⁂ L. RhodesMar 15

(Picking up from this thread: https://merveilles.town/@lrhodes/116206321100377847 )

The Noah narrative is particularly patchy. Lots of repeated details, not always consistent with one another. Noah's children are explicitly introduced multiple times. The number of animals brought onto the Ark is explained at least three times, with two versions specifying two of every animal, and one introducing a special "seven pairs" rule for clean animals. We're told twice how old Noah was at the time of the flood. That sort of repetition and variation is often an indication that the editor has pieced together bits from multiple traditions.
#Bible

⁂ L. Rhodes (@[email protected])

Content warning: reading Genesis (Cain and Abel again)

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Show thread⁂ L. RhodesMar 15
By the way, I've decided to break my public note-taking into separate threads to make it less unwieldy, with CWs for headings, tagged #Bible to make it easier to mute, since I'm aware that the subject matter can be pretty sensitive for some. Apologies if earlier formats were disruptive.
Show thread⁂ L. RhodesMar 15
The editorial priorities are good to keep in mind when reading Biblical texts. It seems clear that the person or (more likely) group who put Genesis into its present form was working with a set of relatively diverse materials, likely pulled from several traditions with already permeable borders. For example, we know that Babylonian mythology had its own flood narrative, but the Genesis editors appear to have been working with multiple Israelite traditions, possibly associated with multiple tribes contained in the traditional Israelite polity. So there seems to be some effort, OTOH, to piece together different not-quite-related stories into a single, unified narrative — that's one thing accomplished by the rather tedious genealogies connecting, say, Adam to Noah — and that has to be balanced with an effort to draw in traditions that will tie Israelites together by including the traditions that are important to various cultural subgroups.
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Show thread⁂ L. RhodesMar 15
For example, a common motif in traditional myths and legends is the invention of cultural institutions that might otherwise seem timeless. And from the Eden narrative through the Noah narrative, agriculture seems to be invented multiple times, by multiple personalities. Mostly, the editors don't seem too interested in the invention of agriculture, though — they're just drawing in different traditions for their own purposes, and those different invention narratives are embedded in the final text because they were integral to the traditions the editors had at hand.
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Show thread⁂ L. RhodesMar 15
Reading the #Bible, you sometimes catch glimpses of traditions that weren't quite central to what the editors were trying to achieve, but that were common enough to the audiences they were writing for that they were worth keeping in, without much explanation. For example: "The Nephilim were on the earth in those days…" Oh. Okay. The Nephilim. And who were they exactly? The Bible doesn't go into it much, and the Nephilim don't really do much of anything in the narrative. The editors were compiling for an audience that would have already known that tradition, and the reference serves to ground the text in the familiar, but not much else. And I think a lot of the difficulties that crop up in trying to understand the Bible can be addressed by starting with the premise that the compilers were trying to produce a text that people would embrace, and thus had to work within the confines of traditions their audience already endorsed. Sometimes, you'll even see them attempting to gloss a tradition that doesn't really fit the direction of a chapter, and it's a good bet that the gloss is there because they couldn't just outright ignore the tradition, for fear of losing their audience.
Show thread⁂ L. RhodesMar 15

You can kind of trace the different traditions through the Noah narrative. It seems to start with the rationale that the Lord floods the earth because "the sons of God" are breeding with humans to make them effectively immortal — there's sort of a Greco-Roman vibe here, maybe gleaned from Phoenician contacts.

Then it gives a second reason: Humankind had grown wicked, and the Lord repents of Creation — this is the version most people remember.

Then there's a third version, similar to the second, but I think the wording links this one back to the Eden narrative: "the earth was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted its ways upon the earth." You can read "earth" here as shorthand for "everything," but I think you could also understand this as a continuation of the theme of humans changing the very nature of the earth. Flesh, which was fashioned out of earth, becomes a conduit for passing corruption back to the earth. The Lord has decided to wipe away the wickedness not just of humanity, but also the wickedness in the earth itself.

