Noah Drank in His House and Ham Found the Shame

Noah pushed cuttings into ground that had been the bottom of a sea. Nothing had grown in it for a year. Everyone who might have argued with him about where to put the rows was gone, so he set them where he liked and worked them alone.

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The vines took. He pressed the grapes, poured the new wine into jars, and one evening he filled a cup inside his own four walls and drank it, and filled it again.

He Planted in Ground That Had Been Sea

He had counted the animals in two by two. He had held a boat together over a drowned world for a year and come out the other side. The first thing he did with dry earth was plant a vineyard. No angel came to stop him. No voice came out of anywhere to say wait.

He drank of the wine and he was drunken (Genesis 9:21). He went down on the floor of his tent with his clothes off him. The roof and the walls closed over him, which is what a house is built to do. Stone and timber will cover a body. They cover nothing else once a mouth carries the rest outside.

He had not decided to take the clothes off. A righteous man went down the way the drunk go down, meaning none of it, and afterward he would have to be dressed again by hands.

Ham Looked and Walked Out

Ham found him there on the floor of the tent. He did not put out a hand. He did not turn around. He looked at his father, and then he walked out through the door to where his two brothers were standing and told them what was lying inside.

The telling took a few seconds. It is the whole of what he did, and it was enough. Inside the tent a man was uncovered under his own roof and the walls were doing their work. Out in the open air the shame went where the walls could not follow it. After that no cloth in the world could get in front of it.

Ham did not go back in. He stood in the daylight with the story in his mouth and waited to see what his brothers would do with it.

They Carried the Cloak Backward

Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it across both their shoulders, one end on each man. Then they walked into the tent backward.

Their faces stayed turned the other way the whole time. They could not see the floor, so they went by the sound of their own heels and by the pull of the cloth between them. When they judged they had come far enough they let it down and kept walking backward until they were out in the daylight again.

Two grown men shuffling in reverse into a dim tent with a blanket stretched between them. It took a great deal longer than looking would have taken. That was the entire difference between them and their brother. They did not speak to Ham on the way in. They did not speak to him on the way out. The cloak had work. Talk would have been looking by another door.

Noah Woke Under Someone Else's Cloth

He came up out of the wine under a garment he had not pulled over himself, and he knew what his youngest son had done to him. Nobody told him. The cloth on top of him said one thing and the quiet outside the tent said the rest.

Then he opened his mouth, and the first words spoken out of the first vineyard were not about Ham at all.

"Cursed be Canaan. A servant of servants shall he be to his brothers."

He blessed the God of Shem, and said Canaan would be Shem's servant. He said God would make room for Japheth, and that Japheth would live in the tents of Shem, and that Canaan would serve him too. Three times the sentence came down. Three times it landed one generation past the man who had earned it.

Ham stood in the light and heard his son's name. Canaan was not in the tent. Canaan had not looked. The curse did not ask whether he had.

The Name Fastened Too Early

The three of them had come off the boat together and been named together, Shem and Ham and Japheth. Only one of them had a child's name fastened to him at that moment, before the ground had dried, before the cuttings went in, before there was any wine in the world to be drunk. Ham, the father of Canaan (Genesis 9:18).

Shem is given nobody there. Japheth is given nobody there. The middle son walked out of the boat already carrying a son who had done nothing yet, and years later, in a tent that smelled of new wine, an old man sat up under a borrowed cloak and said that name out loud.

Noah lived three hundred and fifty years after the flood. Canaan's name went in front of him into every one of them. The walls of the tent still stood. They had done what walls can do. They had not been enough.