 You're listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit nakedbiblepodcast.com and click on the support link in the upper right-hand corner. If you're new to the podcast and Dr. Heizer's approach to the Bible, click on newstarthere at nakedbiblepodcast.com. Welcome to the Naked Bible Podcast, Episode 159, Noah's Nakedness, The Sin of Ham and the Curse of Canaan. I'm the layman, Jerry Strickland, and he's a scholar, Dr. Michael Heizer. Hey Mike, how you doing this week? Pretty good, how are you? I'm doing good. I'm excited for another good episode. I like these topical episodes. It's a nice break from the book, which we'll be voting very soon. Maybe in the next couple of weeks or so, we'll post it up there so people can vote on the next book that we get into. But until then, I'm enjoying these topical episodes. I think you're just looking forward to Noah's nakedness here. I think you got a mascot now. He's no going to be our mascot. I've got to take it, right? Yeah, there you go. Yeah, well, this is one I think, if memory serves, that we actually touched on some of this in a Q&A. That's probably where I said, hey, we need to do a whole episode of this or something like that. So here we are. Again, for newsletter subscribers, I have uploaded an article that I think to date is the best treatment of this issue. I think I'll read a couple things in the article, but basically the research here that I'm going to present to you, again, try to make it decipherable for a lay audience, really depends on it comes from this article. It's by John. I hope I get his middle name correct here. It's Seats. John Seats-Bergsma and Scott Walker-Hahn. The article is entitled Noah's Nakedness and the Curse on Canons. It's from the Journal of Biblical Literature, Volume 124, Issue 1. Back in 2005, pages 25 through 40. So if you're a newsletter subscriber, you will have access to the protected folder and you can get that article and read it. There are a lot more details than what we'll cover here, but I'm going to give you the basics and hopefully explain clearly why this problematic passage in Genesis 9 really does have a good answer. There is a way to make sense of this. So let's just start off by reading the passage. This is going to be Genesis 9, 18 through 25 is what we'll read. Let's just jump in here. I'm using ESV. It says the sons of Noah who went forth from the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Ham was the father of Canaan. These three were the sons of Noah and from these the people of the whole earth were dispersed. Noah began to be a man of the soil and he planted a vineyard. He drank of the wine and became drunk and lay uncovered in his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brothers outside. Then Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it on both their shoulders and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father. Their faces returned backward and they did not see their father's nakedness. When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, he said, Cursed be Canaan, a servant of servants shall he be to his brothers. That's the end of the section here. So this is a familiar story and it's one that's really puzzled people for a long time. And once we go through this material, I think you're going to see how, you know, if you're not sort of tuned in to especially idiomatic expressions in biblical Hebrew, it's very easy to misinterpret this passage. So I'm hoping by the end of it you'll draw that conclusion or see what I mean by that statement. Now, let's talk about how this passage has been approached traditionally. There are three traditional views held by various Jewish groups or sects, Jewish sources and of course Christian interpreters over a long course of time. The first one is voyeurism. This is the idea that what I just read, the sin of Ham was just looking at Noah's naked body. So the problem here is that it was forbidden. There's some taboo about looking upon nudity and that's the sin that Ham commits and he embarrasses Noah and then Noah curses Canaan. Now this has been popular since antiquity. The strength of the position, I'll just read from the article on page 27, they write this. The strength of this position is its conservatism. It refuses to see anything in the text that is not explicit. Yet in a sense voyeurism is a non-explanation since it fails to elucidate either the gravity of Ham's offense or the reason for the curse of Canaan. It also requires the interpreter to assume the existence of a taboo against the accidental sight of a naked parent that is otherwise unattested in biblical or ancient Near Eastern literature. So there you go. I mean it is really looking, you walk into a tent and you see your dad there naked and unexpectedly and then that merits the cursing of your son Canaan. It just seems like it's overkill and again we don't really have any evidence that it was taboo to just come upon someone's naked body and see them and then you were in big trouble. There's nothing like that in biblical law or ancient Near Eastern law but nevertheless this has become again probably the leading traditional view and it really derives from the statement that Ham the father of Canaan in verse 22 saw the nakedness of his father. That's really