BREAKFAST BIBLE STUDY

Drunk Noah Caught Naked

Genesis 9:19-29 (NET)

9/28/25

“Christian nationalism is about power, nothing more.” – Christian Pecker

Everybody learns about Noah’s ark in Sunday school, but mostly, the story stops when Noah and his family hop off the ark. I knew the next part of the story because I looked into family curses when I thought I was cursed a few years ago, but I did not understand all of the story. Though harvest started this week, Christian thought he would still have time to refresh his brain about the story. We had a quick breakfast early yesterday morning and came back in the evening after dark for a breakfast Bible study at supper, a day early. The supper was steaks from the meat locker and potatoes dug from the garden.

Because of the nice weather, Grace cooked on the grill, which means leftovers tomorrow for breakfast on the run.

“You wanted to understand why Noah cursed his grandson Canaan?” Christian asked.

“He skips Ham, Canaan’s father, who was the one who did the sin,” I said, “which might be about sex on Noah’s bottom or something, but I’m not sure.”

“Cole,” Grace asked. “You don’t have any logic issues with the genetic bottleneck humanity would have faced, or all animal species fitting on that ark—millions of species packed into a pretty small ship?”

“Um…should I?”

“Do you believe that every living thing today had ancestors who emerged from that ark?” Christian asked.

“Not the fish,” I said. “Plus, maybe some things floated besides the ark…like ducks!”

“You don’t have any issue with the fact that there is not enough water on the earth to flood everything?” Grace asked. “I know you fully understand the water cycle.”

“I know about the Epic of Gilgamesh,” I said. “I know that story was probably written before Noah. That also had a flood. Floods can happen. Ships can float. I know that much. Maybe it was just mostly flooded everywhere that Noah could see.”

“What Grace is getting at is that we believe that Noah was as mythical as Gilgamesh.”

“It’s a good story, though, with the first rainbow and everything,” I said.

“You like a story about an all-loving, all-knowing God committing global genocide because he was disappointed in the very thing he created?” Grace asked.

“Same God who didn’t invent prisms until Noah was on the scene?” Christian said.

“I don’t know. Maybe I should read,” I said. “I just want to do the drunk part. ‘Noah, a man of the soil, began to plant a vineyard. When he drank some of the wine, he got drunk and uncovered himself inside his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father’s nakedness and told his two brothers who were outside. Shem and Japheth took the garment and placed it on their shoulders. Then they walked in backwards and covered up their father’s nakedness. Their faces were turned the other way so they did not see their father’s nakedness.’ I saw Dad naked once. It wasn’t a big deal. I think there may be more to the story. Like sex or something.”

“But the text doesn’t say that,” Christian said. 

I kept reading: “‘When Noah awoke from his drunken stupor he learned what his youngest son had done to him. So he said,’

‘“Cursed be Canaan!

The lowest of slaves

he will be to his brothers.”

‘He also said,

‘“Worthy of praise is the Lord, the God of Shem!

May Canaan be the slave of Shem!

May God enlarge Japheth’s territory and numbers!

May he live in the tents of Shem

and may Canaan be the slave of Japheth!”’

‘After the flood Noah lived 350 years. The entire lifetime of Noah was 950 years, and then he died.’”

“How old was Noah when he inflicted this curse?” Christian asked.

I took out my phone for the calculator and crunched the numbers. “Six hundred!”

“That’s a harsh curse for a wise old man to inflict,” Grace said.

“So why didn’t he just curse Ham?” I said. “What did Canaan do?”

“God blessed Ham,” Christian said. “Maybe Noah couldn’t undo that blessing.”

“Did you know that this passage has been used to justify slavery and racism for thousands of years?” Grace said. “This was taught to justify slavery in the United States, in fact.”

“I don’t like that because it’s not fair,” I said. “Noah was the one who got drunk and naked. He was irresponsible…unless the story is a synonym or allergy for something worse that Ham did to Noah?”

“Synonyms use the word ‘like’ for comparison. People take allergy medicine for allergies. Do you mean a metaphor or allegory?” Grace asked.

“Allegory!” I said. “That’s what I meant!”

“You think euphemistic language was invoked?” Christian asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t speak Euphemistic. I only speak American.”

“You speak English, Cole,” Grace asked.

“English without all the poof-pah sounds in the words is American,” I said.

“A euphemism is a figure speech meant to soften or hide a more scandalous meaning or intent,” Grace said.

“And some countries speak a language like that?” I asked.

“No,” Grace said. “No, just…look up the word, Cole.”

“Euphemism. It starts with U?”

Grace grabbed a pen and wrote the word down for me.

“Maybe Noah cursing Ham’s son Canaan was worse for Ham than if Noah had simply cursed Ham,” Christian said. “What I believe is that this passage was written as an excuse to enslave the Canaanites and other tribes believed to be descendants of Canaan. People make up stories to justify their evil ways…slavery was evil. Unfortunately, the Bible does not condemn the practice.”

