BEMA Discipleship

BEMA 5: A Misplaced Curse (2025)

Transcription Status

3 Feb 25 — Initial public release

2 Feb 25 — Transcript approved for release

Transcription Volunteers: Sergey Bazylko, Sonya Christensen

A Misplaced Curse

Brent Billings: This is the BEMA Podcast with Marty Salmon. I’m his co-host Brent Billings. Today we are joined by Reed Dent to talk about Noah’s departure from the Ark and the tragedy that ensues.

Marty Solomon: Yeah, welcome Reed, one of our other members of the teaching team here at BEMA.

Reed Dent: Hello, hello.

Marty: Reed is a good friend of mine. He is a campus minister at a campus ministry in Missouri—Kirksville, Missouri—Truman State University.

Reed: Go Dawgs!

Marty: CCF, and I always get the C’s backwards. Give it to me, CCF.

Reed: Campus Christian Fellowship.

Marty: Boom, there you go. And Reed’s just stepped into a new role there. He’s the guy in charge at the moment.

Reed: Oh yeah.

Marty: So we’ll see how that goes, right?

Reed: That’s right. After 16 years, phase one is complete.

Brent: Finally get your driver’s license.

Marty: [laughs] That’s right. So Reed is a fellow campus minister, loves college students, all those things. Also just a great friend of mine. I think you’ll hear over time as you get into these episodes, Reed and I have a deep friendship, a unique friendship. You will sense the banter that goes back and forth. [laughs]

Reed: I was going to say, some banter—especially when we talk about football, which we’re not going to talk about right now.

Marty: So you’ll probably feel that.

Reed: I was going to say, some banter—especially when we talk about football, which we’re not going to talk about right now.

Marty: Yes, no, we won’t. But Reed’s also a lover of just the scriptures. And I’ve always loved the way that Reed thinks, a bit more philosophical is how I’ve always described it. I don’t know if that’s the right word or even the word that he appreciates. But for me, he brings a—he asks a different kind of question—not a textual critical analysis question, more of like a bigger picture, philosophical question. And so I’ve always appreciated that. And part of the role he fills here. So we have an episode in the future. Season six is where we added all these teaching members to our teaching team. So we’re going to link the show where we introduce Reed more officially.

And so you’ve already met Elle, and today you’re meeting Reed. Next episode or so you’re going to meet Josh, and that’s going to be our team. And we’re going to link the episodes where they get introduced more fully. You can do that there. But Brent, you and I never really introduced ourselves at the beginning of this thing. Like we kind of told a little bit of our story, but we never-- so why introduce anybody else? We’re just on a journey together.

Brent: Yeah, we originally assumed mostly people who already knew who we were and everyone else who started listening to the podcast seemed to figure it out along the way anyway. So yeah, we don’t need to spend a bunch of time on that. Let’s get into the text.

Marty: Absolutely. Well, with that, we’re here to talk about the story of Noah that nobody usually talks about. Everybody talks about the boat, the flood, the ark, and very few people talk about the vineyard, the curse.

Reed: We talk about this one around my dinner table with my kids just every night. It’s our go-to text.

Marty: I bet there’s so many wonderful children ministry elements to this story.

Brent: [laughs]

Marty: Well, with that, Reed, since you piped in here, I’m going to start with you. When you think of this story, we’re thinking Genesis 9:18–29, give or take—ish. Like, what kind of things do you think of? What problems? We’ve been asking problems all along this way, looking for problems in the story, things that get our attention, things that make us think differently. What are the things that you think of when you think of a story?

Reed: Yeah, so this is the story about Noah in the tent and the nakedness with his sons. And it is a weird story. I guess just the general tenor of the story following right on the heels of new creation and we made it through the flood. It seems just pretty jarring. So just the nature of it, the tone of it is kind of a problem for me.

Marty: Yeah.

Reed: And more specifically, the thing about the nakedness, I wonder why is that such a big deal?

Marty: Sure. Yep.