where it comes from. So simple voyeurism is probably the leading traditional view and again it's primary weakness other than again not having a law or anything in the Bible that would just say this is awful. It really doesn't explain the curse on Canaan at all. Second view is castration believe it or not. This is the idea that Ham goes into Noah's tent and castrates him. This is a rabbinic idea. You'll see this in rabbinic discussion about the passage and to quote Bergsma and Han in their article again they provide just a little snippet of an explanation here or comment. They say one can cite examples from ancient Near Eastern mythology although none from the Bible of a son castrating his father as part of an effort to usurp his authority. This view also provides some rationale albeit complex this is me now I think that's a generous term I think it's it's pretty strange personally but back to the quotation. It also provides some rationale albeit complex for the cursing of Canaan. Noah curses Ham's fourth son since Ham deprived Noah of a fourth son. What is lacking however is any lexical hint in the text of Genesis 9 that would suggest castration end of quote. So basically it comes down to there's no there's no evidence in the text that Noah was castrated so that's a big problem and the explanation of Canaan's cursing is pretty strained. It has to assume that Noah wanted a fourth son. Again there's there's nothing that actually says that third traditional view is again one that is pretty common castration is probably the least common today of these usually it's voyeurism or this next one but again a lot of people hold to this position as well and that is that the sin of Ham is paternal incest in other words Noah was sexually abused by Ham okay there's a homosexual violation here now Gagnon G-A-G-N-O-N in his otherwise excellent book the Bible and homosexual practice actually takes this view I don't I don't take the paternal incest view as will become evident as we go on and there is really secure biblical textual reason reasons for not taking this view but Gagnon again takes this view he's very influential in the discussion of the Bible and homosexuality and again it's an excellent book but I disagree with him on this point here he's sort of representative that this has a pretty good following pretty solid following now the basis of of this idea and its problems let's just give a quick overview if you go to Genesis 9 24 you read this you read a phrase to the effect that Noah saw quote what his son had done to him unquote now that suggests that I would agree with this point that suggests that we have some crime committed here that goes well beyond just accidentally seeing nakedness in other words it goes well beyond voyeurism so proponents of this will say look something was done to Noah here it's not just seeing the nakedness and they would sort of think logically and say well what could be done to Noah here that you know would be so bad and then you know eventually they're going to get to you know a sexual violation and you say well how do they get there well here's how you get there the phrase that describes what Ham does or what he did and that the phrase is this quote he saw the nakedness of his father unquote is an idiomatic expression for sexual intercourse now that's true and we'll talk about what that means and how we know that that's the case in a moment but just just let's stick with what this view says so we have an idiom here saw the nakedness of his father is an idiom for sexual intercourse and so the views argues that okay since we know this and something was done to know we do the math we put the two things together and Ham sexually abuses his father we have paternal incest as you're going to find out again the view of the the the two authors the article that I'm you know posted in the in the folder in my own view because I think they're right I think it's very persuasive what they're going to argue I think this view gets the idiom um somewhat correct but then misapplies it if we go with the homosexual violation here it doesn't explain again why canan is cursed why isn't ham cursed if ham sexually violates his father why isn't ham the one that's in trouble why isn't ham the one that's cursed when he saw what his son had done to him I mean Noah knows who did what but then he doesn't curse ham he curses canan ham is never cursed in the passage and let me just pause there I mean I in part of my distance ed teaching I have an assignment that's based on this passage and I'm amazed at how many students just don't know that last point they assume that ham is the one that gets cursed he's not read the passage canan is the one that gets cursed not ham and if ham is sexually violating his father that just doesn't really sound reasonable let's just be honest so we have a problem here even though that again this is a popular view we have a problem here on why canan gets cursed and ham nothing is done to him you know in in the passage I would suggest again there's a better view to understand this that actually extends from the biblical data and the paternal incest view gets part of this right but then again this misapplies what what is being seen in the text so here we go let's just start with the idea of of the