I’ll keep this brief, because I don’t want to go astray on this subject. Angels (in Jewish thought) are, in effect, celestial automotons. They don’t have free will as you and I do. As such, if God wants them to eat, they can. They do not, however, have sex with women against God’s will.
If you want to discuss this further, please open up a new thread and I will be more than happy to respond there.
In the meantime (to get back on topic), you completely sidestepped the essential question I was asking you. I’ll repeat it here:
Here, you presented your entire case simply based on “father’s nakedness” = “having sex with your father’s wife” because, as we “all know” the one is a common euphamism for the other.
Yet, here I present you with an even more well-known euphamism (“knowing” = “sex”) and you dismiss it out of hand without even bothering to refute it.
Why is your use of a lesser-used euphamism better than my use of a more-used euphamism? At least with mine, the rest of the story makes sense.
Zev Steinhardt
Nolies, I can’t claim to match Zev’s expertise, but you haven’t really addressed what he’s saying about the euphemism aspect of the phrase. You pointed to other verses in the Bible which say something like “A man who sleeps with his father’s wife is uncovering his father’s nakedness,” and say that “uncovering his father’s nakedness” is a euphemism for “sleeping with his father’s wife,” because the latter phrase might be viewed as vulgar and the writers didn’t want to offend their audience. But, and this is Zev’s point, why would it be used as a euphemism when it just said the offensive version of the phrase?
Please refer to the web site of the Creation Evidence Museum. I’m sorry to say that this temple to ignorance is in my home state of Texas. See the FAQ at http://www.creationevidence.org/fa_questions/freq_questions.html , where they mention some of these pre-flood high-oxygen, high-pressure conditions. They’re also building a hyperbaric chamber at the site to show how much larger things grow in those conditions, so that a man could be big enough to make a giant footprint that could be mistaken many years later for a dinosaur footprint. I don’t know if they thought this up themselves, or if this is common in creationist circles.
Fermentation: Yeast in a sugar solution in the presence of air metabolises sugar to carbon dioxide and water. It does this very merrily even in a partial pressure of ~200millibars oxygen and I’m sure it would do it even more merrily in a more oxygenated atmosphere. However, if you want yeast to metabolise sugar to ethanol and carbon dioxide, you must exclude air; a sealed container with a fermentation trap to allow excess CO[sub]2[/sub] to be vented is the usual method. (You could, I imagine, use a sealed stretchy skin bag to the same effect - one that will inflate under the pressure of the new wine without bursting.)
The reader may be able to devise an experiment in which the aforementioned sealed container is itself entirely surrounded by a pure-oxygen atmosphere. My expected result would be that, since the container and the fermentation trap exclude air, it doesn’t make much odds what the oxygen content of the exterior atmosphere might be.
In summary, there may or may not have been a Biblical Flood. There may or may not have been a much more highly-oxygenated antediluvian atmosphere. But to argue from these suppositions that, pre-Noah, alcohol could not be produced by yeast fermentation is to exhibit a certain lack of knowledge as to what is involved in so doing.
I never made that connection, but when I was a wee lass my godmother told me in all seriousness that black people were descended from Noah’s son, who saw Noah naked and was punished by being turned black. And that’s why black people had to be slaves.
:rolleyes:
Thing is, when you’re a little kid and an adult tells you something, you believe them. I was 12 before I even considered the possibility that my godmother was an idiot.
Your godmother wasn’t alone. Please note that this is covered in What’s up with the biblical story of drunken Noah (Part 2), which discusses how that (ridiculous) notion was used for centuries to justify black slavery, and still arises to this day as “proof”… even believed by many blacks.
Well, this thread has become quiet as of late. Time to shake things up…
This was what I was wondering, as well. Which led me to this theory (what the heck, we’re all guessing anyway):
What if Canaan was really conceived on the Ark (if you favor the sex on the Ark theory), or immediately upon arrival (if you do not). But not by Ham, but by Noah and Ham’s wife? Ham wanders into the tent, sees his drunken father with his wife, and runs to tell his brothers. They enter the tent to cover their father, but when he awakens he knows that their secret is out. At that point, being a good man, he knows that he has done his son wrong. He curses his illegitimate son in an attempt to reconcile himself with his sons.
From later readings, it becomes apparent that there was no ill will between Noah and Ham; Ham seems to have been given a large chunk of real estate (although it would seem that Canaan was also given land as well). It would seem to be contradictory to have given Ham an inheritance if there was bad blood, but not if this was an appeasement instead.
The problem with this is that it is clear from the text that Noah was not yet a grandfather when the flood started (only he, his wife, his sons and his daughters-in-law are brought to the ark). Canaan was Ham’s fourth son. So, he surely wasn’t conceived on the Ark and was likely not conceived until several years later.
Which leads again to the problem of when this incident occurred. I can buy a six month or more while the grapes were grown. However, unless the children of Ham were from a multiple birth, not mentioned, it would have to be four years. This does not seem excessive in getting around to planting grapes, but it does see excessive for Noah to get drunk from the effects of the flood.
We know that children are not usually mentioned unless they directly participate in some action - Isaac and the ram, Moses on the Nile, Ishmael being taken by Hagar, for instance, so might the grandchildren have been taken on the Ark and not mentioned, as not being adults. Certainly humans were not covered by the command to bring two of unclean and seven pairs of clean animals, right? It seems more plausible than Noah’s long delayed drunkeness.
As the Staff Report mentions, there are some interpreters who think that Canaan was conceived on the Ark. I don’t know how they deal with him being the youngest son. Zev, does the text make that clear? or is that a conclusion because the text lists Canaan last in Gen 10:6 ? After all, he might be listed last because he was cursed to be the “lowest of slaves.”
And some of those interpreters think that the drunken Noah story happened a couple of decades after the Flood, so that Canaan was grown. Surely Noah wouldn’t curse a newborn child?
Again, remember that the text itself is unclear. Whenever there are gaps in the text, there have been imaginative people over the centuries who have tried to fill those gaps – sometimes with logical fillers, sometimes with fantastic leaps of imagination. We don’t know for sure exactly how the earliest readers of the text would have understood those gaps.
I suppose that’s a possibility. You often find children listed out of birth order in numerous places. However, I have yet to find any Jewish Biblical commentary who stated anything other than that Canaan was Ham’s youngest (indeed, at least one opinion is that Ham made it impossible for Noah to have anymore children, so Noah cursed Ham’s fourth, since he himself could never have a fourth).
Maybe, maybe not. According to the opinions that Canaan participated in the deed, then obviously it had to take place later on. However, as I pointed out earlier, other opinions don’t hold that Canaan was an adult.
Ham’s participation is clearly spelled out, while Canaan’s is not. If Canaan were an adult, he would be culpable, so I’d see no reason why he wouldn’t be mentioned.
Plus, Zev’s very plausible explanation for Noah’s drunkeness wouldn’t work if it were decades later. (Actually since adulthood is at 13, it would only have to be about 17 years later.) Any other character I could see it, since most are imperfect, and thus real. But Noah was particularly virtuous.
Perhaps the message is that you can be a virtuous drunk?
Noah was virtuous in his generation. That doesn’t neccesarily mean he was virtuous…just more virtuous than everyone else in the world. But the world was particularly wicked, so that doesn’t neccesarily mean much.
