Noah, Satan, and the Vine Adam Carried Out of Eden

When Adam was driven out of Paradise, he did not leave empty-handed. He took a vine.

This detail, preserved in Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews and drawing on multiple midrashic sources compiled between the third and fifth centuries CE, transforms the story of Noah's vineyard from a scene of embarrassing old-man drunkenness into something much stranger. The vine that Noah planted after the flood was not an ordinary plant. It was Paradise stock, carried out of Eden on the day humanity was first expelled, passed down through the generations, and finally discovered near the place where the ark came to rest on Ararat.

Noah found it, tasted the grapes, and decided to plant it. He was in the middle of pressing the first cutting into the soil when Ha-Satan appeared.

In the Jewish tradition, Ha-Satan (הַשָּׂטָן) is not an independent power opposed to God. He is the Accuser, the heavenly prosecutor who tests human beings on God's behalf. His appearance at Noah's planting is not an invasion from outside the divine order. He was, as the tradition says, passing by, and he stopped to ask what Noah was doing. When Noah said he was planting, Ha-Satan asked if he could become a partner in the vineyard. Noah agreed.

What followed was Ha-Satan's contribution to the first wine. He brought a lamb and slaughtered it on the soil. Then a lion. Then a pig. Then a monkey. Each animal's blood went into the ground where the vine would grow. Each contributed something to the nature of wine and the nature of the person who drinks it. The lamb's blood meant that the first cup makes a person gentle and pleasant. The lion's blood meant that the second cup fills a person with the feeling of power and invincibility. The pig's blood meant that the third cup makes a person wallow in filth. The monkey's blood meant that the fourth cup turns a person into a buffoon, dancing and capering and saying things better left unsaid.

On the same day Noah planted the vine, it bore fruit. He pressed it, drew off the juice, drank it, became drunk, and was dishonored. All in one day. The book of Jubilees, composed in the second century BCE, records that Noah planted vines on Mount Lubar, one of the Ararat Mountains, in the seventh week of the first year after the flood. But Jubilees treats the vineyard as innocent, a source of wine used in sacrificial offerings to God, where Noah rejoiced and drank with his children in celebration.

The two traditions do not cancel each other. They describe the same object from different angles. Wine is what Noah used to honor God. Wine is also what stripped away the dignity of the man who survived the flood. Jubilees describes Noah offering burnt sacrifices, placing flesh on the altar, sprinkling wine on the fire, the savour ascending to God, and then retiring to his tent, drunk, uncovered, asleep. Both things are true simultaneously.

The tradition adds that by planting the vine, Noah lost his epithet, the pious. He became instead a man of the ground, the same designation given to Adam when he was sent to work the earth he had come from. The connection is deliberate. Adam's transgression involved a fruit. Noah's involved the vine Adam had brought out of Eden. The man who survived the flood by being different from his generation found himself repeating the original story with the original plant.

Ha-Satan did not force anything. He asked to be a partner, and Noah said yes. The lamb and the lion and the pig and the monkey were buried under the soil where the vine grew, and Noah drank what came from that ground. He did not know what he was drinking. But then, the tradition suggests, no one ever does, not entirely, when they reach for the cup.

The aftermath is recorded with the specificity of a legal account. Noah lay exposed in his tent. His son Ham saw him and told his brothers rather than covering him. The Ginzberg tradition treats Ham's action as a violation of the same order that the vine itself had disrupted: the order of dignity, of covering what should be covered, of protecting the vulnerable rather than publicizing their shame. Two failures cascade from the same source. The vine that came from Paradise produced both the libation that honored God and the intoxication that dishonored the man who survived the flood.

Midrash Tanchuma, the homiletical commentary on the Torah portions compiled between the fourth and seventh centuries CE, asks why Noah deserved to lose his epithet over a vineyard. The answer it reaches is that Noah's error was not the drinking itself but the order of his priorities. He came off the ark and planted before he prayed. He turned immediately to the ground rather than first turning to God. The vine was Paradise stock, a remnant of Eden, and the first thing Noah did with it was make it serve his own pleasure. He repeated, in smaller form, the original structure of Adam's transgression: taking something holy and using it without first acknowledging what it was. Ha-Satan does not appear in the Jubilees account of Noah's vineyard because Jubilees shows Noah approaching the vine with sacrifice and celebration, honoring God before honoring himself. He appears in the Ginzberg synthesis because that synthesis is tracking the moment of forgetting who gave you the vine in the first place.