1 And God blessed Noë and his sons. And he said to them: increase, and multiply, and fill the earth. 2 And fear and trembling of you will be over every animal of the earth; and over all flying things of the sky, with everything which moves over the earth; all fish of the seas have been delivered to your hands. 3 And all which moves and lives, will be your food, as if I had delivered all flourishing plants to you; 4 Except, that you shall not eat meat with blood.
5 Truly I will require the blood of your souls from the hand of each beast; and from the hand of men, from the hand of a man and his brother, I will require the soul of men. 6 Whoever will shed human blood, his blood will be shed; since man is made in the image of God. 7 But increase and multiply, and go out over the earth, and fill it up.
9 Behold I will establish my agreement with you, and with your offspring after you, 10 and to every living soul, which is with you, so in birds as in beasts of burden, and all livestock of the earth, which has gone out from the ark, ad all the beasts of the earth. 11 I will establish my covenant with you, and never again will all flesh be destroyed by the waters of a flood, nor will there be another flood dispersing the Earth.
12 And God said this will be the sign of the pact which I give between myself and you, and to every living soul, which is with you in eternal begettings: 13 I will place my bow in the clouds, and it will be a sign of the covenant between me and between the earth. 14 And when I cover heaven with clouds, my rainbow will appear in the clouds; 15 and I will remember my pact with you, and with all living souls which animate flesh, and there will be no great waters of a flood to destroy all flesh. 16 And the rainbow ill be in the clouds and I will see it, and I will remember the eternal covenant which is a pact between God and every living soul of all flesh which is upon the earth. 17 And God said to Noë: This will be a sign of the covenant which I have established between myself and all flesh on the Earth.
18 Accordingly the son of Noë who went out from the ark were Sem, Cham, and Japheth; in turn Chem himself is the father of Chanaan. 19 These three were the sons of Noë and from these were disseminated every kind of men over all the earth.
20 And Noë a farmer man began to work the land, and he planted wine; 21 And drinking the wine he became drunk, and was naked in his tent. 22 Which when Cham saw his father naked, he declared it to his two brothers outside. 23 And truly Sem and Japheth put a cloak on their shoulders, and moving backwards, they covered the awe-inspiring things of their father; and they turned away their faces, and did not see the manly things of their father.
24 While Noë was waking out of the wine, he learned what his younger son did to him.
25 And cursed be Chanaan, He will be a slave of the slaves of his brothers. 26 And he said: Blessed is the Lord God of Sem, let Chanaan be his slave. 27 May God spread out Japheth, and may Sem live in tents, and may Chanaan be their slave.
28 Moreover Noë lived after the flood for three-hundred fifty years. 29 And all his days amounted to nine-hundred fifty years, and he died.
Linguistic Notes
Linguistically this is a rich chapter. There’s Jerome’s pun on of arcum/arca (bow/ark), but the thing that stuck out to me was in verse 23 where Jerome wrote “At vero Sem et Japheth pallium imposuerunt humeris suis, et incedentes retrorsum, operuerunt verenda patris sui: faciesque eorum aversae erant, et patris virilia non viderunt.” The original Hebrew has עֶרְוַת (nakedness)¹ here and also earlier in the verse which Jerome renders as first verenda (awe-inspiring [things]) and then virilia (manly [things])² but which, when it appeared in the preceding verse Jerome translated the word as nudata (naked). And again, we can’t blame this on the Septuagint which uses γύμνωσιν (nakedness) in all three instances. I can’t help but feel that Jerome was having a bit of fun with the language in this chapter.
Theological Notes
There’s a lot happening theologically in this chapter, which among other things inspired the theologically dubious claim that Black Africans are the sons of Chanaan slander that was used to justify slavery in the U.S. Perhaps more interesting is the covenant that God makes with humanity. The beginnings of kashrut appear here (with the prohibition on consuming blood) and law (a prohibition against murder), but perhaps most important is the promise that God makes to not destroy all life again with a flood. Alas, I’ve witnessed some bad takes on this, one—typical of my adolescence in the 1980s—was to ignore the promise not to destroy all life and take it as God’s will that the world be destroyed in a nuclear holocaust (I remember seeing the headline on an ad where theologians and anti-nuclear activists felt compelled to say that nuclear holocaust was not God’s will). The other is perhaps even more insidious, the belief among some self-proclaimed Christians that we don’t need to worry about things like environmental catastrophe (or more recently climate change) because of this covenant, ignoring the fact that just because God isn’t going to destroy all life doesn’t mean that humanity can’t. I suspect this is a lingering hangover of the belief in a static world/universe that was a mainstream belief up until the 18th and 19th centuries when the first paleontologists uncovered evidence of all manner of now-extinct species of flora and fauna indicating that the natural world is ever-changing in the past and will continue to change in the future.
Bonus post factum addition I recently heard an interview with Edward Tick where he mentioned that PTSD (not under that name, of course) appears throughout the Bible. Job was the obvious case, but I emailed him asking about other examples and he mentioned Noah as well and once you look at this part of the Noah story in that light, it becomes obvious. I’d gotten so used to the commonplace laughing at Noah alongside Chanaan that happens a lot when reading this story that I failed to view Noah with compassion and see him as a traumatized person (he had just witnessed the near-destruction of the world and surely among those who died were many people he loved) who used wine to self-medicate. Suddenly, the story of Chanaan becomes not one of dishonoring his father, but of failure to be compassionate in the face of suffering.
- According to Wiktionary, עֶרְוַת can also refer to a sexually forbidden relation in Jewish law, which makes Cham’s transgression have a greater significance.
- In English, the Latin word has come to mean the male sexual organs.