the Hebrew idiom in this phrase this seeing the nakedness of his father for those of you who may not know or may not want to admit you know you might not be familiar with what an idiom is so what's an idiom an idiom is an expression let me give you an example in English if I say the issue of abortion is a hot potato you're never going to understand what I mean by doing word studies on the words hot and potato okay you could you know you can have everything that Mike's ever said and written and concord it and search it for the words hot and potato and you're never going to understand what I mean by that expression so an idiom is something it's an expression that sort of has to be known within a cultural context if you combine the words hot and potato in that sentence the issue of abortion is a hot potato and you're familiar with the cultural context how that phrase how that combination gets used then you're going to be able to understand and I'm sure everyone in the audience does understand that when I say the issue of abortion is a hot potato what I mean is that the issue of abortion is really explosively controversial okay you know that not because you've studied the words hot and potato you know that because you're part of the culture you're part of the group that would just know what that expression means by experience okay so an idiom is an expression now what we have in genesis nine is indeed a Hebrew idiom to see the Hebrew word is to see the nakedness the Hebrew there is to see the nakedness of someone is idiomatic it's an it's an expression for sexual intercourse now how do we know that well if we go to Leviticus 2017 we read this if a man takes his sister a daughter of his father or a daughter of his mother and sees her nakedness and she sees his nakedness it is a disgrace and they shall be cut off in the sight of the children of their people he has uncovered his sister's nakedness and he shall bear his iniquity now the key here is to understand that uncovering nakedness which describes the act of removing you know clothing removing you know clothing from the genital area for the purpose of sex so you to understand that uncovering nakedness and seeing nakedness are equated in this passage did you notice that we have the idiom to see the nakedness of sees her nakedness and that's parallel to uncovering nakedness the same expression or the similar expression but with two different verbs see and uncover now that's important because if you actually searched for the phrase uncovering nakedness and there the Hebrew word is gala uncover you're going to find passages that very clearly and explicitly show that uncovering nakedness is a reference to sexual intercourse and once you discern that then you go back to Leviticus 2017 and say aha well uncovering nakedness is to have sex and that's in parallel with seeing nakedness and that must also mean to have sexual relations so this is what we're dealing with but let's just back up a little bit Leviticus 18 listen to the uncovering nakedness terminology this is the section in Leviticus where we are we have essentially the holiness code on sexual morality or immorality let's start in verse 6 Leviticus 18 none of you shall approach any one of his close relatives to uncover nakedness I am the lord you shall not uncover the nakedness of your father which is the nakedness of your mother she is your mother you shall not uncover her nakedness you shall not uncover the nakedness of your father's wife it is your father's nakedness you shall not uncover the nakedness of your sister your father's daughter or your mother's daughter whether brought up in the family or in another home you shall not uncover the nakedness of your son's daughter, or of your daughter's daughter. For their nakedness is your own nakedness. You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father's wife's daughter, brought up in your father's family, since she is your sister. You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father's sister, she is your father's relative. You shall not uncover the nakedness of your mother's sister, for she is your mother's relative. You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father's brother. That is, you shall not approach his wife. She is your aunt. Verse 15, you shall not uncover the nakedness of your daughter in law. She is your son's wife. You shall not uncover her nakedness. You shall not uncover the nakedness of your brother's wife. It is your brother's nakedness. You shall not uncover the nakedness of a woman and of her daughter. And you shall not take her son's daughter or her daughter's daughter to uncover her nakedness. They are relatives. It is depravity. And you shall not take a woman as a rival wife to your sister. Uncovering her nakedness while her sister is still alive. Now, this idiomatic expression to uncovered nakedness also occurs in Ezekiel 16. We spent a good deal of time there. Again, a very sexually explicit passage. But in Ezekiel 16, verse 36 and verse 37, we read this. Let's go back to verse 35. Therefore, O prostitute, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God, because your lust was poured out and your nakedness uncovered in your whorings with your lovers and with all your abominable idols and because