7:22-23 - As we all know, God tells Noah to put two of every kind of animal into the Ark, so that they wouldn't perish in the flood. This raises, for me, a question: Why did God choose this particular method -- water -- to destroy the world? In the first place, it meant that, automatically, sea creatures got a pass. Is there something special about them? Something about the antedilluvian technological difficulty in building aquaria with which to save sea creatures? I suppose it was the lowest-tech way to simultaneously (a) wipe out the earth and (b) make it possible for a couple of people to survive. But it still seems unkind for all the animals that weren't saved. Only two of each get saves...except for the fishes? Hmmm.
9:20-27 - Wow, how did I miss this little tawdry story in Sunday School? The first thing that Noah -- the "one who found favor with the LORD" for reasons that are never given, the father of all humanity -- does upon emerging from the Ark after the waters recede? He plants a vineyard, gets drunk, and strips naked. One of his sons, Canaan, sees him and tells his brothers, Shem and Japeth, who, without looking at their drunk, naked father, cover him up. Noah wakes up and curses Canaan -- as if he had a chance to look away -- and blesses Shem and Japeth, who had the advantage of being alerted to their father's condition. Wow. Canaan gets a pretty raw deal here. Shame on Noah.
11:1-9 - The Tower of Babel story... Somehow I remembered there being more to it than these brief 9 verses. And the lesson! I always thought the story was about how the people thought they could become "like God" by building the tower, which, understandably, angered God. But that's just not here in the text, which says that they build the tower to make for themselves "a name, lest [they] be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth." Seems pretty reasonable to me -- engage in a civic engineering project to bring the people together. So why does God object? Not because he considers their doing so an affront to his power, but because "If, as one people with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act, then nothing that they map propose to do will be out of their reach." [JPS translation] So...God basically condemns the entire human race to divisions, discord and misunderstandings because, when they shared a language, they decided to build something?!? Sorry, but in my book these are pretty lame reasons for God to act in this way.
11:26-32 - I never realized Abramah and Sarah had different names before having kids. They were Abram and Sarai.
Monday, December 14, 2009
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What always made me wonder in the story of Noah (Genesis 9:24) is how he knew, when he woke up, that his son Canaan had laughed at him when he was lying naked and unconscious? How could he possibly have learned such a fact? Shem and Japeth would have had to tell him. If they did, what a couple of shmucks they were!
ReplyDeleteI would expect there to be midrash aggadah out the wazoo on this episode. It would be interesting to see how the rabbis fill out the story.
You know, it's funny, I missed that little bit! But you're right, of course. I've got to do some more digging on this and see how it gets explained.
ReplyDeleteA CJ Rabbi once told me that all of the Avot et al. are portrayed seriously flawed people in the Tanakh, in order to show (among other things) that even flawed people can be great. Hmmm. Not sure I buy this...