“Jesus did,” I said.

“Sometime, not today,” Christian said, “you’ll have to show me where Jesus condemns slavery in the New Testament.”

“That said,” Grace added, “people reading this in ancient times would have seen Ham’s act as terribly disrespectful to his father.”

“What I don’t believe is that Noah was prophetic because I don’t believe Noah existed,” Christian said. “The story is as ridiculous as the tooth fairy. I believe this story was passed down orally from multiple sources, compiled from multiple sources. Scribes eventually merged multiple versions into one text. The author—not Moses—believed that the enemies of Israel deserved slavery. You don’t have to believe that, but I do. One might also argue that the curse, which is written in poetic form, comes from an oral tradition in which Ham doesn’t exist, and Canaan serves as Noah’s son.”

“It makes more sense to curse the person who did the bad thing,” I said.

“Ancient Israelites used Canaan as a justification for hating Canaanites,” Grace said. “Racists have argued that Ham is the father of all Africans.”

“How could he be African-American if he was the father of Canaan?” I asked.

“Just African,” Grace said. “The transatlantic slave trade is still thousands of years away. As far as we know, no Africans were in America during the time of Noah.”

“Hold up. You’re asking how Ham could be African if Canaan, his son, was Semitic and vice versa?” Christian said. “The story is a myth, but some apologists might rationalize that Ham was African and Ham’s wife was Semitic, hence making Canaan Semitic as well.”

“No, Canaan wasn’t Semitic. Semitic means Jewish. Canaan was a Canaanite from the Promised Land,” I said.

“Canaanites are a Semitic people, too, Cole,” Grace said. “Semitic can mean a broad family of languages or can mean the people who speak those languages.”

“Wait, Ham and Canaan were characters made up just for racism?” I asked.

“Stupid, isn’t it?” Grace said.

“All humans came from Africa,” Christian said.

“That’s where Eden was?” I asked. “I thought it was someplace else.”

“Eden never existed,” Christian said. “Noah never existed.”

“Are you sure?”

“No, but the geological record shows no evidence of a worldwide flood,” Christian said. “If it did, a uniform layer of sediment would exist across every continent. That layer does not exist.”

“I just know that this story has slavery and drunkenness and unfair curses,” I said. “Now I get why they don’t teach this part of Noah in Sunday school. They stop with the rainbow and leave out the drunk, naked curses.”

“A wrathful God destroying all but a handful of people and animals is okay for Sunday school,” Grace said, “but drunken nakedness isn’t?”

“Maybe the ark was in a small flood that people thought went everywhere,” I said.

“You read that theory online,” Grace said. “When the glaciers receded, there were floods, but those oral traditions would have had to survive thousands and thousands of years.”

“Did they?”

“We don’t know, Cole,” Grace said. “There are older flood stories than the story of Noah.”

“So…did other people steal those stories from the Bible?” I asked.

“The chronology makes that claim dubious,” Christian said.

“But how did all the animals survive the flood?” I asked.

“There wasn’t a worldwide flood,” Grace said.

“But it could have happened, right?”

“No,” Christian said. 

“How come?”

“Not enough water and a genetic bottleneck,” Christian said. “If the ark were big enough to hold pairs of animals from the millions of species that existed thousands of years ago—even if you claim that the ark only held broad classes of species that eventually diverged into the millions of species that exist today—those populations would have had a difficult time surviving. You would have generations of inbreeding in humans and animals. Inbreeding creates genetic problems. Today, when populations of species shrink to a certain level, they usually end up dying out, even with human intervention. Does that make sense?”

“Maybe if you say it again,” I said.

“Is monoculture good in farming?” Christian asked.

“No.”

“Why?” Grace asked.

“Monoculture means everybody is planting the exact same seeds,” I said. “One disease could wipe out everything. Oh, so wait, if one animal in the pair died, the entire species would die. That was pretty risky of Noah and God.”

“It’s simply an implausible and ugly story, in my opinion,” Grace said.

“The flood is scary,” I said. “The drunken nakedness is wrong. The racist curse is worse. They probably shouldn’t teach any of it in real schools. Bible schools, sure. Real schools, no.”

“Real schools,” Grace said. “If that’s all you got out of our talk this evening, bravo, Cole.”

In state legislatures across the country, Christian fundamentalists are passing laws meant to force the teaching of the Christian Bible in public schools. From the posting of textually inaccurate iterations of the Ten Commandments on the walls of classrooms to the incorporation of the “Trump Bible” across multiple pedagogical disciplines, these laws and mandates are sweeping the reddest parts of this nation.

The height of hypocrisy is banning books in the name of “protecting children” while mandating one particular book rife with numerous acts of sexual violence and scenes of graphic violence and genocide.

Book bans are dangerous. The Bible is worth reading and exists online and in public school libraries across the country, but proponents of mandating its formal teaching in public schools need to know what it actually says.

Some themes in my books below might not be appropriate for children.