Things Fall Apart … Again: Genesis 9.18-10.32

In the last post we saw how after the flood, God reaffirms humanity’s creation in the image of God, renews humanity’s original blessing, and establishes a covenant with all living things. But the beauty and hopefulness of that narrative is tinged with a hint of warning, for God does all this despite the fact that the human heart is now inclined away from God’s purposes. In the passage we’ll look at today, we see that inclination manifest itself in what is essentially a third fall story — after Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel, one that will have lasting political consequences in the narrative world of the Bible. We’ll also look at the ‘quasi-genealogical’ section that follows this short story and how it reinforces its themes.

Integrated Summary

These two passages are very different — one is narrative, one is genealogical; one focuses on the particular dynamics of Noah’s immediate family, one is universal in scope — but they present a common theme. Both emphasize the unity of humanity and the interrelatedness of all peoples. Yet both also have a political motivation, to justify the marginalization of Israel’s traditional enemies, most especially the Canaanites.

As Christians, this shows the power of stories and the great care we need to take to make sure we’re telling stories that do justice to the Gospel. For in order to justify prejudices or violence against the other, there are few more powerful tools than a stories that portray those who are in the way of our goals as cursed or even sub-human. And Christians have been — and some sadly continue to be — just as prone to using these tools as anyone else, a fact that has had devastating consequences for the world. We must affirm as loudly as we can and as often as needed that any such dehumanizing story is antithetical to the spirit of the Christian Gospel.

Text

Please check out the full text in your Bible of choice or follow this link.

The section of Genesis we’re looking at today comprises two main parts: 9.18-29 tells the story of Noah and his sons after the flood and is organized as follows:

• Introduction (9.18-19): Reintroduction of Noah and his sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth
• Main Plot (9.20-23): Story of Noah’s drunkenness and Ham’s violation of filial responsibilities
• Curse and Blessing (9.24-27): Noah curses Ham’s line and blesses Shem and Japheth
• Conclusion (9.28-29)

Genesis 10 includes a ‘table’ or ‘map’ of the nations of the world, showing how the three branches of Noah’s line repopulate the world:

• Superscript (10.1): Reintroduction of Noah and his sons
• Noah’s Line (10.1-31):
  • Sons of Japheth (10:2-5): A peripheral group possibly referring to peoples of the Aegean and Black Seas
  • Sons of Ham (10.6-20): A group closer to the centre of the story, including many peoples traditionally opposed to Israel, and under Egyptian influence, roughly associated with the southeastern Mediterranean region
  • Sons of Shem (10.21-31): The group that becomes the focus of the rest of Genesis, roughly representing the Semitic peoples and their lands in Mesopotamia and the broader Arabian Sea area
• Subscript (10.32): Describes these peoples as the fulfillment of the post-flood blessing to fill the earth

The basic structure of the ‘table of nations’ is broken up by the insertion of other materials, such as the story of Nimrod (10.8-12), and an extended discussion of Canaan’s line (10.15-19).

Experience

The main thing I experienced when reading the narrative portion of today’s text is confusion. The text is tight-lipped about the nature of Ham’s sin, and then it is Ham’s son Canaan rather than Ham himself who bears the brunt of Noah’s curse. I also have to wonder at the text’s lack of comment on Noah’s drunkenness.

The table of nations I find overwhelming. It’s really just a long list of names, only some of which I recognize as place names or people groups. I wonder what, if anything, it’s trying to tell us that may have been clear to its intended audience that is lost on us today. The insertion about Nimrod is odd and feels out of place. And again, I can’t help but notice how central Canaan is to the chapter.

Encounter

God is notable here in not being a character in the story, though referenced by name (YHWH) in Noah’s blessing and the Nimrod detail. In terms of actual characters, Noah comes across as rather ambivalent here. It’s interesting that this man who until this point has been portrayed as someone who is rather perfect before God, right after the flood story, is shown to be pretty irresponsible, passing out drunk and then lashing out at Canaan for Ham’s sin against him.

While the exact nature of Ham’s sin is unclear, what is clear is that he is not virtuous. Rather than hiding his father’s shame, he invites his brothers to witness it. For their part, they refuse to take part in whatever game Ham is playing at, demonstrating good character.

We don’t really encounter anyone among the long list of names in chapter 10, with the exception of Nimrod. I have to wonder why he is singled out for mention.