of the blood of your children that you gave to them. Therefore, behold, I will gather all your lovers with whom you took pleasure, all those who you loved and all those you hated. I will gather them against you from every side and will uncover your nakedness to them that they may see all your nakedness. Again, in the context of Ezekiel 16, again, very sexual in orientation. Ezekiel 2210 has the same idea. Let's just go there. Again, we're focused on the phrase uncover nakedness. Verse 10, in you men uncover their father's nakedness. In you, they're speaking to the city here. In you, they violate women who are unclean there at menstrual impurity. Again, it's a reference to sexual intercourse with people you shouldn't be having sex with. Ezekiel 23, next chapter. We'll start in verse 10 here. Ezekiel 2310. The Assyrians, again, talking about Jerusalem, you know, Judah's relationships with the Assyrians. These Assyrians uncovered her nakedness. They seized her sons and her daughters. And as for her, they killed her with a sword. And she became a byword among women when judgment had been executed on her. Her sister Aholeba saw this, and she became more corrupt than her sister in her lust and in her whoring, which was worse than that of her sister. Again, very clear sexual context. You go down to verse 18. When she carried on her whoring so openly and flaunted her nakedness, I turned in disgust from her as I had in disgust from her sister. Verse 29. Again, the sexual context is very clear. They shall deal with you in hatred. Again, the people that the Lord is going to bring up against the city. And take away all the fruit of your labor and leave you naked and bare. And the nakedness of your whoring shall be uncovered. So again, the context is pretty clear. Uncovering nakedness is clearly, if you go back to Leviticus 18, it's just over and over and over again with forbidden sexual relationships. Uncovering nakedness is clearly an idiomatic expression for to have sex with. And since that phrase, that idiom is used in parallel in Leviticus 2017 with to see nakedness, scholars, and again, and I would conclude, would say this, that both of them are idiomatic expressions for the same thing. To see someone's nakedness is the same as to uncover someone's nakedness. They're both a reference to have sex with. Now to this point, this is the argument of the paternal incest view, the homosexual violation view, because people will go to Genesis nine. Again, let's go back to our passage. And they'll say, look, look what Ham did was he saw the nakedness of his father. And since we know that see the nakedness of is a euphemism for have sex with he had sex with his father. This is a homosexual violation. It's paternal incest. But that misses something in Leviticus 18. Let me read it again. Okay, and you're going to see what we're tracking on here. We do not have homosexual intercourse here. We have heterosexual intercourse going on. So I'll give you that heads up. I'll listen to Leviticus 18. Again, verse six. None of you shall approach any one of his close relatives to uncovered nakedness. I am the Lord. You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father, which is the nakedness of your mother. She is your mother. You shall not uncover her nakedness. You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father's wife. I catch this. It is your father's nakedness. Verse 10, we'll skip down. You shall not uncover the nakedness of your son's daughter or your daughter's daughter for their nakedness is your own nakedness. Verse 14, you shall not uncover the nakedness of your father's brother. That is, you shall not approach his wife. She is your aunt. Verse 16, you shall not uncover the nakedness of your brother's wife. It is your brother's nakedness. What this phrase means to uncover the nakedness of your father, it actually means don't mess with his wife. Okay. Do not uncover the nakedness of your father, which is the nakedness of your mother. See, in Old Testament, against Semitic patriarchal culture, the nakedness of a man was defined as the woman that belongs to him. So that's why Leviticus has this wording. To us, it sounds very confusing, but if you understand the idiom, it's not. Do not uncover the nakedness of your father, which is the nakedness of your mother. She's your mother. Okay. Don't uncover the nakedness of your father's wife. Why? Why shouldn't I uncover the nakedness of my father's wife? Because it's your father's nakedness. Well, I thought it was my father's wife. Oh, that's right. It is because to uncover a man's nakedness means to have sex with the woman who belongs to him. That's what's missing in this whole discussion. It's very clear that to see nakedness and to uncover nakedness are both idioms for sexual intercourse, but then people will take that and go back to Genesis 9 and they'll say, look, see nakedness. That means have sex with and look at what Ham does. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father. Again, the voyeurs say, well, he's just looking at Noah's naked body, but the paternal incest, you will say, look, he saw the nakedness of his father. He had sex with his father. No, what it actually means, if you go back to Leviticus, to see the nakedness of your father or to see the nakedness of any particular man, your brother, is to take that man's woman, that take that man's wife sexually. What we have in Genesis 9 is not paternal incest. What we have in Genesis 9 is maternal incest. This idiom, in fact, either one, to see nakedness or uncover nakedness, is never used in the passages that condemn homosexuality. It's not an idiom that's used for homosexual violation or intercourse. There you have terms like to lie with another man. This idiom to uncover a man's nakedness is saying, do not have sex with the woman who belongs to that man. Don't do that. Again, if you don't know that, if you don't see that, then you're going to get a homosexual violation in Genesis 9 where what you should be getting is maternal incest. Ham had sex with Noah's wife. Ham had sex with his own mother. That's the problem. That is the crime. Let's just think about the story. Shem and Japheth walk. Ham is like, hey, guess what I just did? All right, sex with mom. It's sex with our father's mother or our father's wife, our father's woman. Well, Noah is, of course, the patriarchal head of the family, and we're going to talk about the meaning of what Ham does. But he goes out and he tells his brothers, what do the brothers do? They walk backwards and cover their father's nakedness, which, again, I'm suggesting, and the idiom says, is their mother. They go in and they refuse to look at her naked body, for sure, because they're backwards, but they cover it. Why do they do it this way? Why do they do what they do and do it this way? The account telegraphs a very commendable gesture. The gesture distances them from any sense of either mutual lust or approval of what Ham had done. It puts a significant barrier between them. It's going to cast them as the good guys here. You say, well, what about verses 20 and 21? It says, Noah began to be a man of the soil and he planted a vineyard. He drank of the wine and became drunk and lay uncovered in his tent. Doesn't his tent suggest that Ham had sex with his father? You know, Ham goes into Noah's tent. The assumption is Noah's the only one there to have sex with. Well, actually not. Let's think, just think with me. There's going to be a textual issue here, but just think with me logically here. Noah's wife could have been in Noah's tent. If it is Noah's tent, okay, they could have had sex as a couple, then Ham comes in and does what he does to his mom. Or maybe Noah got drunk, passed out, and Ham comes in there and ceases the opportunity. Noah can't defend his wife, Ham's mom. Any of those scenarios could account for the his tent terminology, but there's actually a textual issue here. In Hebrew, what gets translated his tent here is oholo. It should be translated her tent because we have the noun ohel with a suffix, third feminine singular suffix, which is the H, oholo. If you can read Hebrew, you know, we'll reproduce this in the transcript or at least transliterate it. This is a third feminine singular suffix on the noun. It should be translated her tent. The Mazarets actually suggest that a quote correction here, a third masculine singular suffix would be the letter vav instead of the letter hey, that's actually here in the text. So that's where scholars will come across this, oh, the Mazarets thought it should be his tent. So that's what we're going to translate even though in the text it's really her tent. Well, I'm suggesting that hey, let's just stick with the text as we have it written here. Ham finds them in her tent. So if Noah was in there, all these scenarios I just described apply as well. It doesn't really matter whose tent it is at the end of the day because if Noah is passed out or incapacitated or whatever, Ham is going to be taking advantage of his mother. So the reference to Noah's tent really doesn't do anything because, hang on, logically it doesn't matter and it actually should be translated her tent anyway. Proof of this, again, other than grammar and the grammar is what it is or the morphology is what it is. It is a third feminine singular ending. It's Genesis 2467. Here's how the English has it. This is Isaac and Rebecca's story. Then Isaac brought her, Rebecca, in the story, into the tent of Sarah, his mother, and took Rebecca and she became his wife and he loved her. So Isaac was comforted after his mother's death. Now, in Hebrew, here's what we actually have literally. We have, again, for those who know Hebrew, it's Vayavieha, Yitzchak, Haohelah. Literally it is Ed He brought, and Isaac brought, and again, Rebecca is the one in context, and Isaac brought her into her tent, into her tent, the tent of Sarah, his mother. The point is, look, Sarah was dead and Isaac apparently is living in her tent, or at least her part of the bigger patriarchal tent complex there. He brings Rebecca home and he takes her into her tent, into his mother's tent, her mother's old tent space, her old living space, and that's where they're going to live. We have the same form, the Ohel. Ohel is the Hebrew word for tent, and then the third feminine singular suffix on it, and it's very clearly a reference to a woman's tent here in Genesis 2467. It's Sarah's old tent, but of course she's now deceased. So what we have in Genesis 9, again, to summarize, and then we're going to move on