Reed: I mean, I get that it might be awkward to see your dad naked, but I don’t know, it just seems like it really sets Noah off, and so I wonder about that. And the other thing, kind of at a more meta level of the text, I guess, is the name Canaan, Ham’s son’s name is Canaan, and if you know the rest of the biblical story, the relationship that the Israelites have with the Canaanites, I just wonder, is it kind of conspicuous and a little strange that here, right after the the flood, like is it weird or conspicuous that the name is Canaan?

Marty: Sure. And there’s like, like if we were to keep going into the genealogy that follows, like that’s such a dominant idea, like Mitzrayim, which just means Egypt. In the Hebrew, Kush, Canaan, like all these names, so many of these names, most of these names are names of larger nations and people groups. And you’re like, oh, that’s very, that’s very interesting. And we’ll talk about that more as we keep journeying through the podcast. Yeah, it’s absolutely something that I think is worth mentioning. Brent, what kind of stuff do you see?

Brent: Well, speaking of the thing with Canaan, like the awkward mention of it in that list of names, the list of names itself is kind of weird because they’re not, it’s in a different order than we see it in other places.

Marty: And typically you would expect it to be in an order. And typically we, I think we would assume birth order. And yet Noah’s a story where the order keeps showing up in different ways, particularly as you keep going past this story into the genealogy, the order keeps changing. Is that what I’m hearing you point out?

Brent: Yeah, yeah.

Marty: Yeah, it’s very odd.

Brent: It’s not consistent. So it seems like maybe there’s something that we should be reading in this particular portion about that order or whatever it is.

Marty: Yep.

Brent: The other thing I noticed is like, this is the first time a vineyard is mentioned and you know, Noah figures out immediately how to make wine out of it. So it’s like, as soon as the grapes start popping up, it’s like, okay, how can we get, how can we get this into a different form? Which is funny to me. I’m assuming that it—

Reed: He had a lot of time thinking of that stuff on the boat

Marty: Yeah, it is like a very quick transaction of planting a vineyard, had grapes, got drunk. You’re like, wow, that’s a power-packed verse right there. Absolutely.

Reed: What a weekend.

Brent: And actually that does bring up another problem for me now that you say it that way. When you start a vineyard, it takes a long time to get those grapes up to a point where you can start producing stuff. And then when you make the wine, it takes all this time. So this is a very compressed story.

Marty: Absolutely. We actually come back to this in Session 6. One of the things that happened after we recorded this the first time is I had somebody write in who had a vineyard, and he said, “It’s going to take you four years at least,” and the Torah principle is going to be five, because that first year has to go to God. So it’s at least four years before you have grapes. We read this and we always read it like it’s such a quick thing, and yet logically speaking, this would have to take some time for him to actually cultivate a vineyard, plant a vineyard, get grapes, make wine. That’s the thing.

And as you’ve mentioned before, Brent, this is the first mention of a vineyard. We have something called the law of first mention, which we prefer to call a principle because it’s not really a law, it’s more of a principle. When you see a unique idea, word, or image, the Jewish mind, the Hebrew, Eastern mind will often go, “Where did I hear that first?” It’s that first story that will kind of frame what that image is supposed to be able to communicate to us.

So whenever you see a vineyard in Scripture, it’s possible that it might bring you back to this very story here. Not all the time, that’s why it’s more of a principle, not a law. Because it’s not that every single time you see a vineyard, you should be thinking about this story. But that’s that principle of first mention.

Like, where’s the first time we see the word love? It’s actually in the Akedah. A particular word for love is in the Akedah, the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac. That story is going to tell me something about love, because of the principle of first mention. So those are the things that we see here.

But with that, enough speculating. We’re behind schedule. Brent, go ahead and get us into the Text.

Brent: “The sons of Noah who came out of the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Ham was the father of Canaan. These were the three sons of Noah, and from them came the people who were scattered over the whole earth.”

