Noah’s Vintner Tale: Divine Literature in Human Language

One of the more puzzling narratives of the book of Genesis is what we might call Noah’s Vintner Tale:

These are the sons of Noah, who went forth from the ark: Shem, Ham, and Yafet; and Ham was the father of Canaan. These three were the sons of Noah, and from them the whole earth spread out. Noah, ish ha’adamah, a man of the soil, began and planted a vineyard. He drank of the wine and became drunk, and he lay uncovered within his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father’s nakedness and told his two brothers outside. Shem and Yafet took a garment, laid it across both their shoulders and walked backward, and covered their father’s nakedness; their faces were turned away, so they did not see him. When Noah awoke from his wine and realized what his youngest son had done to him, he said: “Cursed be Canaan; he shall be the lowest of servants to his brothers.” He also said: “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem; and may Canaan be their servant. May God extend Yafet’s territory; may Yafet dwell in the tents of Shem, and may Canaan be the slave of Yafet.”(Gen. 9:18-27). Here is Noah, the individual who walked with God, who was chosen to repopulate the world after the Flood. How could this man end up drunk and naked in his tent, abused by his son Ham? And why would he take out his anger on his grandson Canaan, who apparently had played no role in the abuse? Centuries of commentators have asked and discussed these and related questions. We are told upfront that Noah, ish ha’adamah, a man of the soil, began and planted a vineyard (Gen. 9:20). Rashi (Gen. 9:20) states that it was wrong to plant a vineyard first, and not crops like wheat, that are more useful. Vineyards, explains Ramban (9:20), as opposed to vines, are designed to produce large quantities of grapes necessary to make wine. It is Noah who makes this first decision, and he is responsible for what follows. These rabbinic commentaries indicate that we are reading a moral tale of sorts. The Torah is not clear in describing Ham’s action. We are told that he saw his father’s nakedness [ervat aviv] (Gen. 9:21). The term gilui ervah, as used throughout Leviticus 18, denotes forbidden sexual acts: No one shall come close to any close relative ligalot erva (ev. 18:6). Based on the use of the same term here, TB Sanhedrin 70a understands that something of a sexual nature occurred between Ham and Noah, with two opinions as to exactly what that was, either that Ham castrated Noah or that he had sexual relations with him. Rabbi Yaaqov Medan suggests¹ that the phrase he saw his father’s nakedness [ervat aviv] means that Ham had sexual relations with father’s wife (that is, Ham’s mother). However, even seeing one’s father naked for voyeuristic curiosity is forbidden, as one cannot even enter the bathhouse with him (Shulhan Arukh, Even HaEzer 223:6, Rema). For that reason, Shem and Yafet took a garment, laid it across both their shoulders and walked backward, and covered their father’s nakedness; their faces were turned away, so they did not see him (Gen. 9:23).

According to Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik,² Ham’s sin was that when he saw his father exposed in his tent, he did not act to protect his father’s dignity. Instead, he rushed outside to tell his brothers. When Noah awoke and understood what had happened, he pronounced a curse – not because of the act itself, but because of what it revealed about Ham’s character. Noah understood that Ham sought to expose his father’s flaws, to strip away his moral stature in the eyes of others. Ham rejoiced. He spread the story eagerly, as if to say, “Come and see –this is the one we thought was righteous.” This is not a love of truth, but a hunger to demean. It is the resentment of one who cannot bear the existence of moral greatness. Such an attitude is worthy of a curse. There is no denying Noah’s failure, continues Rabbi Soloveitchik, but Shem and Yafet refused to turn it into a spectacle. They covered his nakedness, both physically and morally. No human being is perfect, they understood. Even the righteous can fail. Noah’s drunkenness was a moment of human weakness, nothing more. After surviving the Flood and carrying the responsibility of all life while rebuilding the world from ruin, Noah planted the first vineyard, and drank too much. He erred. The Torah does not excuse this nor does it condemn it outright. But that moment should not erase his being the chosen remnant to continue humanity. The question remains, why was Canaan cursed and not Ham? The standard rabbinic answer is that of Rabbi Yehuda who explains that God had already blessed Ham, and it was not fitting to curse one whom God has blessed. Therefore, Noah cursed his son Canaan (Bereshit Rabba 37:6; TB Sanhedrin 70a, Tosafot s.v. killelo b’revi’i). Abarbanel (in answers to his questions in chapter 9) says that Noah foresaw all that was destined to happen to the nation of Canaan – its enslavement, its subjugation, and its expulsion from the land. Therefore, he cursed the future nation of Canaan. The significance of Noah’s Vintner Tale as a coda to the Torah’s Flood Story becomes more obvious when we appreciate it as part of the Torah’s anti-pagan polemic. We are so removed from pagan society that we forget that one of the Bible’s original goals was to advance a polemic against the pagan worldview that permeated Bronze Age Canaan, a worldview which Early Israelites had encountered and to some extent were engaged. In doing so, the Bible uses lashon benei adam, divine literature in human language. R. Yoseph ibn Kaspi (1280-1345) extended this principle, using it to explain the use of anthropomorphisms in the Bible. “In its Kaspian adaptation, the rabbinic dictum may then be paraphrased as follows: ‘The Torah expressed things as they were believed or perceived or practiced by the multitude and not as they were in actuality.’”³ It sometimes adopts not only the vocabulary, but also the well-known literature of the period to convey the unique Jewish messages about morality and the individual’s responsibility. The most famous of these polemics is perhaps the use of the Gilgamesh Epic as a foil against which the Israelite values could be presented.⁴ The motif of a catastrophic flood was widespread in the ancient Near East. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Utnapishtim survives a divinely-sent flood after being warned by the god Ea, who instructs him to build a boat. Human morality is almost incidental: survival is granted to Utnapishtim because of divine favor, not because of ethical conduct. The emphasis is on divine whim, caprice, or ritualistic cosmic order rather than on human ethical behavior.

