“And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers outside” (Genesis 9:22)
This is just one of those weird Old Testament stories, right? Noah survives the flood that destroys the entire earth – God’s watery reset button on His creation – and immediately after hitting dry land, he plants a vineyard, grows some grapes, makes some wine, gets drunk, and passes out. This may not seem like a holy action, but if you’ve ever taken a long car trip, you know how restoring a stiff drink can be at the end of it.
But, really, what is this story all about? Why record this in holy scripture? What are we to learn from this story other than to keep our eyes one someone’s forehead when we’re in a locker room?
The earliest chapters of Genesis are all etiological. “Etiological” means “serving to explain something by giving a cause or reason for it, often in historical or mythical terms.” Every culture has etiological stories that it tells. For example, you cannot be a child of the Midwest without learning of Johnny Appleseed. Johnny Appleseed (born John Chapman in Massachusetts in 1774) was a real man, who really did plant apple seeds ahead of the early American pioneers (though he planted cider apples, not the type we tend to eat today, but apples that were good for making hard cider. So, there’s one interesting point between Noah and Johnny Appleseed!). His life, however real, has been mythologized as a way of explaining why early settlers of the Midwest expansion found such lush provisions when they arrived. Johnny Appleseed exists because the plains of the Midwest are so fertile as to need a mythic explanation. Johnny Appleseed is etiological.
So what about Noah? There is no historical evidence for Noah, the flood, or much of anything else in the first eleven chapters of Genesis (contrary to what certain Christian entertainment venues in Kentucky would advertise). Instead, these stories were created by the people of God to help explain the world as they found it. Our story today, then, is a way to explain the conflict between Israel and the Canaanites. These early rivals to God’s people needed a backstory if the conflict was to be made sense of. As such, the people of God created a narrative in which Ham, the father of Canaan, did something shameful in seeing Noah, an early hero of Israel, and therefore it was easier for Israel to revile Canaan.
Etiological stories are often sad things; ways that we justify prejudice and injustice in the present (for example, at the end of the Cain and Abel story, God marks Cain in such a way that any who meet him won’t kill him. Early American biblical scholars conjectured that the “mark” Cain received was black skin. “Black as Cain” still exists as an idiom today. By making all African slaves descendants of the Bible’s first murderer, it was easier to justify their enslavement).
So, what do we do with such stories today? We dig into them. We get to the root of them. At the root of this story is shame. Noah is drunk and naked. Shameful. Ham sees his father’s nakedness. Shameful. Once we understand the root of this story as being shame, then we can address it appropriately. For Christians, the relief in our shame is not some backward attempt to cover it up (as Noah’s other sons do), but to be relieved of it entirely through the grace of Jesus Christ. Without shame, this story’s plot breaks down, there isn’t animosity, there aren’t any curses. And isn’t that an interesting thought? Without shame, we won’t curse others. Without shame, we are empowered to bless others.
It’s easy to read this account in Noah’s life and conjecture some measly moral – don’t get drunk, or something like that. It is a far better thing to see how destructive shame can be, to remember that Jesus’ death and resurrection removes our shame, and to pursue blessing – rather than shaming – all we encounter. Amen.