Marty: And Brent, you already pointed this out. We’re looking for problems. That’s what we’re trying to get used to. We’re trying to get used to hearing a chunk of Text and asking, is there anything that’s a problem in here? And the mention of Canaan is odd because these other sons had sons, right?

Brent: Yeah.

Marty: And Ham had more sons than just Canaan. And yet Canaan gets mentioned here. So right off the bat, you’re like, “Okay, wait a minute. Why? You didn’t have to, but you did. So why? Why are we mentioning Canaan?” That should probably jump off on our dashboard here. Go ahead and give us the next couple of verses.

Brent: Well, and I also think that it’s interesting that it says they were scattered over the whole earth. Which makes me think, like, what is the whole earth? But it also makes me think four corners. But we’ve got three sons, so hold that thought.

Marty: Oh yeah. Hold that thought. Okay. I love that.

Brent: Okay, “Noah, a man of the soil, proceeded to plant a vineyard. When he drank some of its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent.”

Marty: I guess in a lot of ways, Brent, you already brought up some problems about this section. Reed, do you see anything in here that gets your attention?

Reed: I am wondering about an allusion—allusion, not illusion—an allusion to the garden story; the Adam and Eve story. That’s something that gets my attention. When you were talking about first mention of the vineyard, the thought that went through my head was, yes, first mention of the word vineyard, but in some way, can we compare this to the taking of the fruit and the eating of the fruit? Because there’s, in each case, there is a kind of partaking of this particular kind of fruit or some kind of fruit, and then trouble ensues after that.

Marty: Oh, baby. We’re going to put a pin in that. All right. We’re going to come back to that one. I love that. Good problem there. Let’s see, go ahead and give us some more, Brent.

Brent: “Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father naked and told his two brothers outside. But Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it across their shoulders. Then they walked in backward and covered their father’s body. Their faces were turned the other way so that they would not see their father naked.”

Marty: Absolutely. Okay, so there’s that mention of nakedness, and now that Reed said what he just said a moment ago, you’re realizing, “Hey, wait a minute. I had another story where there was an awkward presence of nakedness. It was that same story. Okay. Now we’re starting to read the Bible. Maybe like, maybe we’re starting to hear this more through that Eastern lens. Go ahead and keep us going before we dive too deep into that, Brent.

Brent: Yeah, also really hammering home this Canaan idea.

Marty: Yep, absolutely.

Brent: Like we, like you just said that, like we remember.

Marty: Yep. Yeah. Yes. Oh, you’re right. You’re absolutely right. Yep. Another mention of Canaan. Absolutely.

Brent: When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to him, he said, “Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers.

Marty: Okay, so now all of a sudden we’ve had two mentions of Canaan and what is it that jumps out at us from either one of you? What seems so wacky about what happens in this verse?

Reed: He’s cursing the wrong guy.

Marty: He’s cursing the wrong guy. Like here’s, we were just told that whatever it was, and we struggle, Reed said, like, we don’t really understand what’s happened. But whatever has happened, Ham is the one who’s done it. Noah wakes up and curses the wrong guy, curses the grandson. Not the son, but curses the son’s son.

Reed: Who wasn’t even present in the action of the story. It’s Ham, Shem, and Japheth who are the only ones involved in the tent. I mean, all we’ve been told is that Kanan exists as a grandson, but he actually doesn’t even show up as a character in the story anywhere.

Marty: Absolutely. And depending on how you want to look at this, some Jewish perspective is going to say that Canaan’s not even born yet, that we’re talking about a son that’s not even on the scene yet, let alone not even present, but maybe doesn’t even exist. You can read that story different ways, the Jewish community does, but that all is a part of what we’ll keep talking about. Absolutely. Brent, give us the last chunk here. Let’s just finish this up.

Brent: He also said—“he” being Noah—he also said, “Praise be to the Lord, the God of Shem. May Canaan be the slave of Shem. May God extend Japheth’s territory. May Japheth live in the tents of Shem, and may Canaan be the slave of Japheth.” After the flood, Noah lived 350 years. lived a total of 950 years and then he died.

