Within His Tent

Before We Start

The flood is over. The covenant is given, the bow is in the cloud, and Noah comes off the boat and plants a vineyard.

Then this happens.

Three verses, and I had to work them slowly, because the shame in this account is not where I first went looking for it.

He Was Uncovered

I looked up the word.

The word is given as galah. The form here is one the grammar people call Hithpael, and the entry lists that form on its own. Under Hithpael it gives two things. To be uncovered. And to reveal oneself.

So it can be read as he became uncovered, and it can be read as he uncovered himself. The entry gives me both and does not choose between them.

Moses does not tell me which. Whether Noah deliberately took his clothes off, or whether he became uncovered because of the state he was in, the verse does not say.

I am leaving that open, because that is where Moses left it.

Now the entry for galah does carry a sense of disgrace somewhere in its range. I looked at that a long time, and I am not going to bring it into this verse.

Because of where he is.

Within His Tent

Moses gives me the location. He was uncovered WITHIN HIS TENT.

Not in the vineyard. Inside the place that was his.

Now what I build on that is mine, and Genesis does not use the words expectation of privacy.

A man inside his own tent has a reasonable expectation that what happens in there stays in there. I have my own sense of privacy inside my own house. If somebody comes in and sees me, where is my shame? It should be theirs, for being in my private space and seeing what would otherwise have been private.

So whatever put Noah in that condition, drunk or deliberate, he was somewhere a man may be uncovered without it being anybody else's business.

What Moses gives me is the tent.

Then Somebody Else Sees Him

Two words in that verse and I looked up both.

Saw is given as raah, and the entry gives a wide range. To see, to look at, to inspect, to perceive, to gaze at, to watch.

I am not going to pick one of those. The entry offering gaze does not mean Moses said gaze. What the verse gives me is that Ham saw it, and that is all I can say he did with his eyes.

Told is given as nagad. The entry gives to tell, declare, report, make known, announce, publish, proclaim. And it says something I want you to hold: always by word of mouth to one present.

Moses says he told them. He does not say he showed them anything.

It was within his tent. Ham took it without.

The Word Changes

Verse 21 says Noah was uncovered. That is galah.

Verse 22 does not say Ham saw his father uncovered. It says Ham saw the NAKEDNESS of his father. And nakedness is a different word.

The word is given as ervah. And the entry gives nudity, and then it gives this, figuratively, disgrace, blemish. It gives shame and uncleanness among its renderings. And under the senses it gives pudenda, implying shameful exposure.

Then it gives one more. Exposed, undefended.

Now I have to be straight about something, because both entries have a shame sense in them. Galah leads with to denude, especially in a disgraceful sense. So I cannot say one word carries shame and the other does not.

And this is what I did with each of them. In verse 21 I would not press that sense, because of where Noah was. In verse 22 I am not pressing it either. The entry gives it. Moses does not say he chose it.

Ervah may simply be the ordinary word for nakedness.

Exposed and Undefended

That last pair stopped me.

Moses tells me Noah was drunken and tells me nothing else about his condition. He does not say Noah was asleep. He does not say what Noah knew or did not know. He does not say whether Noah could have covered himself.

So I am not describing a man who cannot help himself, because that is a picture I would be supplying.

What is on the page is the word. The entry for the word Moses uses for what Ham saw says exposed, undefended. One line in a dictionary is not enough to build a study on. But I am not going to pretend I did not see it either.

The Brothers

They took a garment. They laid it on both their shoulders. They went backward. They covered him. Their faces were backward. And they saw not.

Six things, and the whole of it is arranged to cover him without seeing him.

That neither one of them was going to turn round is what I read in it.

The verse guards it twice over. The turning away and the not seeing are both written down.

Where the Disgrace Is

As I read it, the disgrace is not in Noah being uncovered. He was in his tent.

I do not think it is in Ham seeing, either. The verse says he saw, and it does not say where from.

The disgrace, as I read it, is in what Ham did with what he saw.

He took a thing that was inside his father's tent, and he carried it outside, and he told it.

What Moses gives me is where it happened, what Ham saw, and what Ham did next, and then he shows me two other men doing the opposite with what Ham told them.

That contrast is not my invention. Moses put it there.

The Heart

I have had things about me carried outside a room where they should have stayed.

What I have learned is that the covering is a choice somebody makes. Shem and Japheth were told. They knew, and they went and put a garment on him with their faces turned away.

Ham saw it. He is not the one who covered him.

So when I am given something about somebody that they did not hand me, I want to be one of the two who walked in backward. Not the one who went out and told it.