Explore

So, we come to the Explore section of the study with the following questions:

• What can we say about what exactly Ham’s sin is here?
• What is going on with Noah’s cursing of Canaan for Ham’s sin?
• What, if anything, is the ‘table of nations’ tryign to tell us?

Noah and Ham

Of the stories we’ve seen in Genesis, this is the first not to have an obvious counterpart in Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) literature (Carr, Sarna (1989) 63).* The story is introduced by a description of Noah’s wine-making, however, which does fit into a broader cultural idea that the consumption of alcohol is a mark of a mature and civilized humanity (Carr). It’s generally agreed that this detail is included as a fulfillment of his father’s intention for him, that he would be a comfort for people from their toil (Walton (2001), Brueggemann, Carr). Wine fulfills this in two ways, both being a source of comfort that is derived from the work of the soil itself, and a sedative to help the body relax after a long day’s work. The description of Noah as a ‘man of the soil’ continues a through line in Genesis (one of the few!), with there being references to ground or soil in 1.26 (since the word for humanity ‘adam is related to the word ‘adamah ‘soil, ground, earth’), 2.5, 3.17-23, and 4.2. For the most part, wine has very positive connotations in the Old Testament (Judges 9:13; Psalm 104:15; Proverbs 31:6, Jeremiah 16.7), and while his over-consumption doesn’t put Noah in the best light, neither is it condemned in the text. This is fitting in the sense that it continues Genesis’s general sensibility that the markers of human civilization are double-edged swords (Carr). But it remains that Noah’s drunkenness is not the problem in the story, but rather Ham’s taking advantage of it.

While the text’s silence about the exact nature of Ham’s violation has led to a lot of wild speculation over the years — including castrating or even raping his father or having sex with his mother — it seems best to read it literally, as a simple violation of Noah’s dignity as a father (Carr, Walton (2001)). Such a reading is strongly recommended by the fact that his brothers avoid sharing in his sin simply by covering Noah and averting their eyes. A literal reading may also be informed by a Ugaritic text, which speaks of assisting one’s father when he’s too deep in his cups as an essential duty of a son (Carr). While this is a bit unsatisfying, considering the huge ramifications the story has on Ham’s descendants, it highlights the importance of filial obligation in Hebrew culture. In so doing, it functions as a third story about the fall of family relationships: First husband and wife break faith with each other (Genesis 3), then brother breaks faith with brother (Genesis 4), and now child breaks faith with father (Carr).

Ham and Canaan

Irrespective of what Ham did, one of the strangest things in the story to our sensibilities is that Noah curses not Ham, but his son Canaan for his act (Brueggemann). Scholars have tried to explain this in a number of ways, including suggesting that an earlier version of the story understood Canaan to be Noah’s third son and what we have now was a way of harmonizing the story with the flood tradition that had Ham on the ark (Carr), that it would have been explained in a better-known longer version of the story that is greatly condensed here (Sarna (1989) 64), or simply ignoring the issue (which is, honestly, never a bad approach when dealing with a narrative hole; really, anything is just speculation and eisegesis).

But of course, if we know anything about the biblical story, the reason for Canaan’s curse here is obvious: The Canaanites were the inhabitants of the land which God promises to Abraham and his descendants, and are therefore the great enemies of Israel’s formative period. The text clearly has a political and polemical purpose, which is to vilify its readers’ essential enemy (Walton (2001), Brueggmenan, Carr). As Genesis continues, this cleaving off of Israel’s relatives from the story of promise is repeated in the dynamics between Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, and Ephraim and Manasseh (Brueggemann).

The Table of Nations

Genesis 10 is entirely taken up by what has been called the ‘Table of Nations’, a “quasi-genealogical” text which shows how Noah’s descendants repopulate the earth (Walton (2001)). It’s “quasi-genealogical” because it contains many of the features of ANE geneaologies, including patterning around the numbers seven, ten, and here especially, seventy, and internal and external symmetry (internal: the seventy names are roughly grouped into ten groups of seven (Walton (2001)); external: the seventy names here are paralleled by the seventy individuals who seek refuge in Egypt at the end of the book). But it also differs from typical ANE genealogy in not being monolinear (i.e., we see a full branching out of Noah’s descendants rather than just following the most important line) (Carr). This difference is intentional and emphasizes the universal scope of Noah’s line and the interrelationship of all peoples (Carr).