Show thread⁂ L. RhodesMar 15
Back to the Nephilim and "the heroes that were of old" for a moment: I think what's going on here is that the compilers are dealing with an inconvenient tradition, first by acknowledging it, then by placing it prior to the flood, so that it can be dispensed with. They're saying, "Yes, of course, there were demigods at one point, just as you've always heard, but they were killed before everything we're going to talk about here." Why? Because the editors are focused on a fundamental different theology, one premised on covenants with the Lord. They want to foreclose the possibility that the messiahs who crop up in the rest of their narrative are demigods, and frame them, rather, as upholders of the covenant. The fact that they have to deal with the Nephilim first testifies to the popularity of the tradition that they're expunging via the flood. And, indeed, before the end of the chapter, the Lord promises to establish a covenant with Noah.
Show thread⁂ L. RhodesMar 15
Okay, so the Lord spares Noah and his family, and Noah builds an altar and offers burnt sacrifices to the Lord, which pleases the Lord enough that he swears off destroying the earth anymore. This pays off the "seven pairs" addendum from earlier on, but I think it may also serve as an innovation on the Cain/Abel conflict — Abel's offering isn't presented as "burnt." There's a thru-line from Adam to Noah that shows a progressive honing of the sort of offerings that are acceptable to the Lord. That connection to the Eden story is further solidified by the form of the Lord's promise: "I will never again curse the ground because of humankind…" Humans are fair game, "for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth," but the earth is now exempted from the guilt-by-association that previously attended it.
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Show thread⁂ L. RhodesMar 15
Next, the Lord gives humankind dominion over the animals, on the premise that Noah saved them from destruction. This is likely a different tradition from the Eden narrative, since the Lord has effectively already given Man dominion over animals by creating them as companions. (Not to mention that Abel was a shepherd.) There's a callback to the premise that humans were created in God's image, so presumably this is connected to the creation narrative in Genesis 1.
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Show thread⁂ L. RhodesMar 16

Okay, tricky passage. Noah invents viticulture. (My concordance links "Noah" to the Hebrew word for "rest," so this may have been Noah's traditional culture-hero role, and indeed, this story seems utterly distinct from the flood narrative.) One of his sons, Ham, discovers Noah drunk and naked in his own tent. Ham's brothers, Shem and Japheth take measures to avoid seeing Noah's nakedness. Noah curses not Ham, but his son, Canaan, to slavery.

Okay, so why a curse? Some scholars suggest that it's implied that Ham took advantage of Noah, but I don't think that it's necessary to go that far. Rather, you could see this as referring back to the awareness of nakedness in the Eden story. Noah's drunkenness puts him into a pre-expulsion state, as though he had lost the knowledge of good and evil that humankind gained from eating the fruit. (The echo of the fruit of Eden in the grapes of viticulture seems to reinforce that interpretation.)

Show thread⁂ L. RhodesMar 16

Okay, but why curse Canaan? Well, cursing Canaan seems to be the point. Because Canaan is the namesake of a resident nation that is reviled throughout the Hebrew canon. In other books, the Israelites exterminate the Canaanites in conquest of their land.

My guess would be that Canaan was not original to the story, but that the legend of Noah's nakedness was co-opted to explain the status of contemporary Canaanites. Ham may have already been a recognized part of the original legend, which made it necessary to commute the curse to a son, rather than recast Canaan as Noah's son.

That's mostly supposition, though. It really is a tricky package.

Show thread⁂ L. RhodesMar 16
I've also seen it suggested that Canaanite religion was essentially a fertility cult that used ritual nudity to promote crop and vineyard growth, in which case, the Ham story could be a way of repudiating Canaanite influence on Israelite religion, much the same way that Cain and Abel repudiate certain forms of ritual offering. I have read enough research about Canaan to know whether that's independently verifiable, though, or based entirely on Biblical references to Canaan.
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@lrhodes I don't really buy that, on the grounds that the Ham story represents an isolated and individual incident as opposed to the kind of collective ritual you'd expect from religious practices. If the Israelites wanted to refute that kind of influence, I'd expect them to do so through a Sodom or a Babel-esque (or Golden Calf-esque. Why didn't I think of that a minute ago?) parable.
Mar 16 at 2:04amWeb