).
The Hebrew word for nakedness is “arum” which simply means “nudity” or “nakedness” with no sexual overtones. It’s used for Adam and Eve in the Garden, for Job who came naked (arum) from his mother’s womb, clearly without sexual implication.
“Uncovering nakedness” adds a verb, gilui (uncovering) or l’galos (to uncover) and that’s where the sexual implications come in. There are other Hebrew euphemisms for intercourse as well, of course.
I will amend the Staff Report accordingly.
This discussion reminds me of a joke I found in [Jessel, Anyone? written by George Jessel about 1961:
A psychiatrist is testing a potential inmate in an insane asylum. He shows the patient three cards, one at a time.
On one is a circle.
The psychiatrist asks, “What is this?”
The patient blushes and says, “That’s a beach umbrella, doctor–and I’m enbrarrassed to tell you what that surfer hunk is doing with his girlfriend under it…”
Next the doctor shows him a card with a square on it and asks, “What is this?"
The patient reacts the same, and says, “That’s a blanket in a harem, Doctor, and the sultan is having his way with his wives…”
Third, the psychiatrist holds up a card beating a triangle and asks the patient what that is.
The patient says, “That’s a teepee, Doctor, and the brave is humping a tribal maiden…”
The doctor puts the cards down and says, “I am going to remcommend that you be committed. You have an abnormal obsession with sex.”
The patient bridles and says, I don’t have an abnormal obsession, Doctor! YOU drew all those dirty pictures!”
In short, I prefer to keep Occam’s Razor in mind rather than making creative assumptions. 
Well, it hardly takes any creativity to see the possibility, especially in a language like Hebrew that overwhelmingly favors parataxic constructions.
What, no mention of Ham sticking his dad’s hand in a bowl of warm water, or shaving things into his hair? Man, he was a slacker.
Hi John W.–I had to look this up–parataxis (adj.=paratactic) apparently means “the placing of clauses or phrases one after another without connectives.” I don’t know Hebrew, but am willing to grant that Hebrew grammar may well fit this definition. I miss the connection though on why this leads naturally to speculations on whether “drunk” is an intentional or accidental state. Could you expand on what you mean? I think I’m missing the logical link. Thanks.
Dear Dex,
Could you provide me with a book title about Caananite mythology?
No, I ain’t lookin for nasty stuff, I simply didn’t realize we have any of their myths available.
BTW–are there Philistine Myths available? Book titles?
I heard years ago from a so-called historian that the argument for this story being a defense of slavery is because when Noah’s kids went out to re-populate the world after the Ark landed, Ham settled in the area that is now Africa. One that we know was a supplier of slave labor for many years. Has anyone else ever heard anything similar to that?
Well, now, here’s some real meat.
Another thing that occurs to me, however, is that the words may have connoted different things at different times in history.
According to your SR on Bible authorship, the J document may have appeared as early as 1000 BC, whereas the P document (from which I presume by your statements in that report to be the source of the bulk of Leviticus) may have been written 250 years later. I think most languages are capable changes in connotation of surviving words and phrases in that sort of time frame.
So perhaps, by the time P wrote Leviticus, “to uncover one’s nakedness” definitely meant “to have sex”, hence the very natural inference of of incest in the mentioned passages, but it did not have that connotaiton at the time of J’s writing, leading to confusion about exactly what went on in the tent on the part of later readers.
I have heard this, and I assume that will be addressed in Dex’s part two.