Noah Wanted One More Son After the Floodwaters

For five hundred years Noah refused to have children.

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He had watched the people around him provoking their Maker daily and in the open, so he did the arithmetic any careful man would do. A world with a term on it does not need more sons in it, and there had already been famine in his father Lamech's day, up out of the ground the Lord had cursed. "Let that man die childless," Noah said about himself, in the third person, the way people talk when they have given something up and do not want to hear their own name in it.

Then God said, be fruitful and multiply. Noah put down the argument he had been holding for five centuries and went and raised a family.

The Ark He Had to Build With His Own Hands

Shem, Ham and Japheth were grown men with wives of their own by the time the second instruction came, and it was worded to leave him no way out of the labor. Make yourself an ark. Not send for one, not have one raised by a crew. The wood was named and the measurements were given and the work was his, so an old man went and cut gopher timber and boiled pitch and set the boards himself.

Then the rain started and the door shut, and the water took everything he had ever walked past.

The Year of Feeding

Inside, he was the only man on board whose knees still had to go all the way down to the boards.

His sons had wives and their own stations on the decks, but a grown son is not a small son. A small son fits where a full-grown man does not. He can be sent, and he comes back, and he makes the third trip in the middle of the night without being asked twice. Noah went down through the animal decks himself in the dark, every night, for a year, with the feed and the water, and somewhere in that year he made himself a promise. When the ground comes back I will have one more boy, and he will be mine to raise, and he will serve me when I am past all this.

That was the whole of it. Not a dynasty and not a blessing. One child small enough to be useful before the old man's hands gave out.

The Vineyard and the Tent

The water went down. The ground dried, and Noah planted a vineyard, because a man who has spent a year keeping other creatures alive will eventually want something growing that is his. The wine came in. He drank it and it took him, and he lay down uncovered inside his tent.

What Ham did to his father in there is not written down. Something was done to his body while he slept, and his son did it, and the household knew before Noah did.

He woke up covered. Somebody had laid a garment over him, which meant somebody had come in, seen him, and been decent about it, which meant somebody else had come in first and had not been. Noah worked that out in the first few seconds of an old man's waking, before he had even sat up, and then he followed it forward to the promise he had made himself in the dark on the animal decks and understood that it was finished. There would be no small son now.

The Shape of the Curse

"You kept me from raising a son to serve me," he said to Ham. "So that man will be a servant to his brothers."

It was cut to the exact size of what had been taken. Ham had removed the one who would have served Noah, so Ham's line would serve Shem and Japheth, and those two were themselves called servants of God. One kind of service had been denied, so another kind was imposed, and the chain ran upward out of the lowest man in it all the way to Heaven.

Noah lived on for years after the vineyard. He had gone through the water with every living kind aboard and come out onto rinsed ground with three grown men, their wives, and a curse he had spoken himself. At night, when the knees went, there was nobody small in the house to send.