God's insistence on working with failed, flawed people.

I remember when I began to realize that the Sunday School versions of Bible stories often left a lot of detail out. I didn’t go to church much after junior high, so when I began my first year at Bible college, my understanding of many of the biblical accounts were frozen at that level or younger. So it was a surprise and a fascination to me to discover those stories again in their uncensored form. I began to understand why King David’s family was all messed up, for example, and also why Baal worship was at the same time so popular and so evil.

Something else I realized when I read these stories again with adult eyes was that not every story was neat, tidy, and came with its own handy-dandy moral. Too often, particularly when we read the Old Testament stories, we want to turn them into a kind of Aesop’s Fable – a story whose main importance is the morality lesson at the end. When treated like this, the biblical story and persons involved become almost irrelevant, as if they existed solely to provide a means to teach the reader some important life-lesson.

Genesis 9:18-29
"The sons of Noah who came out of the ark were Shem, Ham and Japheth. (Ham was the father of Canaan.) 19 These were the three sons of Noah, and from them came the people who were scattered over the earth. 20 Noah, a man of the soil, proceeded to plant a vineyard. 21 When he drank some of its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent. 22 Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father's nakedness and told his two brothers outside. 23 But Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it across their shoulders; then they walked in backward and covered their father's nakedness. Their faces were turned the other way so that they would not see their father's nakedness. 24 When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to him, 25 he said, "Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers." 26 He also said, "Blessed be the LORD, the God of Shem! May Canaan be the slave of Shem.   27 May God extend the territory of Japheth; may Japheth live in the tents of Shem, and may Canaan be his slave." 28 After the flood Noah lived 350 years. 29 Altogether, Noah lived 950 years, and then he died." 

As I mentioned above, there is more to the Bible stories than the flannelgraph version. This particular story is usually not told in Sunday School because of two embarrassing revelations – one is obvious and the other is more subtle in nuance. The first is that Noah was a drunk, or at least he got very, very drunk on this occasion. This seems to explain why Shem and Japheth were embarrassed when Ham came out of his father’s tent and told them he had seen their father passed out naked inside. But why would Noah, when he recovered from his inebriation, call down curses upon Ham, who had seemed to act out of concern that Noah not be dishonored?

The answer seems to be, especially when compared to other places in the Old Testament where the phrase is used, that when Ham “saw his father’s nakedness,” it implies more than the literal truth of the statement. It appears that Ham raped his father while he was drunk, thus dishonoring Noah in a fundamental way. When Ham came out of the tent to brag to his brothers, they were ashamed and walked in backward with a blanket between them so as not to see anything.

This explains much more fully why Noah cursed Ham and his Canaanite descendants so vehemently. It also explains why the Canaanites as a people were to be wiped out by the children of Israel when they came into the Promised Land from Egypt, as apparently the Canaanites continued this and other detestable practices.

Try putting together a “moral of the story” on this one. (Don’t rape your father? Don’t get drunk when your sons are around? Homosexual rape is a good reason to curse a whole people?)

I think, rather than tack some kind of teachable moment on the end, it would be better just to tell the story and allow people to understand that even though God had wiped out most of the human race because of evil, sin and its corruption still existed. Noah may have found favor in the eyes of the Lord before the flood, but in the end remained a flawed, failed human being, fallen short like the rest of us.