Jamin Bradley

After Noah got drunk and passed out naked in his tent, something very strange happened. The story goes like this: Noah’s son, Ham, “saw the nakedness of his father” and told his brothers about it. His brothers then took a sheet and walked backward to lay it on “their father’s nakedness” so that they wouldn’t see it. Noah then woke up and put a curse on Ham’s son, Canaan, for what Ham “had done to him.”

What did he do? Surely it wasn’t that big of a deal in the ancient world that he saw his father naked. Many answers have been proposed, but I’ve only heard one that makes sense of all the details.

Leviticus 20:11 says, “If a man lies with his father’s wife, he has uncovered his father’s nakedness.” In other words, Noah’s nakedness is a euphemism for how Ham slept with his mother. This is further proved by the fact that this story is actually about Canaan, who was the offspring of Ham and Noah’s wife. Canaan’s name comes up five times in this story because this is his origin story. He had nothing to do with anything, but Noah’s angry curse came down on him because of who his parents were. This theme is echoed later in Genesis, for after the next apocalyptic event of Sodom and Gomorrah, the survivors will also commit incest.

May we be observant of how society impacts our minds, lest pieces of our old worlds live on into our new ones.