Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Genesis · About this commentary
The vineyard, and the word over Canaan
Genesis 9:18-29
18 The sons of Noah who went out from the ship were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Ham is the father of Canaan. · WEB
The man God preserved gets drunk within a chapter of the covenant, and the word that follows falls on one grandson and on nobody else.
The bow is barely in the sky before the paragraph shows what kind of world it was hung over. Noah began to be a farmer, and planted a vineyard. He drank of the wine and got drunk. He was uncovered within his tent.
The man is the same one described as righteous, blameless among his generation, and walking with God. Scripture does not protect him, does not explain the episode, and does not offer a mitigating circumstance. This is the book's consistent habit with its best figures, and it is one of the strongest internal marks of honest reporting: a national literature inventing its ancestors does not begin the new world with its hero drunk and naked.
What Ham did is described in the fewest possible words — he saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers outside — and the offense is evidently in the telling as much as the seeing, since the seeing was accidental and the telling was not. His brothers' response is described at four times the length, and every detail is deliberate: a garment on both their shoulders, walking in backwards, their faces turned away. The contrast between publishing a father's shame and covering it is the whole of the narrative's judgment.
Then the word Noah speaks on waking, and it must be read exactly as it stands, because few sentences in Scripture have been more misused. Canaan is cursed. He will be a servant of servants to his brothers.
The curse falls on Canaan. Ham had four sons — Cush, Mizraim, Put and Canaan Genesis 10:6 — and three of them are not mentioned. Ham himself is not cursed. And the passage nowhere speaks of skin, race, or descent beyond the single named line.
What it does speak of is a people the book's first readers were about to meet. Canaan is the ancestor of the Canaanites, whose borders the next chapter maps Genesis 10:19 and whose conduct the law later describes as the reason their land was taken from them Leviticus 18:24–25. The word is about them, and its fulfillment is in the history of that people and no other.
The passage has been used, in the modern period and at enormous human cost, to justify the enslavement of Africans on the theory that Ham was their father and the curse was on him. The text will not carry it. The person named is Canaan; the peoples descended from Ham's other sons are elsewhere in Scripture without any such word attached; and the one nation that Scripture does connect to this saying settled in the land north of Egypt. An interpretation that has to change the name in the verse before it can be applied is not an interpretation of the verse.
Noah's remaining words are blessings, and their form is worth noting — he blesses Yahweh, the God of Shem rather than Shem himself, which puts the honor where the line will lead. And the chapter closes with the refrain of chapter five restored: All the days of Noah were nine hundred fifty years, and then he died.
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