A Turn of Phrases

Before We Start

Three sentences come out of Noah's mouth at the end of chapter 9, and the weight in them is not where the English puts it. So I followed the words underneath. The word for curse, the word for servant, the root that servant comes from, and the word for the ground.

I want to say at the start how I am going to handle those words. A dictionary entry gives me a range. It does not tell me which sense the verse picked. The verse decides that, and where I cannot tell, I will say I cannot tell.

He Awoke and He Knew

He awoke from his wine. What runs through my mind is that we do not know when that was. Whether it was the next day or right away, the verse leaves it.

He awoke and he knew. How he knew, and what he felt, we do not know. What I have is a man who woke up and knew.

Then he gives me what Noah said.

The Ground He Was Standing On

Before Noah opens his mouth I want to know what is under his feet, because it is not neutral ground.

That was spoken over the soil, not over the man. I opened that in What Each One Was Made From. I am not walking it again here. What I want in this study is that it was still true in Noah's day, and Scripture says so at Noah's own naming.

His own father named him over it. Generations after Eden, still working cursed ground. They said so when they named the child.

As I have done. That is the flood. He is promising not to do that again, and He puts His reason in the middle of the sentence, that the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth. That is not a world put back right.

There is something else in it. The word for curse in Genesis 8:21 is not the word for curse in Genesis 3:17. The lexicons give them two different numbers. The one in chapter 3 leads with to execrate, to bitterly curse. The one in chapter 8 leads with to make light. Its other renderings run through contempt, despise, slight.

Two different words do not prove two different actions, and my King James gives me curse for both. What it proves is narrower. Genesis 8:21 is not speaking with the word Genesis 3:17 used.

So the ground is what it was. Tilling the ground is the monster in the room. It does not set Adam apart, it does not set Noah apart, and it does not set me apart either.

Then a Man Curses a Man

The word is given as arar. The entry has it as to execrate, to bitterly curse.

It is the same word that is under the serpent in chapter 3, under the ground in the same chapter, under Cain in chapter 4.

As I read it, this is what has just happened. God cursed the serpent, which had done something. God cursed the ground, which is a thing. God cursed Cain, who had killed his brother. Every one of those had acted, or was a thing. Adam, who ate, was never cursed himself.

Now a man opens his mouth, and the one he curses is a man with no act recorded against him.

Moses does not stop and say any of that. He writes down what Noah said and makes no comment on it at all. That I set those verses beside each other is my reading.

A Servant of Servants

A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.

I looked the word up. The entry is wider than I expected. It is given as ebed. It is used of a slave, of a man-servant, of subjects, of the worshippers of God. The entry says it can be a form of address between equals.

My own entry will not let me call that word degrading by itself.

What the verse gives me is that it is said twice. A servant of servants. Not put below somebody. Put at the bottom. As I read it, they should be on the same footing, but not.

The root that word comes from holds both ends of the thing. That entry gives tilling, worship, bondage, all three out of the one root. It has a form that means to compel to labour, to cause to serve, to cause to serve as subjects. So the same root covers the man who serves and the man who makes him serve.

I have seen what the bottom end of that looks like, and it is in Exodus.

Israel over Israel. Egypt set men from among them over their own people, then beat those men when the work fell short. A slave put over slaves. The blows coming down through his own.

The One Who Acted Is Not the One Named

Moses tells me who Canaan is before anything happens, and then he tells me again in the middle of it.

Four sons. One name in verse 25.

We are not told how it came to land on Canaan. Not why him and not Ham, and not why one son out of four. Moses puts the relationship down twice and leaves it standing there.

The one who acted is not the one named.

The same man who wrote down what Noah said wrote down that law.

The Other Father

There is another father in Genesis who speaks over his sons at the end of his life, and he uses the very same word.

I looked up the number on that one, and it is the same number as verse 25. Arar, in both places.

Then I looked up every place that word turns up in Genesis. God speaks it over the serpent, over the ground, over Cain. Lamech repeats it about the ground when he names Noah. It is in a promise God makes to Abraham, and in a blessing Isaac speaks. Both of those are aimed at whoever, not at anybody by name. Jacob puts it on a temper.

Noah puts it on a boy. In the whole book he is the only man who speaks that word onto somebody's name.

Cursed be Canaan.

Cursed be their anger.

One father puts the word on a person. The other puts it on a temper.

