This is a very confusing part of the Bible. Noah messes up really badly. Ham makes the situation even worse. Then Noah speaks his only recorded words in the Bible and sometimes we aren’t sure how we should feel about them. What do we do when the Bible tells us what happened but doesn’t tell us how we should feel about it?
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel.
(Parents, all Scripture comes from the CSB this week, the Christian Standard Bible, and we will mostly be in Genesis 9)
Noah, as a man of the soil, began by planting a vineyard. 21 He drank some of the wine, became drunk, and uncovered himself inside his tent. 22 Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father naked and told his two brothers outside. 23 Then Shem and Japheth took a cloak and placed it over both their shoulders, and walking backward, they covered their father’s nakedness. Their faces were turned away, and they did not see their father naked. 24 When Noah awoke from his drinking and learned what his youngest son had done to him, 25 he said: Canaan is cursed. He will be the lowest of slaves to his brothers. 26 He also said: Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem; Let Canaan be Shem’s slave. 27 Let God extend Japheth;
let Japheth dwell in the tents of Shem; let Canaan be Shem’s slave.
Well, that’s a really depressing end to the whole flood story, right? What the heck happened here? Why did a man like Noah get drunk? Why did Noah curse Canaan when it was Canaan’s dad who messed up? Why were Noah’s first and last words in the entire Bible a curse against his grandson? If you are thinking this is messed up, you are right. Remember, all through the Bible our heroes are going to do bad things and mess up. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Miriam, Joshua, David, Peter, James, John, etc., etc. are all going to mess up in big and small ways. Remember that the Bible teaches us that only God is perfect—not us and not even the big names in the Bible. How long did Adam and Eve do good before they believed the biggest lie ever told? We have no idea. Maybe a day, maybe a thousand years. Probably closer to a day than a thousand years but we really just don’t know. That’s something you will see a lot of fiction writings about because Jewish people have wondered about that for a long time and wrote a lot of “what if” stories about it!
I want you to always remember this when you read your Bibles, all your life. Just because someone in the Bible is a hero, or chosen by God, it doesn’t mean that everything they did is good. The Bible will talk about them doing terrible things, just awful. Sometimes they get punished for it and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the Bible says what they did is bad and sometimes it doesn’t say much of anything. Sometimes what they did is just described, like in today’s lesson. The Bible describes what did happen and not always what should have happened. So, we don’t have to make excuses when heroes do bad things. In life, it is important that we don’t do that. When I was a lot younger, there was a President who did something that was just terrible and you would think that everyone would admit how bad it was. Nope, the people who thought he was a hero made excuses and made fun of the people who were talking about how bad it was. And I have seen it more than once, sometimes with Democrats and sometimes with Republicans. We always have to be careful when we admire a person, when we respect them, that we don’t call the bad things they do good or okay just because we like them so much. Noah doesn’t really look good in this week’s lesson and that’s okay. Just because Noah was righteous in his generation doesn’t mean that he was perfect or always a good guy or did everything right. It doesn’t mean that he was the perfect father, husband, son, boss, brother, or anything. The Bible isn’t about perfect people, it’s about a bunch of messed up people waiting for the perfect person, Jesus, to come to fix everything they broke. So, never feel bad about noticing stuff that is totally whacked. It’s okay to call what’s bad, bad, no matter who is doing it.
Now, this story must have happened many years later. We see that the Bible tells us that Noah was a man of the soil, which means he was a farmer—but that shouldn’t really surprise us because when there are no grocery stores, people need to grow their own food, raise their own animals, and hunt for wild game if they aren’t planning on starving to death. If you’ve ever been out in the middle of nowhere, you know that there isn’t just food laying around all over the place. Food for humans that isn’t grown by humans is very hard to find. Humans used to have to work very hard to eat before the invention of plows and tractors and sprinklers and all of that stuff that we see as normal today. A family might work all year and only make just enough food for themselves with nothing left over. So, the first thing they all had to do was to move away from the ark, which was on a mountain or in a mountain range, and go somewhere lower onto a plain or valley where there might be a river or a lake and they could grow themselves the food they would need to survive. First, they would have grown barley and wheat from the seeds they had stored in the ark and maybe vegetables. And that would have taken about four to six months before they could eat those. Fruit trees would take years before there was enough fruit to depend on. And grapes? Grapes also took a long time to grow into mature plants.