Marty: All right, so here we are. And I want to go back to this idea that I think you both have brought out, this paralleling that we see between the story of the flood and the story. Well, we already saw some parallel issues in the last episode when we looked at the flood.

We noticed how the flood paralleled the story of creation. And now here it is, it continues again, the story of this vineyard paralleling the story of the Garden of Eden. If we just think about—we’ve got the things that we should expect to see. We should expect to see a garden. Do we have a garden? We sure do—this time we have a vineyard.

We should expect to see fruit and bad things coming from the fruit. That happens, we have fruit of the garden that they can partake of the fruit of the garden and bad things would happen. We should have a story about nakedness. Check, got that. We should have a story about covering the nakedness. Like both of them end up being naked, something bad happens, and they end up covering. That happens here. There should be a curse. We got that. These stories are absolutely a part of what’s taking place.

Reed: One interesting maybe contrast I see in the parallel with the nakedness in particular, it jumped out to me that in this story the nakedness is already a problem from the get-go; whereas in the Adam and Eve story they were naked and unashamed is what the text says, and then later it becomes a problem. But here as soon as they come off the boat, apparently there’s no initial instance where Noah is naked and everything’s fine. It’s just a problem from the get-go.

Marty: Absolutely. So one of the things that we’re going to keep diving into, for perspective, is something called the Midrash. We’ve kind of mentioned it in past episodes. We’re going to keep talking about Midrash. We’re going to keep diving deeper and deeper into different Midrash along the way.

Midrash is an ancient form of Jewish commentary. So we’re familiar with commentary today. We’re familiar with commentaries. We would go to our Western library if we’re a Bible student, or if we’ve been trained in Bible college, or we might be a preacher or whatever, and we go to our library and we have a shelf of commentaries, and we pull those commentaries off the shelf. What we’re looking at is some insight from a particular Bible scholar about the passages that, well, Jews had commentaries 2000s of years ago. But they just think differently than we do.

If we write a commentary, well, we’re gonna put it in an outline and we’re gonna have bullet points and we’re gonna tell you what you need to know and then we’re gonna kind of prove to you why those things are true and the very Western way of communicating information.

In the Eastern world, they believe in the process of discovery. So what they’re trying to do is not write an article to point out all the things that are in the story. they’re gonna try to get you to discover whatever they discovered. They discovered something one day and rather than writing a blog post about what they found, they wanna get you to find it too.

And so they tell stories about the stories so that you can look at the story again with almost like a sub story and ask yourself, what is it that they found? It’s like a literary device, similar to chiasms. It’s a way of burying treasure. It’s a way of a rabbi saying, I found something, which means that the Midrash is often, it feels ludicrous. It feels arbitrary.

It feels crazy because what the Midrash often does, I had one teacher explain it this way, the Midrash takes you all the way around the block to go right next door. Like you could just walk out the door and go right next door, but the Midrash wants to take you the long way around the block to go right next door, because on the way you’re going to discover something on the way of wrestling with what’s next door, you’re going to find all kinds of other things.

And so the Midrash will often seem ridiculous. It’s not designed to be literal, historical. It’s impossible to draw the line. Sometimes it is trying to tell us about literal history. Sometimes it’s making up like the craziest story ever. And you never quite know what is what because it’s not the point of, it’s just Jewish commentary.

For us, I think we would say, as Jesus followers, as Christian listeners, we might say, “It’s not inspired.” Okay, totally fine with it. It’s as inspired as the commentary that sits on my shelf from a Christian theologian in, you know, wherever.

Brent: A Christian theologian who hopefully knows the text really well, loves God, and has this passion. It’s not like it’s coming from this weird third-party source that doesn’t have any interest in what’s going on.

Marty: Yes. If we’re on a journey here in the podcast to ask ourselves, how do we think like an Easterner? I would think that at least one of the things we would want to do is engage that Eastern commentary. Like if I’m going to pick a commentary anyway, I feel like one of the best commentaries I could pick is the ancient one that will deal with the thoughts and the perspectives and what the people that have been dealing...