to talk about what the meaning of all this is, is him, I would suggest, goes to his mother's tent, or again, we don't know how the tent structure was set up. If you're nomadic and patriarchal, you have a big tent and it's divided into compartments, which incidentally is the meaning of, in my house are many mansions. That's part of this whole kind of thing. You live with your parents, just different parts of the complex here. He goes into his mother's living space and apparently Noah's there. Maybe he and his wife had sex. They were both drinking wine. Maybe that was preparatory to that, or maybe Noah passed out or whatever, we don't know. Noah's incapacitated, though, when Ham shows up and Ham violates his mother. Okay, we have maternal incest. That is the crime. Now you ask, well, how does that explain the cursing of Canaan? It actually does. The maternal incest view is the only view that actually has a coherent explanation for the cursing of Canaan instead of Ham. You say, how? It goes this way. Canaan was the product of the incestuous union. The passage tells us twice, sort of proleptically telegraphs the fact that, quote, Ham was the father of Canaan. It's Genesis, you know, in verses 18 and 22 there, Genesis 9. By cursing Canaan, Noah telegraphed to everyone that Canaan would not become the inheritor of family leadership. He was excluded because his birth was illegitimate and the result of Ham's attempt to usurp his own position as leader of the family. Noah's angry because Ham is to use biblical or King James language here. Ham is raising up competitive seed through his father's wife with the intent of taking control of the family and then passing it on to his illegitimate son, Canaan. Now there is strong scriptural precedent and ancient Near Eastern precedent, but we're going to stick to the scriptural precedent for this idea. Reuben did this with Bilhah in Genesis 35, 22, Genesis 49, 3, and 4, but the even better examples are when you get to the monarchy because then you have a real issue of succession. So in 2 Samuel 12, 8, we have an account where David, to legitimize his position, he took Saul's wives and concubines. God, this is right after the Bathsheba thing. I'll just go back up to verse 7 where Nathan is scolding David. After his little parable about the U Lamb, Nathan said to David in verse 7, you are the man. Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, I anointed you king over Israel. I delivered you out of the hand of Saul. I gave you your master's house and your master's wives into your arms and gave you the house of Israel and of Judah. And if this were too little, I would add to you as much more. He's given it to David here. Basically saying, look, God saying, through the prophet, I made you king. I made you king. And this was part in the culture. This is part of the culture. This is how you solidify your dynasty. You have sexual relations with the competitor, with their wives and concubines. This is what you do. Now, this was done to David later on by Absalom. And there's an infamous scene in 2 Samuel 16 in verses 20 through 23. This is the scene, kind of a notorious scene in the Old Testament where Absalom publicly does this to David's wives and concubines. I'll just read the passage. Then Absalom said to Ahithophel, give your counsel, what shall we do? Ahithophel said to Absalom, go into your father's concubines, whom he has left to keep the house. And all Israel will hear that you have made yourself a stench to your father and the hands of all who are with you will be strengthened. So they pitched a tent for Absalom on the roof and Absalom went into his father's concubines in the sight of all Israel. Again, he does this because he's usurping David as king. He's usurping David's office. Later in 2 Kings 2, David has this happen to him again, or almost. Remember when David was old, they gave him a concubine named Avishag to keep him warm because he was old, and she sleeps with the king. Adonijah, when David is about to die, and there's a question of succession, some of course are engineered to circumstances where Solomon becomes the next king. But Adonijah, another son, had a serious backing in 2 Kings 2. And in verses 13 through 25, Adonijah tries to take David's concubine sexually. Again, this is what you do to solidify this dynastic transition. This is again as part of Israelite culture, part of patriarchal culture before that. And so again, this is something that when we read Genesis 9, Ham by doing this is laying claim to the leadership of the family. And he is going to have this particular son, again in this view, take over. And Noah says, forget it. I'm going to exclude Canaan. He is going to be a servant to all of the brothers. So he is cursed. This is why Canaan gets cursed. It is a second-handed punishment of Ham, but it's a really devastating one because Canaan is going to outlive Ham. That's why Canaan becomes the target because he is illegitimate. Now, let me read a little bit from Bergsmann and Hans' article on this point. They say, the objection has been raised that verses 24 and 25 imply that Noah pronounced the curse on Canaan immediately. Again, it feels like a chronological disconnect, like Noah sees what happened and he says, I'm going to curse Canaan. Well, the