After the flood, Noah broke fresh ground for a vineyard. He had tasted the grape and prized it twice, for its fruit and for its juice.
As he worked, Ha-Satan, the heavenly Accuser, who in Jewish tradition works as a tester of human character, came walking through the new world. He asked what Noah was planting. Noah told him: vines, for the pleasure of wine.
"Let me help you," Ha-Satan said.
He went off and returned with four animals: a lamb, a lion, a pig, and a monkey. He slaughtered each at the roots of the young vines and fed their blood into the soil as fertilizer.
When the work was done, he stepped back and explained the arithmetic of his gift. "Of those who drink the juice of these grapes," he said, "some will turn meek and gentle as the lamb. Some will grow bold and fearless as the lion. Some will become foul and beastly as the pig. And some will grow frolicsome and senseless as the monkey."
The four stages of any drinker, sweetness, courage, ugliness, foolishness, were planted in the soil that first afternoon.
The teaching is preserved in Midrash Tanchuma on Noach and in Yalkut Shimoni on Genesis. Ha-Satan did not poison the vine. He only named what it does.
The Rabbis have a curious Haggada respecting the origin of the culture of the vine. Once while Noah was hard at work breaking up the fallow ground for a vineyard, Satan drew near and inquired what he was doing. On ascertaining that the patriarch was about to cultivate the grape, which he valued both for its fruit and its juice, he at once volunteered to assist him at his task, and began to manure the soil with the blood of a lamb, a lion, a pig, and a monkey. ''Now," said he, when his work was done, "of those who taste the juice of the grape, some will become meek and gentle as the lamb, some bold and fearless as the lion, some foul and beastly as the pig, and others frolicsome and lively as the monkey. This quaint story may be found more fully detailed in the Midrash Tanchuma (see Noah) and the Yalkut on Genesis. The Mohammedan legend is somewhat similar. It relates how Satan on the like occasion used the blood of a peacock, of an ape, of a lion, and of a pig, and it deduces from the abuse of the vine the curse that fell on the children of Ham, and ascribes the color of the purple grape to the dark hue which thenceforth tinctured all the fruit of their land as well as their own complexions.