Genesis 6–9 adopts the broad plot of the Flood story – divine destruction of humanity, a chosen survivor, a boat, and repopulation – but immediately diverges in ethics and theological intent. Noah is explicitly described as righteous, blameless among his contemporaries (Gen. 6:9). Noah’s survival is directly linked to his moral character. The Torah signals that ethical integrity, not merely divine whim, is the condition for salvation. This is subversive adaptation—taking a story or motif from an opposing culture and intentionally reworking it to overturn its original meaning or message. Early Israelites would have quickly recognized the polemic nature of the biblical story, appreciating the pagan version with which they were aware as a foil. Future generations can appreciate the story of Noah’s Flood in its own right, aided by the classic rabbinic commentaries. The popular pagan literary piece used as a foil to Noah’s Vintner Tale was likely “The Drunkenness of El” (KTU 1.114), a Ugaritic ritual– incantation text from the Late Bronze Age (13th century BCE). Variant oral versions had spread through the region by the time the Early Israelites entered Canaan, and these Early Israelites were well acquainted with their surrounding culture. It is probable that they knew this story long before they heard the story of Noah. This short pagan mythic text depicts the high god El, here called Ilu, becoming excessively drunk at a banquet, and involves his children, Takamuna and Sunama. The gods ate and drank, they drank wine to satiety, new wine to drunkenness. … Ilu took his seat as [ Ilu sat in his club. He drank [wine] to satiety, new wine to drunkenness. Ilu (then) went to his house proceeded to his mansion; Takamuna and Sunama supported him but Habay came across him, the one with horns and a tail.

He fouled himself with his excrement and his urine. Ilu fell down like a dead one Ilu, like those going down in the Earth. ‘Anatu and ‘Attartu went tracking down [in the countryside], holy desert in the [heights some remedies] [——] ‘Anatu and ‘Attartu [found them] and with them made him come back to his || acquaintances, on applying remedy, he woke up.⁵ This is a vignette of a wine party of the gods. Its skeleton outline seems not very different from that of the Noah incident. In both, the groups’ senior personality gets drunk and his two sons take him home. In both cases there is another person involved, a negative character. But put flesh on the skeleton and we see two very different ethical foundations. The pagans do not seem troubled about how their gods behave; they probably have seen many a drunk at their parties, and it must have been amusing to be told that gods themselves act similarly. The scatological accosting by the demonic Habay was surely crude and vulgar, but no one seems to be upset about it. El suffers temporary humiliation, but nothing enduring happens. There is no judgment of moral failure, curse, or punishment. Early Israelites would be telling each other a very different story. Noah was not at a party where he was served too much wine, nor did he simply fall asleep drunk. He was abused in some manner by his own child, and he brought it on himself, getting drunk on the wine of the vineyards he had planted! His two sons did not simply walk their drunk father home; they walked backwards so as not to further shame him, making a moral statement about Ham’s deed. There was a judgment of moral failure, ending with a curse. In Genesis 9:18, the text makes a simple genealogical statement that Noah had a grandson named Canaan. But the Early Israelites entering their land of Canaan would also read it as a remark that Ham was the father of the Canaanite nation in the same way that George Washington would be identified as the Father of the United States. This sets them up to hear the verse saying that the then-current nation of Canaan which they are confronting should be cursed because it acts with the same sexual depravity as did its “founding father.” In a literary piece, it was not necessary to specify what Ham did. Leviticus 18 has a list of possibilities from which to choose. What is important is the underlying message that the Israelites not follow the practices of the land of Canaan to which they are being brought (18:3). The new Israelite community would hear an anti-pagan polemic warning them to avoid the sexual mores of the Canaanite community they were now confronting, The Bible takes a morally empty pagan folk story unrelated to the pagan Gilgamesh epic – there is no mention of El there – and adopts it as a coda to its Flood story with a moral demand for Israelite ethical responsibility. The new human community that Noah was to establish was promised God’s future loyalty, testified by the rainbow in the sky. But there is no guarantee that the new community will live up to its responsibilities. Unlike pagan balladeers who found no moral challenge to be sober and responsible, the Israelites were commanded to take responsibility. Without that ethical commitment, even a generally righteous Noah can wind up drunk and abused in his own tent, they were warned. All this is presented via a subversive adaptation, divine literature in human language.