Some of these passages, they’ve had a head start on us for centuries and centuries and centuries, the Jewish world has. These stories in Torah. They’ve been dealing with them a lot longer than any Christian thinker has. So what is it that they’ve found over the centuries? It doesn’t mean that it’s right. It just means it’s full of unique, different perspective that matches the world that it’s being written to and being written out of.

And so, the Midrash has some things to say about this idea. Reed, you asked this question, like, what, tell me about your question about nakedness. Like, what was your question at the very beginning of the episode?

Reed: Well I wondered why is it such, it seems to be such a big deal to Noah when he wakes up, he’s like in a rage and he’s cursing his grandson who wasn’t even involved because Ham saw him naked and I just wondered, I mean it might be awkward or embarrassing to see your dad naked, but is it curse worthy and even curse worthy to him son?

Marty: Right, right. Something definitely odd and weird is happening here. It’s helpful to know that the terms to see nakedness or to uncover nakedness, which is not the same phrase, but can feel related. These expressions of nakedness are Hebrew idioms that usually refer to something else.

The idea of seeing nakedness can refer to one of two things in the Hebrew mind. It can refer to sexual union, if you’re seeing somebody’s nakedness, and if it’s a marriage setting or something like that, it would be sexual union. It could be something like molestation, if somebody is abusing somebody else and they see their nakedness.

Or it could be the concept of seeing as in taking, like you actually see something and you do more than just see it. You see it and you perceive it. You see it and you take it. You see it and you do more than just look at it. You see it. The same idea in the Hebrew word “shema.” You can listen to something and then you can hear it. You can understand it, perceive it, obey it.

Like the word “shema” is so much deeper than just “hear.” In the same way that to see nakedness can be so much deeper than to just look at. And so one of the other things that you can end up doing with this is you can find a taking of nakedness, or to put it more bluntly, castration.

We can actually look at, Brent—do you have Deuteronomy 22? Give us Deuteronomy 22:30. And we can see this first expression, the sexual union nature of this expression.

Brent: “A man is not to marry his father’s wife. He must not dishonor his father’s bed.”

Marty: Can you read it in the ESV? I never asked Brent Billings to read me anything in the ESV. So I’m throwing him a curve ball right here. [laughter]

Reed: That’s why I’m making such big eyes at you right now. Wait, you’re asking for the ESV? I thought that was my translation that you always bash me for.

Marty: That’s okay. This time it’ll get the job done.

Brent: “A man shall not take his father’s wife so that he does not uncover his father’s nakedness.”

Marty: All right, there’s that phrasing. A different phrase, but the same kind of idiomatic concept. So, a lot of people have actually, I think Dr. Michael Heiser had this perspective. A lot of textual critics will say that what’s taking place here is that Ham is sleeping with Noah’s wife. He’s sleeping with his mom, whether it’s a stepmom or whatever, however you want to do the math on that, but that he’s sleeping with Noah’s wife.

However, Christian or Jewish Midrash never went that direction, which I find so interesting because that’s such an easy play. Like it’s so easy. It’s not that they didn’t see that. It’s that they chose in the Jewish tradition to not go that direction. And what wants to grab my attention is why.

What the Jewish Midrash says is that Ham castrated his father, which I know for a lot of people that have listened to this podcast in the past, this is the first crazy, crazy idea. It simply doesn’t say that, Marty. And I know, in fact, the Midrashic story is kind of nuts.

We’ll talk about it in season six, but we’ll talk about the story about Noah feeding a lion on the ark and gets his genitals shredded—and that’s how the castration happened. Like, it’s a crazy story. I’m not gonna lie. But why does the Jewish Midrash want to make this a story not about sexual union and sexual disobedience, but of castration?

Brent: And just on the idea of Hebrew idioms, if you’re like, well, how, how could that possibly be an idiom for, for any of those things? We’re already very familiar with one of them. Maybe so much that it has lullaby affected us because Adam knew his wife Eve and she became pregnant.