So, when the Bible says that Noah planted a vineyard, it really means that they had a long trek before finding a place with good conditions and then he planted the vines he had brought with them, and after three to four years he got enough grapes to be able to turn into dried raisin cakes and wine. And unless he brought a lot of vines with them, and he probably didn’t, this probably took at least ten years to get enough plants to get enough grapes. It takes a lot of grapes to make wine. They would have stored wine in bags made of animal skin, or in pottery, and they wouldn’t have used bottles during the Bible times—not even in Jesus’s time. But the next time you go to the store, ask to see a wine bottle. And then go into the produce section, which has fruits and veggies, and look at the grapes. It takes about two and a half pounds of grapes to make just one bottle of wine, and the grapes in the stores are huge compared to the grapes used for wine. And the grapes had to be cared for and pruned and harvested and then they had to make a special kind of container called a vat or a press and they would crush the grapes—sometimes with their feet! And the juice would run out of a tube at the bottom and they would put the juice into the animal skins and it would ferment and turn into alcohol. That’s a whole lot of work! But it wouldn’t have been a big priority because Noah’s family had to get to work learning how to survive on their own and they would have had so much planting and harvesting to do that wine would have been at the bottom of the list.
Now, what happens when people drink alcohol and they aren’t responsible or careful? Well, they get drunk and a lot of times they do really foolish things. Because when people are drinking alcohol, the alcohol makes them kinda numb in their brains, and all of those normal warnings that our brains give us not to do foolish things?—well, they kinda stop working. Why was Noah drinking so much to get drunk? We don’t know. People drink too much alcohol for a lot of reasons and none of them are good. The Bible tells us that he got really drunk and he was so drunk that he fell asleep in his tent, naked. Maybe his tent was open so that people walking by could see him, we just don’t know. When people get drunk, they don’t really think things through very well and sometimes they hurt themselves and other people.
Now, Noah had three sons: Ham, Shem, and Japheth. And if you are going to ask me who was the oldest, I just can’t because when you look at the original language, it says something very weird and no one can really agree on what it means! Depending on which translation of the Bible you use, some say that Shem is the older brother and some say that Japheth is. It’s all part of the problem with ancient languages. Sometimes even Hebrew speakers have no idea what something means in ancient Hebrew! All we know for sure is that Ham was the youngest. Fortunately, it doesn’t matter to the story at all. But as I was saying, there were three sons, and the sons each had a wife with them on the ark and by now, many years later, they had kids.
Now, because we don’t live in what is called an honor/shame society, it’s kind of hard for us to see what the really big deal was with what happened. Kids these days make fun of their parents and especially on tv. Kids disrespect adults in general. When I was a kid there was much less of that going on, but it still sometimes happened. When I was a kid, we called all adults Mister and Mrs., and let me tell you that if I mouthed off to an adult, my parents found out about it and I wasn’t keen to do it again. If I did it at school, I’d get into trouble there and at home. That doesn’t mean that every family was like that but in mine, you just didn’t disrespect grownups. And when Shem, Japheth, and Ham were alive—you just can’t even imagine how strict the world was about those kinds of things.
In the ancient world, there existed something called patriarchy. And the oldest or most respected man in the family ruled over absolutely everyone. If he thought you were making the family look bad, he could even kill you. The only way to remove the man in charge was if he was making the family look bad and then someone else would take his place. But it wasn’t easy to do. You see, a family’s reputation was more important than anything. If other people didn’t respect the head of your family, then they wouldn’t do business with you and if people wouldn’t do business with you, it wouldn’t be long before the whole family was ruined. Daughters couldn’t get married into good families and the sons wouldn’t be able to find good wives. No one was falling in love and getting married in those days as we do now, marriage was an agreement between the father of the groom and the father of the bride. They didn’t usually care whether their kids liked each other or not because marriage was like a business deal. By joining two families, they each became stronger. Daughters went and lived with their husband’s families and sons stayed with their parents for the rest of their lives. As long as your family had a good reputation, and everyone respected them, everything went very well.