kid hadn't even been born. They don't even know that Noah's wife is pregnant. So it feels a little odd and this is the objection. So the objection is raised that verses 24 and 25 imply that Noah pronounced the curse on Canaan immediately. Therefore, the nine months necessary for him to be born, according to the maternal incest theory, that just doesn't sound right. But the narrator may have simply compressed the chronology at this point, as he does elsewhere. After all, Genesis 532, which reads, after Noah was 500 years old, Noah became the father of Shemham and Japheth. Should not be taken to mean that Noah's wife bore triplets shortly after his 500th birthday. In other words, you have to read that into it. So sometime after Noah was 500 years old, he has three boys. There's no hint in the text that their triplets is the point. So you can have these kind of comments, especially in Genesis, to be honest with you, in narrating family history. It doesn't include all the events and be a totally exhaustive chronology of events. That's their point here. So they're saying, look, this isn't really a good objection to the maternal incest idea, this comment about, you know, the supposition is probably a better way to say it. The supposition that Noah wakes up and just starts cursing the kid. He doesn't even know she's pregnant yet. It's just an added detail, again, that because of what happened here, Canaan is going to get cursed. Now, to wrap up the episode, if you want more, you know, like, sort of, you know, objections and their answers, you know, to this kind of thing, you can go read the article. The maternal incest view, I would say this, it's not a perfect argument. In other words, it's not going to answer like everything with the kind of precision that you would wish for. But personally, I think that this view, again, this option for understanding what happens between Noah and Ham and Canaan in Genesis 9, I think this view is far and away, the most coherent understanding of the sin of Ham and the cursing of Canaan. Frankly, none of the other traditional views has the same explanatory power, especially when it comes to why Canaan is the target. So I think the maternal incest view is the best view. Again, I'm giving you the article if you want to read it, and they do a good job interacting with the other views. So I've distilled the information here, but the key to it is to recognize the idiom, to see nakedness and to uncover nakedness. They're the same idiom, or they're different idioms, almost the same, but they're different idioms, very similar idioms for the same idea to have sex with. And if you actually go to where uncovered nakedness is most often and most thoroughly used in the biblical text, you find out it's not used of a homosexual violation or a homosexual relationship. It's consistently the idea that to see or uncover your father's nakedness, that's the language of Genesis 9, Ham saw the nakedness of his father, that this language actually refers to having sexual relations with the woman who belongs to that particular man, in this case, the father. And if you see that and you recognize it, this is far and away, I think the best view because it honors the Hebrew idiom and it is able to explain why Canaan is the target of Noah's anger. Mike, what can you tell us about this passage or the sin of Ham being used to promote slavery? Yeah, it was part of sort of a matrix of ideas, a complex of ideas used in Europe and of course America to justify targeting the Negro race, the Hamidic races and then subjugate them to slavery. Of course, the real hard part of that is Ham isn't cursed. He is not cursed in the passage. For anyone, there are lots of reasons why that justification of slavery is ridiculous and frankly, other biblical arguments to justify slavery are pretty dumb and some of them, I'll just be bluntly honest, some of them depend on truly bad exegesis. I have a whole lecture that I call biblical racism. I gave this in Missouri over a year ago when we went for an unseen realm event plus there were other topics that people wanted to hear about and this is one of them and it derives from the whole problem of in the age of discovery in Europe. I'll try to keep this really short but in the age of discovery in Europe when Europeans were crossing the Atlantic and going to other parts of the world, they were finding humans in lands that aren't mentioned in the Bible. Like, hey, what is this place? It's not part of what the Bible says the world is, the nations of the world in Genesis 10 and again, they were dark skinned, darker than the white Europeans and so to answer, people thought they were answering this whole problem of how do we get human beings in other parts of the world that aren't in the Bible. They came up with theories about other races besides the Adamic race. There was co-atomism, other humans beside alongside Adam, other humans before Adam. That was part of answering the long ages. This time in history, the 1500s, the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, there's all sorts of things going on in the age of discovery. You're discovering new lands, human beings in these new lands, you're discovering ancient texts and having them deciphered, Sanskrit, Ceneiform, Egyptian, all the