This material contains a mixture of individual names, place names, and people names, only some of which are identifiable today as representing ancient cities or peoples (Walton (2001)). We might either conclude from this that the table simply reflects peoples known in the ancient world but lost to history, or that it was an intentional combination of known groups and invented groups as a way of demonstrating that Noah’s descendants populated the whole known world, and beyond (Carr). It should also be noted that the lists do not correspondent to actual socio-linguistic connections among the known groups. For example, the Canaanites were a West Semitic culture who spoke a language nearly identical to Hebrew, but they are placed in Ham’s line here alongside Egypt and Cush, and the mysterious figure of Nimrod is likewise a Hammite but is located deep in Semitic (i.e., Shemite) land (Carr). As a general rule, the patterns seem to follow the the political aims we saw above: Israel’s traditional enemies — for example, Egypt, Canaan, and Phoenicia — are all placed in the cursed line of Ham, peripheral groups not salient to the Hebrew political experience are generally placed in Japheth’s line, and the groups most salient to, but not always in opposition to, Israel’s political life are placed with their ancestor Eber in Shem’s line (Carr). That Assyria and Babylon do not receive a negative assessment here strongly suggests that the text reflects the political realities of an earlier, possibly Solomonic, period (Brueggemann). (Along this line, Carr’s suggestion that the awkward insertion of the Nimrod city-building material here could reflect a later desire to place the Mesopotamian imperial nations in Ham’s cursed line is attractive.)

What we have in the table of nations is an interesting mixture of the universal and the particular — a tension that is common in the Old Testament — with a broad, “unparalleled ecumenical vision of … a network of interrelatedness among all peoples” is also designed to promote a specific political agenda which marginalizes Israel’s traditional enemies from God’s blessing (Brueggemann).

As Brueggemann also points out, this text marks a significant shift in the Old Testament, away from more mythological themes and images to the specifically human and political sphere, which dominates the rest of the Old Testament — with the one major exception of the next story we’ll look at, from Genesis 11.

Challenge

As noted in the post on Cain, one of the major functions of the ‘challenge’ portion of the Integral Hermeneutic method is to give voice to those marginalized in a text. And just as we saw in that post, so too has the curse on Ham’s line been used to justify all sorts of xenophobic and racist ideologies. As Carr put it:

[T]he depiction of post-flood peoples in Genesis 10 came to be a crucial template for European constructs of “Semitic,” “Hamitic,” and “Japhetite” (the latter often associated with Europeans) races and development of religiously-based ideologies supporting racial domination. In particular, the stories of Cain and Ham were reinterpreted to provide an account of African peoples as subhuman products of a separate line of Adam’s descendants, bearing the dark “mark” of Cain’s infamy (Gen 4:15) and the curse of Ham’s descendants to slavery (Gen 9:25).

Once again, we must, especially as Christians, reject any such interpretations outright. First, they ignore that according to the very same tradition this text comes from, all humanity is created in the image and likeness of God. Second, they ignore half of the dual purpose of this particular text, which is to demonstrate the interrelatedness and essential unity of humanity. And third, they ignore the New Testament teaching that any and every division of race, culture, and gender has been erased in and through the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Therefore, any racist or marginalizing application of texts like this in the world today are not only illegitimate, but anti-Christian, and simply evil.

Expand

The two texts we’ve looked at today offer a nuanced perspective on humanity. The re-creation of the world and confirmation of God’s promises we saw in Genesis 8.20-9.17 progresses here, but we might say that even if the rose bush is growing, it’s not flowering. The filling of the earth with Noah’s descendants is stated to be a fulfillment of God’s original blessing to humanity, and it offers a powerful teaching on the unity and interrelatedness of all humanity. But all is not well in the world. Just as we saw in the pre-flood stories, important family relationships are broken. And just as we saw in the pre-flood stories, some families are blessed and others are cursed, some are central to the future unfolding of God’s story, and some are marginal. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

But the story’s abuse over the centuries also stands as an important warning for us, particularly as Christians. We must reject any story that dehumanizes or vilifies those we don’t like, and affirm, with Genesis, that all humanity is created in the image and likeness of God, and, with the New Testament, that any such division in humanity is undone in God’s new creation in and through Jesus of Nazareth. For “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3.28).

 

• For details, please see the series bibliography.