Genesis 9
So, it wasn't until chapter 9 that wild animals were afraid of man. "Dread fear of you shall come upon all the animals of the earth and all the birds of the air, upon all the creatures that move about on the ground and all the fishes of the sea; into your power they are delivered." (verse 2) I guess this also says that it was at this point that people started eating meat. That makes this carnivore sad. Over a thousand and a half years without meat? Blech.
There it is. "Every creature that is alive shall be yours to eat; I give them all to you as I did the green plants." (verse 3) According to the footnotes, all creatures were vegetarians before the flood. Again I say, yuck.
And God sets his bow in the sky as a promise to never flood the world again.
Towards the end of the chapter, there's the one bit of the flood that never makes it's way into the kids' books. Noah gets out of the ark and plants a vineyard. He then makes wine and gets roaring drunk and passes out nude in his tent. Ham, one of Noah's sons, "saw his father's nakedness" (verse 22) and goes out and tells his brothers about it. Shem and Japheth (his other sons) take a robe and walk backwards to cover their dad without seeing him. Noah wakes up and then curses Canaan, Ham's son. (?!)
Noah lived 350 years after the flood. (So the earth is now 1906 years old.)
Question I've never had answered: Why curse Canaan?
There it is. "Every creature that is alive shall be yours to eat; I give them all to you as I did the green plants." (verse 3) According to the footnotes, all creatures were vegetarians before the flood. Again I say, yuck.
And God sets his bow in the sky as a promise to never flood the world again.
Towards the end of the chapter, there's the one bit of the flood that never makes it's way into the kids' books. Noah gets out of the ark and plants a vineyard. He then makes wine and gets roaring drunk and passes out nude in his tent. Ham, one of Noah's sons, "saw his father's nakedness" (verse 22) and goes out and tells his brothers about it. Shem and Japheth (his other sons) take a robe and walk backwards to cover their dad without seeing him. Noah wakes up and then curses Canaan, Ham's son. (?!)
Noah lived 350 years after the flood. (So the earth is now 1906 years old.)
Question I've never had answered: Why curse Canaan?
posted by Netzach at
5:08 PM
1 Comments:
This is the best explanation I've seen for why Canaan was the one cursed:
"Perhaps Noah cursed Canaan because it is more painful for a father to see his child suffer than it is for a father to suffer himself. The other possible explanation is that Canaan was somehow involved in the incident, thereby bringing Noah's curse upon himself."
It's basically a "we don't know". My thinking is that since Moses was writing this for an audience that would have already been familiar with these stories he left out some details that they would already know. Silly Moses.
I also think it's beneficial to mention that it was Noah who cursed Canaan and not God - so the curse doesn't have to be righteous. It was just the curse of an angry man and we often take our anger out on the wrong people.
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