But what if your honor was damaged? What if something made a fool of the head of your family or one of the members? Well, if it was bad enough, they would say that your family was shamed. And that was very bad if people didn’t respect you as much. Because of this, wives, children, and other family members were always very careful in public to never make one another look bad. Children obeyed their parents, wives obeyed their husbands because if you didn’t do that in the ancient world, the man looked weak and if he looked weak, then other men wouldn’t trust and respect him. Men were expected to control everyone and everything around them. That’s what patriarchy means—men had all the power and women and children had none at all. Men could even kill family members they thought were trouble, and if they could kill family members just think what they could do to slaves and strangers! What men weren’t really allowed to do was to attack people who had more honor, or status, than they had. They had to be careful. There were rules and all of their society made sure that everyone kept the rules. It’s very hard to imagine what life was like for everyone back then but everyone’s survival depended on a strong family and one person in charge of everything. And so even if they were alone, as more and more kids were born, it would have been very important for everyone to respect and obey Noah, because he was like 500 years older than everyone else. I explain this much better and much slower in my Book, Honor and Shame in the Bible, which I wrote for kids.
But, whenever you have one person in charge, sometimes the other men in the family think that they would be better for the job and especially if they are stronger and have more energy or maybe they have skills that the patriarch, the man in charge, didn’t have. There’s always someone who thinks they are the best person for the job, right? I mean, even Satan decided that he ought to have God’s job. I mean, if he thought that was a good idea then anything is possible! But what do you do when you are the youngest son and you know that when your father dies, your oldest brother will probably become the new patriarch? You’ve got to play the honor/shame game and that’s a really terrible thing to do to someone else because the only way to make yourself look better in that kind of society is to make someone else look really bad. If you can make the other person look bad enough, then you get more and more popular and people respect you more and they don’t respect the person you made look bad anymore. You know, it works the same on the playground, and in school, and everywhere that kids hang out. Honor is about popularity, and Ham was about to do something just terrible to try to make his father look bad when he should have protected him instead.
Now, remember—Noah had gotten really drunk, which was bad. He got drunk enough that he passed out in his tent and he was naked and just lying there. A nice person would have covered him up with a blanket and shut the tent door and later pretended like nothing happened—unless it kept happening and then Ham would need to talk to Noah and try to help him with his problem because Ham was over a hundred years old. He was a grownup too. But Ham saw his dad and went out and told his brothers and possibly everyone else too. His dad made a mistake, maybe just that once—we don’t know, and Ham was taking advantage of it and shaming his father. Because he did this, the people in the family wouldn’t trust Noah as much. Noah’s family would be disappointed in Noah for getting so far out of control and they might actually be laughing at him. Now, if Ham’s plan had worked, his brothers and the rest of the family would have started gossiping and insulting Noah, talking about maybe needing new leadership in the family if Noah wasn’t going to be serious and honorable.
But that isn’t what happened. Shem and Japheth heard what Ham had to say and they did the right thing. They took a cloak, which would have been kind of like a blanket, and they put it between them and walked backward into Noah’s tent and covered him up and let him sleep. They might not have liked what their father did, but they also knew that Ham was totally wrong about how he handled it. And when Noah woke up, I imagine he felt pretty bad and cranky because when people get drunk they wake up feeling like someone ran them over with a steamroller. And maybe he walked out of the tent and some of the kids were giggling at him—I don’t know. I know he would probably wonder why he woke up naked covered with someone else’s cloak, right? He would know something was up, and maybe when he went outside everyone looked away quickly the way they do when they are embarrassed to be looking at you. I don’t think it took long for Noah to figure out exactly what had happened and who was responsible. He was the patriarch, the man in charge of everyone there, and when he would ask a question, people would tell him what he wanted to know unless it would get them personally in trouble. And by this time, with Shem and Japheth showing love and loyalty to their dad, Ham probably knew that whatever he hoped to accomplish in shaming his father wasn’t going to work. In fact, it really backfired and something awful is going to happen.