Marty: Absolutely.

Brent: We’re familiar with some of these idioms, just not this one necessarily.

Marty: Totally. Great example, Brent. Totally. All right. Well, the Midrash is trying to get a few things that we’ve already noticed in the text. The Midrash is trying to point out some things that on a first cursory reading you might miss.

First of all, we said that Noah curses the wrong guy. Why would Noah do that? Why would Noah, especially if it’s castration, especially if it’s such a direct offense, why would Noah curse Canaan and not curse Ham? On the surface, it seems to make that make even less sense.

And yet, Reed, you said that this story was paralleling another story. What was it?

Reed: Did I say I was paralleling another story?

Marty: Yeah, you said this story.

Reed: The- the Garden of- the Garden of Eden story?

Marty: Yeah, the Garden of Eden story.

Reed: Oh, okay. Okay, I thought you were talking like another Canaan story. Canaan- uh, yeah, the Garden of Eden. Okay, yeah.

Marty: Now Brent, when we were doing the Garden of Eden story a few episodes ago, there was like this really weird paragraph. Do you remember? It was a paragraph about what?

Brent: The thing about the rivers

Marty: Oh, and we said that was really weird. It seemed unnecessary. It seemed like it didn’t need to be there. And there were how many rivers, Brent?

Brent: Yeah, it didn’t seem necessary and there were four rivers and like how they talked about each one of them like was was kind of weird.

Marty: Uh-huh. And one river, I hardly mentioned anything about, like I’d only literally mentioned its name and existence, but I said nothing else about it, not where it was from, not what it was doing. It just like this, like there was three rivers, almost a fourth river. Right? You remember that?

Brent: Well in the first river all more than half the text goes over the first river and then you get some detail in the second river almost nothing on the third and then and then the fourth is just, it’s just kind of briefly mentioned.

Marty: Right. The Jews looked at this and they said, “Well, you know what rivers represent?” In the same way that trees, we talk about family trees. Rivers are another image that are used in Jewish thought to talk about the tributaries of a river, to talk about lineage, to talk about family, to talk about descendants.

Noah has how many sons? Three sons, and yet there were four rivers in what would have been the parallel paragraph. God told Noah in the ark, when he comes out of the ark, to do what? To be—

Brent: fruitful and multiply.

Marty: To be fruitful and multiply, should have more sons. And you’re like, of course, it’s supposed to be a fourth son. There was four rivers. There’s supposed to be four sons.

But if Ham has castrated Noah, obviously is unable to have a fourth son. So now what is the Jewish Midrash trying to teach us about why Noah, why would Noah read? Why are you hearing? What makes sense to you of why Noah would curse not Ham, but Canaan?

Reed: Well, if it’s a castration, then no fourth son.

Marty: Absolutely. It’s as if Ham has taken away his ability to have progeny. So Noah is cursing Ham’s progeny.

What this does is it turns it into a story about vengeance, not sexual immorality, not some kind of just arbitrary obedience or disobedience, but it now makes a story about vengeance.

We said, if this was a parallel telling, we said that creation was a story about learning how to stop creating. The very next story was Adam and Eve. Will they trust the invitation to stop creating? The answer to that question was no.

We said in the last episode that the flood was about learning how to stop destroying. So the next story is now the invitation for Noah to trust. Can you stop destroying? And the answer to that question ends up tragically being no.

And this does seem to fit, like when Noah wakes up and learns that would have been, that would definitely been, and a lot of people, a lot of Westerners will get hung up in the details. How did he not wake up in the midst of a castration? And I think we might be getting a little lost in the details when we start asking, we might be messing with the Midrash is trying to get us to see in the story.

There might be ways to answer that question, but there might be questions that may be somewhat missing that point. But it does make some of those questions make sense.

Brent: Or maybe it was just really, really good wine.

