Could this be the Truth Behind Canaan's Curse?

The Coolest thing about reading the Bible, is that Holy Spirit lives within it's pages. In other words, as we read, He gives insight into the words. There are those who read without God's Spirit within themselves, and they will never see or understand the deeper meanings God has planted there for His people to discover.

There are times when you see things that are good, then there are times when you see things that are AMAZING! Over the years, I've gotten all kinds of special understanding. Here is one such time:

At the end of Genesis 9 we read a story of Noah and his son, Ham. The typical way of understanding the story goes like this-

Noah gets drunk and lays openly naked in his tent. His son, Ham, looks in on him and mockingly shares what he saw with his brothers. His brothers take a blanket and walk in Noah's tent backwards, so as not to see their "father's nakedness" and cover him. Later Noah learns what happened and curses Ham . . . no, wait! He curses Ham's son, Canaan! What? Canaan is not even Ham's eldest son. What's going on here?

The key is in understanding biblical phrases that mean something different than what we would think today. The phrase we want to look at here is "uncovered his father's nakedness."

We would assume it means, "saw him naked." Not so. There are other passages in the Bible which give us a better understanding of this phrase back then. For instance, in Leviticus 18:7-20 there are a long list of things you should not do because you would be "uncovering the nakedness of your [father, brother, uncle, etc]." Most modern translations translate this phrase "to have sexual relations with." Two other such passages using this phrase are Leviticus 20:17-21 and Ezekiel 22:10.

So here's what I believe is really going on in Noah's story. Ham rapes his mother and then mockingly shares that with his brothers. In their concern for her, they walk in their parents' tent backwards as a gesture of modesty to "cover their father's nakedness."

Now whether Noah is present (drunk, passed out?) in the same tent, or elsewhere it doesn't matter. The deed was done "to him" (the patriarchal society here, is blatantly ignoring the woman- after all, she is Noah's "property." I must interject how terrible this is!). His nakedness was uncovered; someone had sexual relations with his wife.

So we must assume a few things here. Noah's wife (she is not specifically named in the Bible, but some traditions give her the name Naamah or Emzara), gets pregnant during this obscene act. She has the baby, which is Ham's son (Ham has already had children with his own wife, so Canaan is not his eldest). That son is named Canaan. After the birth, Noah THEN curses this child because of the circumstances surrounding his paternity. 

While I don't necessarily like what has happened here, it now makes sense to me. I always wondered why Canaan was cursed and not Ham (well, I'm still not sure why Ham wasn't cursed!). 

Question: Did Noah only learn of this situation AFTER the birth of Canaan? Maybe he got half the story (it was not his child) when the child was born and therefore he cursed the child. Maybe even later he was told who the true father was? Perhaps that would explain why Ham wasn't cursed. In his anger after learning the truth, Noah blew up, cursed the child and had cooled down by the time he learned the whole story. Maybe that was Naamah/Emzara's plan, so her beloved son Ham was not cursed in the first place? Let's give her some credit after all!

One can only conjecture these parts of the story. But I think it's pretty clear what the main truth of the story is now.

My wife, Debbie, still doesn't totally want to go with this yet. She's still working on it. What do you think?