Noah would be very angry, and he would have a terrible headache. Men in ancient times were not used to the younger generation mocking them and trying to shame them. It was a time when the patriarch had all the power and all the respect and even if he was a bad person—didn’t matter. And no one questioned that it should be that way—it was their context, the way things normally were then. Nothing else would have made sense to them because they believed this kept their families safe and working in peace and harmony as a team. And it was a very dangerous world. You had to know that everyone was going to follow orders and do their job when times were difficult. And so, Noah did something very strange that people have always wondered about and there are different theories—some of them don’t line up very well with what we know about the ancient world and some do, but I am going to tell you what I think happened and maybe you can come up with something different because the Bible doesn’t tell us why. It only tells us what happened. And we have come across a lot of those situations, haven’t we! One of the things it means is that we can have different opinions and that’s okay.
Noah opens his mouth for the first and last time in the entire Bible and says this: “Canaan is cursed. He will be the lowest of slaves to his brothers. 26 He also said: Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem; Let Canaan be Shem’s slave. 27 Let God extend Japheth; let Japheth dwell in the tents of Shem; let Canaan be Shem’s slave.”
Excuse me—what? No way! He cursed Ham the next morning, right? For embarrassing him in front of the family, right? He’s sending him away from the entire family and never wants to see Ham again, right? No, that isn’t how Noah uses his only recorded words. Noah curses his grandson. But his grandson doesn’t really appear to have done anything wrong. The only thing Canaan did wrong seems to be having Ham for a father. Noah’s son Ham hurt him, and so it looks like Noah is retaliating by hurting Ham through his own son. Believe me, if my parents ever really wanted to hurt me, they would do it by hurting one of my kids, and since they are twins it would hurt everyone in my family. I wouldn’t be able to have any kind of relationship with my parents if they hurt my son for something I did. I would be wrong, but they would be wrong too. And what would my two younger brothers do? Would they side with my parents against me, or would they side with their nephew against our parents? If Noah had just cursed Ham, it would have been much easier on the family because Ham would have just left and started his own group. But now, there is going to be chaos.
Noah had the power to curse a family member in ancient times. Remember that God hadn’t given His laws yet, that wouldn’t happen for at least another thousand years. And I don’t want you to think of a curse like a witch’s curse, okay? I want you to think about consequences. Just like in Genesis 3 when God told Adam and Eve what the consequences would be of what they did and how it would mess up their lives and their marriage from what God wanted for them in the beginning. God didn’t do those things to them, that’s what happened because they weren’t in the garden anymore and because they couldn’t trust each other anymore. And so, Noah, who wasn’t perfect even though the Bible says He was righteous compared to everyone else who lived before the flood—that just means compared to them he was right—he had the power to make life miserable for Canaan because Ham humiliated him. That’s the way things worked in a patriarchal family. You don’t mess with the dad or the grandfather or the uncle or whoever is in charge. But even in your own family, if you do something awful, you will be cursed with consequences. Maybe you will be grounded. You might have to work very hard to get your family to trust you again, even though they still love you. And sometimes your parents might even be so angry that they punish you too severely and take some of it back later. It happens—just like with Noah, except he doesn’t seem like he took it back.
And you might be thinking now that I am saying that Noah was a horrible, evil person but we have to remember that everyone who has ever lived is very complicated. Noah was used to being respected and obeyed without question. But his youngest son had humiliated him in front of everyone. Probably that had never happened to Noah before and maybe Noah was even scared because he was getting older and maybe he felt threatened by that. We will never know the whole story, but there are a lot of lessons here about being careful about alcohol, and not trying to hurt people in our family, and not punishing the wrong people to try to get even. We need to look at the story and make sure we don’t do things to others that we can see are cruel and unfair and foolish. What a terrible way to end the story of Noah. But he won’t be the only person we see who starts great but ends on a bad note.
I love you. I am praying for you. And I pray that you have a wonderful time studying the Bible with the people who love you.