Marty: Well, that’s some of the answers when I do get that question is, people can be drunk enough that they can go through quite a bit of injury

Brent: Yeah, yeah.

Marty: and not wake. And so that’s definitely a possibility, but we don’t want to miss the point in light of that. I think the last time we did this episode that I thought was unbelievably good

Brent: Okay, well, before I get to my best point, let me bring it back around to that earlier comment. The three sons of Noah, and from them came the people who were scattered over the whole earth. And we’ll talk about numbers later, but numbers have a tendency to represent things. I mean, I guess we talked about it in the introductory episode.

Numbers have this qualitative thing and the number four is often used to refer to the Gentiles or, you know, anyone outside of the Jewish people. And so that’s supposed to be these people who scatter over the whole earth, the four corners of the earth, but there’s only three sons to do it.

Marty: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great point. Tell me the other great point that you made.

Brent: Okay, the other one was, like, Noah comes out of his tent and he’s like, “What have you done?”

Marty: Yes.

Brent: You know, I mean, he doesn’t literally say that in the text, but it’s like, he comes out like, “What is going on? What happened here?” And that was God’s question back in the garden.

Marty: Absolutely. Like Noah’s playing the God character. And I love that observation. I heard a Jewish teacher once say that the word that Noah, the word that it uses for Noah’s curse is only used for God. Noah’s the only human character in the entire scripture to be given that word for curse.

There’s other words for curse where humans curse each other, but this is the only time in scripture where this particular curse is engaged in by a human character. Only God engages in it. So Noah’s playing the God character here.

Reed: But it seems like not very well.

Marty: Yes, exactly. Yes.

Reed: I think the interesting parallel to me that is here, a contrast again-- and I think it’s so interesting to think about parallels, either within biblical stories or between biblical stories and other ancient Near Eastern stories.

I often find that the meatiest part of the treasure, for me, is in what then is different. Where does it diverge? And in the garden story, it is always important to me to point out to people that notice that God is not actually cursing the people.

He curses the ground. He curses the serpent. But He doesn’t put the curse directly on the man or the woman. It is because of them. And here, Noah, it’s like, I just imagine him in this vengeful rage doing his sort of worst impression of God like, “Oh yeah, and I can curse something too.”

And then he lays it on a person where it’s not supposed to be. And just to really double down and add insult to injury, he puts it on the wrong person.

Marty: Absolutely. Which is the total cancerous danger of vengeance. Because vengeance never truly stays where it ought to. always goes, which leads me to kind of the concluding thought for this episode here, which is, this is what Reed just is articulating is why this matters.

Because a lot of people come away from this episode, and this is one of the first episodes where they’re like, “I really just don’t get it. I kind of have a problem with the castration thing. I prefer, Marty, I just prefer the reading where he sleeps with his mom.” Here’s why this matters, because if it’s about sexual infidelity and sexual disobedience, then who’s the offender?

Brent: Ham is. And actually his mom too?

Marty: Sure, but absolutely.

Brent: Maybe?

Marty: We’ll just make it easy and say Ham’s the offender. And then Ham is the one that did something wrong and then maybe pays for it with the curse of his son. I guess those details don’t really work out, but definitely on a basic level, Ham’s the offender.

But if this story is about castration and Noah’s action of what Reed just said, he’s not playing the God part well. Sure, Ham’s done something wrong. That’s clear. But if the lesson isn’t about Ham’s wrong, but about Noah’s wrong, then obviously the offender just became who?

Reed: Noah.

Marty: Noah. And now I come back, Reed, to your question about nations. Could the larger point underneath this, could it be about where the people of Canaan came from? And could it be that they’re not just the product of rampant disobedience, but could Could Jewish wisdom try to be teaching us that, you know, a whole lot of this actually is our fault, Noah’s fault?

This is the danger of vengeance. This is how dangerous vengeance can be as we record this episode. And this will probably be going on in a lot of different ways for years to come. Right now, as we record this, Israel and Palestine are having quite an interesting situation over in the Middle East.