Jacob is speaking to the men who did the thing. Reuben loses the excellency for his own act. Simeon and Levi are answered for what they did at Shechem. Where Jacob speaks against a son, it lands on the man who did it.

Even the hard words are counted as blessing in that chapter. Genesis nine never says that about verse 25.

The Blessing Didn't Run in a Straight Line

He does not bless Shem. He blesses the LORD God of Shem. The blessing goes upward, and Shem is named as the one whose God He is.

There is a play on the name in the next verse. In the Hebrew, enlarge and Japheth are built out of the same sounds. That is the language doing it, not me finding it.

Now here is the thing I keep coming back to.

Shem and Japheth did the same thing. Verse 23 gives it in one breath. Both took the garment. Both laid it upon their shoulders. Both went backward. Both covered him. Both saw not.

One act, two men, and no difference in it anywhere.

They do not get the same word.

If somebody wants to argue that they are benefited because they covered their father, then why are the both of them not blessed in the same manner? The blessing didn't run in a straight line.

Canaan is put at the bottom, and no act of his is on the page.

What Kind of Authority Is That

That is the question I am left holding, and the chapter does not answer it.

God does not speak in that verse. Where the right came from, we are not told.

But we are doing chapter 9. Chapter 8 is where the offering sits.

Moses makes nothing of that in chapter 9, and I am carrying it over from chapter 8 myself. What the altar shows is a man doing work the law would later hand to Aaron's sons. Leviticus is where that law sat. The book never calls him a priest, so the verse names no office he is speaking from.

It is not the dominion, because the dominion was never over people. It was given over the fish, the fowl, the cattle, every living thing. The same creatures come back in this same chapter, as the fear and the dread of him upon the beasts.

There is one place in the chapter where a man's life is put into men's hands, and it is about blood required for blood. It is not about a man speaking a fate over a child.

So I do not know what Noah was speaking out of. Neither does the chapter.

What I do hold is that it cannot be done outside God, and I am not the first to say it.

That is the Lord to Pilate, about one man's power over another man.

Balaam was hired to curse a nation and could not do it. Solomon says a curse without a cause does not land. I am setting those beside Genesis nine myself. Neither of them is written about Noah.

Now hold all three together, because they came out in one breath.

Cursed be Canaan. Blessed be the LORD God of Shem. God shall enlarge Japheth.

A curse, a blessing and an enlarging, out of one man's mouth. Whatever I am asking about the first one I have to ask about the other two. Canaan is named in all three.

Which leaves me a second question, and it is not the one I started with.

Did it hold?

The chapter does not show me. Verse 27 ends, and the next chapter goes into names.

It is a question I am carrying, and I will carry it into the reading ahead.

Before I Close It

These verses have been used to do great harm. That belongs on the page.

They were used for a long time to say that a whole people were made to serve. The text does not say it. Noah names Canaan, and nobody else. The very next chapter has Nimrod, out of Cush, another of Ham's sons, and his kingdom begins with cities.

When the land does change hands, hundreds of years later, God gives His own reason for it, and it is not Noah's word.

Their own account, come due in its own time. Not a grandfather's sentence.

The Heart

Here is what I hold, and it is mine.

Working the ground is the thing none of us gets out of. Adam had it, Noah had it, and I have it. It is the one weight that does not single anybody out.

So when I read verse 25, the part that stops me is not the hardness of it. It is that one boy is given something on top of what everybody carries. He is given it by a man, and no act of his is behind it on the page.

I feel his pain, because his way is hard from out the door. We know nothing about how Canaan lived, so the hardness I hear in it is mine.

So can a fate be changed?

I think about Jabez. His mother named him out of her own sorrow, and that word sat on him from the beginning, the same way this one sits on Canaan.

He prayed, and God answered him.

I opened Jabez before, in The Heart Within the Line, where I was looking at the heart inside the line of names.

We are never told whether Canaan asked. That is the wondering.

But I cannot give a curse more room than God gives it. A man said it. God did not say it.

I know something about a word spoken over a life.

I grew up in poverty, probably looked down upon in my village. I wouldn't have known the difference then. People would say I wouldn't mount to nothing.

I prayed no prayer, didn't know how then.

But my life, as it turned out, has a totally different picture to that announcement.

So actually I will continue to stand in the I don't know lane until I see otherwise.

If God be for me, who can be against me?