GENESIS 9, or, "Noah gets tanked"

God reiterates his promise not to flood the world again, Noah gets drunk and naked in front of his three sons. Things get awkward.

Okay, there's a lot of ground to cover in this chapter so I'm going to divide things up into four handy categories...

1) God officially endorses capital punishment
"Whoever sheds the blood of man,
by man shall his blood be shed;
for in the image of God
has God made man."

2) God gives the first rule of eating kosher
"Everything that lives and moves will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything. But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it."
Because of this passage, kosher meat must be thoroughly removed of blood using one of several methods such as soaking and salting, or broiling. This means that you won't catch an orthodox Jew ordering his steak rare.

3) Noah curses Ham (his child, not the meat)
Noah plants a vineyard and one night he gets drunk off his own wine and lays naked in his tent. A similar thing happened to me in college. His son Ham comes in and gets a mental picture that no one wants stuck in their head. He goes outside to tell his two brothers Japeth and Shem what he saw, and the two brothers cover Noah up without looking at his naked body.

As if seeing his drunk father naked wasn't bad enough, Noah then wakes up (probably with a wiked hangover) and curses Ham, saying his son Canaan will be a slave for Shem and Japeth. Kind of a raw deal in my opinion.

Like the "Mark of Cain" the "Curse of Ham" has also been used to justify racism and slavery. Africans were traditionally thought to be descendants of Canaan, and so it makes it okay for white people (descendants of Shem and Japeth of course) to enslave them.

Also, Wikipedia tells us that "Some Biblical scholars see the "curse of Ham" story as an early Hebrew rationalization for Israel's conquest and enslavement of the Canaanites, who were presumed to descend from Canaan."

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about Canaan: "[Canaan] is an ancient term for a region approximating to present-day Israel and the West Bank and Gaza, plus adjoining coastal lands and parts of Lebanon and Syria."

4) My Thoughts
Did you know that Noah's story ended with him getting drunk, naked, and then cursing his son for no good reason? Neither did I. It's funny how some parts of the Bible have become so ingrained in our cultural consciousness, while others have become mostly forgotten. Shouldn't each chapter in the Bible carry roughly equal weight in the minds of its believers? And if not, how do we determine which parts are more worthy of our attention than others?

High Culture References to Gen 9: Giovanni Bellini's "The Drunkeness of Noah"