Brent: That’s one way to put it.

Marty: That’s one way to put it. And you could say that we’re still—this is the danger of vengeance. You could poetically, I’m not saying technically, poetically say that this kind of stuff is why vengeance can be so dangerous.

Because it’s about our kids and our grandkids and our descendants, and it even becomes about nations and people groups. Vengeance has a way of kind of sneaking out and being uncontrolled.

If only Noah could have been made in the image of God, he was. But if only Noah could have lived out of that image and decided to know when to stop destroying, to say the cycle’s going to stop with me. But vengeance is so dangerous, and that becomes the lesson for the story.

Brent: And what does Noah do after this curse? He lived 350 years and then he died. Like he didn’t do anything else. He just sat in his bitterness for 350 years.

Marty: Sure. Yeah.

Brent: Like imagine, he got nowhere with it.

Reed: The difference is, I think the Abraham discussion, when we get to that, and the difference in the way that Abraham reacts to destruction of the world, or Sodom and Gomorrah, and the way that Noah reacts to the destruction of his world are so very different, and I think this will all come back into play, like the kind of person that Noah is deciding to be here.

Marty: Absolutely.

Reed: This is one of the things that I love the most about the Hebrew Scriptures is the capacity for self-criticism to say, “Maybe we were wrong,” or even, and you think about it in some of the way that other great figures of the Hebrew Scriptures are portrayed, nobody is just clean all the way through, you know?

Marty: Yep.

Reed: You think about, even—I’ve been reading a lot of the David story lately and David is portrayed as being very problematic and having a lot of issues. And you might expect more legendary tales of Kings who are just, you know, great and wonderful and glorious.

And the Hebrew scriptures decide to actually look at the problems that maybe we have created. And I think it’s an incredible posture to encourage us readers to say, okay, what about me?

Marty: Yeah.

Reed: Where do I—Richard Rohr said that any nation that loses the capacity for self-criticism will become idolatrous, and I think about that line all the time, and that’s what I love about stories like this, it’s like, okay, we’re trying not to become idolatrous, we worship God, we have some problems that we’ve gotta own and get figured out.

Marty: Totally. There’s a pretty good lesson in there, Brent. I know the castration thing’s weird, but it’s a pretty good lesson nonetheless.

Brent: It is weird. And yeah, I, you know, we’ll talk, we’ll introduce more midrash as we go. Uh, you know, some of you may not be able to help yourselves and you’re going to want to just dive into that. It really is crazy. Like if you think this is crazy, there’s plenty more where that came from.

So I, you know, unless, unless that’s just really your, your natural leaning, I would say, hold off on the Midrash for now. We’ll introduce some stuff as we go. And then, you know, later on, we’ll give you some tools to explore some of this stuff more directly, because there’s, there’s still a lot that we got to go over and like, introduce all of these concepts, because there’s, there’s so much to this Eastern way of thinking, this Jewish way of thinking that we don’t yet understand coming from the typical circles that we do.

So I would encourage you: just hang on. We’re going to walk you through the whole thing and give you all the tools. By the time we’re done with the Scriptures, we’re going to give you all the tools you need to study all this stuff.

Marty: Baby steps.

Brent: Baby steps! Love it. Okay, well, that’ll do it for this episode. All the details that you need are at bemadiscipleship.com. You can use the contact page to get in touch. You can find a group or join a group or form a group, whatever you need is on the groups page. You can get in touch with us about that. If you need any help, all of our stuff’s on the website. So just go there and thanks for joining us on the BEMA podcast. We’ll talk to you again soon.

Morgan Dybing: Hi, I’m Morgan Dybing, a BEMA listener from Minneapolis, and here is the prayer from Episode 5’s Companion.

God, help us to stop the cycle of vengeance that roars at the tip of our tongue, the ends of our fingers, eating away at our heart. Teach us to forgive, our words full of life, our hands held open, our hearts bearing peace. Teach us to love our friends and enemies, all created in your image. Amen.