Thayer Thursday – Drunk, Naked Noah
The more you read the Bible, the more you start to recognize quotations and allusions to other portions of scripture.
For instance, last week I was reading through Ezekiel 8-11 and was struck by the parallels between portions of that scripture and portions of the book of Revelation (particularly chapters 7 & 14). These are intentional references by the authors, meant to drive the readers (or hearers) back to that which they’ve heard before.
If you have a study Bible, the section between the two blocks of text on each page has a list of some of these cross references so you can see when an author is quoting from, or alluding to, another section of scripture. They also indicate where the same story is told by a different author with their own flare.
The most amazing visual representation of these Biblical cross references I have seen is an image created by Chris Harrison:
He graphed all of the cross references he found in the Bible. On the horizontal axis of his graph, there are hundreds of vertical bars that represent each chapter of the Bible. Each vertical bar is longer or shorter depending on how many verses there are in that chapter. In order to distinguish between the different books of the Bible, he denotes the change in the books by alternating the colors of the vertical bars between light and dark gray. Finally, to represent a cross reference from one section of the Bible to another, he has drawn a colored half circle line which connects each of the 69,000+ cross references he has identified throughout scripture. I strongly encourage you to view some of his other stunning visual representations at his website: CLICK HERE.
So why do I share this today?
Well, if you were to open your Bible and read Genesis 9:18-27, you would encounter an extremely odd section of scripture. Noah gets drunk, falls asleep in his tent, his son Ham sees him & mischievously goes out and tells his brothers about it. When Noah finds out what Ham did, he curses his grandson (Ham’s son Canaan) – a curse which has reverberations throughout most of the Old Testament as the Israelites eventually settle in the land of Canaan.
When we read this story on its own we rightly have a number of questions. For instance, why did Noah get so angry that he was seen naked?
Surely a son seeing his father naked isn’t really an offense, is it?
Not only that, but isn’t Noah really the one who started these shenanigans by getting drunk and passing out in his tent in the first place?
This has led many scholars to grapple with whether or not Ham “seeing” his father is really a euphemism for something much worse – such as sexually violating his father as he slept.
However, if you start reading at Genesis 1 and read through Genesis 9, you’ll quickly pick up on a parallel between Genesis 9 and Genesis 3.
In Genesis 3, Adam and Eve both partake of the fruit of the tree they weren’t supposed to. Their first realization after they ate from the tree was that they were naked. So they covered themselves.
Fast forward to Genesis 6 and the wickedness of mankind had reached such a level that God sent a great flood to eradicate the people from the land; everybody except for Noah (whom God found to be a righteous man) and his family. God rescues Noah and his family from the flood, and in chapter 9 gives them the same charge He gave to Adam and Eve “be fruitful and multiply.” However, right in line with Adam and Eve, Noah partakes in the fruit of the vine (in quite the excess), passes out in his nakedness, a nakedness which his two good sons recognize, but cover (just as Adam and Eve – and later God – covered their nakedness).
In pointing his readers back to chapter 3, the author of Genesis is showing his readers that the flood didn’t take care of the problem. The nakedness that needs covering remains despite the washing of the flood. The effects of Adam and Eve’s disobedience continue and will require a great work of God to eradicate.
Chris Thayer
Categories: Biblical Scholarship, Biblical Theology, Blog, Hebrew Bible