stuff that have alternative histories, alternative stories of human origins. You have geology is becoming a science at this point, talking about the earth being millions of years old, you have Darwin in the mid-19th century. You have a bunch of forces that are converging and out of that came some really, truly bad Bible interpretation and the racial issue is one component of that. This passage in Genesis 9 was used as part of the alternate Adamic humanity answer to how we get these other people. Surely the Europeans are the race that is the most close to Adam because we inherited the Bible, we inherited the Judeo-Christian worldview, we inherited really what used to be the Roman Empire, which was Christianized. All these non sequitur leaps of logic concatenate together into racial theory. People who went to Genesis 9 said, oh, Ham, where did his ancestor, down in there in Africa? Well, look, Ham was just awful and of course, assuming, this sounds unbelievable, but people just don't read the text. They assume that Ham, it's very clear he committed a crime, but then they talked about the fact that Ham is cursed and he deserves to be in bondage and slavery. Well, Ham never gets cursed in the passage, but it doesn't matter and it didn't matter. They had their theories and that was good enough. They had what they thought were their biblical answers to these issues and don't mess with me. I have the answer now. I get to keep the integrity of the Bible because we've got to find all this other stuff in the Bible or else we have to just junk the Bible. We've got to come up with answers for all the questions that these new discoveries are throwing at us and so they did terrible Bible interpretation. This is where the lost tribes of Israel stuff is born in the same, again, the hotbed of ideas. It's just truly awful in all sorts of ways, not only intellectually nonsensical, but we all know where the racial thing, the terrible stuff that created. Yeah, this gets used a lot. There are whole books on how this passage, Genesis 9, was used to justify this. Some will also say, Cain, this whole thing about the mark of Cain, well, that must have been blackness. Really? Okay, sounds good to be. Let's go with that. He's marked and cursed and that justifies slavery too. Can you get some truly bad Bible interpretation? Bible interpretation actually matters, folks. It has mattered in the history of Western civilization. The slavery issue, unfortunately, is probably exhibit A on how tragic ideas can extend from bad Bible interpretation. Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous to justify slavery with that. Yeah, but to try to be fair, people came up with, again, just awful ideas, ridiculous interpretations that have no basis in the reality of the text, taken in its own context. But many of them, they weren't motivated by hate. I mean, there were racial hate mongers that seized upon these things and then used them to justify slavery. But a lot of other people thought that they had to go this route to keep their faith, to keep, we got to find this stuff in the Bible somewhere. We got to interpret the Bible somehow to account for this. Otherwise, we can't look at it as true. For many people, it wasn't a question of, oh, I hate blacks. Let's go put them in bondage. No. The question was, well, okay, our leadership, our pastors, our scholars are telling us, this is how we need to read our Bible here. The Bible's still correct. That's just unfortunate if you're one of these lesser races, God be with you. It was that kind of thing. It's sort of a passive and then a more active hate thing going on. It wasn't all the same thing. It's just unfortunate. It's just unfortunate. It's unconscionable at the end of the day. It's history. This is the path. These are the paths that you go. We can lay a lot of the slavery issue at the feet of people doing bad Bible interpretation. That's just a demonstrable fact is uncomfortable to some that it might be. That's true. It's true. Mike, 1,000 years from now, when people are listening to this podcast, how are they going to interpret when I say that the show is uncovering the Bible's nakedness? How are they going to hot potato that one? Maybe there'll be more biographical information about you on the Internet. Then they'll just read that and say, okay, we understand now. Basically, we've learned two things here. We have a new slogan uncovering the Bible's nakedness. Didn't we just say something about doing bad stuff with the Bible? Yeah, and the code word is hot potato. Yeah, we're just going to ignore that. Yeah, anytime I say something to say hot potato, that's our new word. All right, now we're our new little, I don't know, is meme the right word there? I don't know. I don't know, but if I get out of line, just say hot potato, and then let the guys translate that 1,000 years from now, so they can figure it out. Let them deal with that. That's right. All right, Mike, well, next week we're going to do another Q&A. And then with that, I just want to thank everybody for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. God bless. Thanks for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit www.nakedbibleblog.com. To learn more about Dr. Heizer's other websites and blogs, go to www.brmsh.com.