Diachronicity in the Pentateuch - The Drunkenness of Noah (Gen 9:18-27)

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austendw
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Diachronicity in the Pentateuch - The Drunkenness of Noah (Gen 9:18-27)

Post by austendw »

I’ve been banging on about diachronic approaches to the biblical text and many people think that I must mean the Documentary Hypothesis. But diachronic approaches don't have an inherent connection to that 19th Century theory, and particularly not to its absolute chronological scheme. In the traditional Documentary Hypothesis, the Drunkenness of Noah episode, was considered – in its entirety – part of the pre-priestly J (Jahwist) source, but that plays no part in the diachronic approach to the text, below.

The point of all this is to try to find the rifts in the text that cannot be explained synchronically and then try to find a composition history that will make plausible sense of the text's diachronic development. Many of those rifts and problems were discovered centuries ago and "solved", at that time, by the creation of tales [midrashim], to explain the inconsistencies and/or bridge the gaps, and other similar explanations. Others have been discovered more recently by other scholars. Of course, we may disagree with the solutions put forward by all of those earlier scholars, but we can build on their well-honed skills in literary criticism.

Here's the story as it appears in Genesis 9:18-27
18 And the sons of Noah who went forth from the ark were Shem, Ham and Yaphet. And Ham was the father of Canaan. 19 These three were the sons of Noah; and from these the whole earth was peopled.
20 And Noah, man of the ground, began [?..] and he planted a vineyard; 21 And he drank of the wine, and became drunk, and lay uncovered in his tent. 22 And Ham the father of Canaan saw the nakedness of his father and he told his two brothers outside, 23 so Shem and Yaphet took a garment, laid it upon both their shoulders, and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father; their faces were turned away, and they did not see their father's nakedness.
24 And Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, 25 and he said:
“Cursed be Canaan - a slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers."
26* And he said:
"Blessed be the YHWH the god of Shem - and let Canaan be his slave.
27 God enlarge Yaphet - and let him dwell in the tents of Shem - and let Canaan be his slave."
But this story has problems: When Noah woke how could he have known that his son simply saw him in an undignified drunken state? What happened to him, exactly? The term "uncover the nakedness" is used in Leviticus to mean having sex with someone, and both words appear here (with grammatical differences). Bruce Louden et al have (rightly) noted the connections with Hesiod, and propose that originally the story concerned castration. He is surely right, but whether the switch from castration happened at a literary stage or a pre-literary, oral stage, of transmission is unclear and there is no evidence of castration in text as we have it. Talmudic Rabbis proposed one or other of these explanations (b. Sanhedrin 70a). David M Carr doubts either, since in v. 24 the issue of seeing the father's nakedness is clearly taken literally. But I think the diachronic analysis explains this (see below). But there are other anomalies: Why is Ham is described as the youngest son, when he elsewhere is always the middle son. Why are we told that Ham is the father of Canaan in 9:22 when we had already read this in 9:18? Why is it that Ham is the son who disrespects his father but it is his son Canaan who is cursed?

Here's what I (at this moment) think is the best diachronic explanation for these discrepancies that I can think of.

(1) The earliest version - Canaan's wicked act and the curse it earns him:
18* And the sons of Noah were Shem, Yaphet and Canaan.

20 And Noah, man of the ground, began [..?..] and he planted a vineyard; 21 And he drank of the wine, and became drunk, and lay uncovered in his tent. 22a* And Canaan saw the nakedness of his father [....?]
24 And Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, 25 and he said:
“Cursed be Canaan - a slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers."
The first verse 9:18 is actually the last verse of the genealogy of Noah, and is a sequel to Genesis 5:29. Some commentators (incl. Louden) assume that the text has been changed to Canaan from Ham, and the curse similarly amended. But it seems to me (and Carr is of the same opinion) that the curse against Canaan is the very raison d'etre of the story, and it must therefore have been the earliest version.

(2) The "bowdlerised" version:
18* And the sons of Noah were Shem, Yaphet and Canaan.

20 And Noah, man of the ground, began [?..] and he planted a vineyard; 21 And he drank of the wine, and became drunk, and lay uncovered in his tent. 22 And Canaan saw the nakedness of his father,

And he told his two brothers outside, 23 so Shem and Yaphet took a garment, laid it upon both their shoulders, and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father; their faces were turned away, and they did not see their father's nakedness.
24 And Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, 25 and he said:
“Cursed be Canaan - a slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers."

26* And he said:
"Blessed be the <tents (אהלי)> of Shem - and let Canaan be his slave.
27* God enlarge (yapht - יַפְתְּ) Yaphet - and let Canaan be his slave."
Here, by adding Canaan's two older brothers in verse 24, Canaan's crime is diminished to literally looking at the nakedness of his father without doing anything about it - disrespect - unlike the brothers, who cover him up, averting their eyes. The two brothers receive two-phrase blessings that parallel Canaan's curse. (I've also included the speculative reconstruction that it was originally the tents of Shem that were blessed, which was later overwritten. See below).

(3) The Post-Diluvian version
18 And the sons of Noah who went forth from the ark were Shem Ham and Yaphet and Ham was the father of Canaan.
19 These three were the sons of Noah; and from these the whole earth was peopled.

20 And Noah, man of the ground, began [?..] and he planted a vineyard; 21 And he drank of the wine, and became drunk, and lay uncovered in his tent. 22 And Ham the father of Canaan saw the nakedness of his father ...
And he told his two brothers outside, 23 so Shem and Yaphet took a garment, laid it upon both their shoulders, and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father; their faces were turned away, and they did not see their father's nakedness.
24 And Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, 25 and he said:
“Cursed be Canaan - a slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers."

26* And he said:
"Blessed be the <tents (אהלי)> of Shem - and let Canaan be his slave.
27 God enlarge Yaphet,
- and let him dwell in the tents (אָהֳלֵי) of Shem - and let Canaan be his slave."
The above may involve different amendments, telescoped. In any case at this stage the story is linked to the well known (Priestly) version, in which the sons of Noah were Shem, Ham & Yaphet are the fathers of post-diluvian mankind. Ham is therefore made the father of Canaan and he is the perpetrator of the wicked act, rather than Canaan, who is now Noah's grandson. An additional clause is added to Yaphet's blessing, which refers back to the tents of Shem in the previous line. What does Yaphet dwelling in the tents of Shem mean? Wajdenbaum & Gmirkin argue that this must refer to Alexander's conquests - and they may be right. But "dwelling in the tents of" is not the most obvious turn of phrase to evoke imperial conquest, and the allusion may be to some other, less dramatic situation.

(4) The penultimate version (part of Gen 9:26 only):
"Blessed be the God (אֱלֹהֵי) of Shem
Here "tents of" (אהלי) becomes "God of" (אֱלֹהֵי) by means of the transposition of two letters. It's unclear whether this was a scribal error, or the scribed intentionally changed it, thinking that he was correcting the defective version he was copying.

(5) Final version (part of Gen 9:26 only):
"Blessed be YHWH the God of Shem
The name YHWH added (part of a redactional tendency repeated throughout Genesis 1-11)

I have just now come across a very interesting essay by David Frankel (whose approach I am certainly familiar with) Noah, Ham and the Curse of Canaan: Who Did What to Whom in the Tent? - which independently agrees with the division between 1 & 2 above. (And in note 22 he references the notion that the three sons were originally Shem, Japhet & Canaan.) However, he has an even more radical take on it, and believes that originally the father abused by Canaan was in fact Ham, and that the story was only later transferred to Noah. There are a number of reasons why I am not convinced by that, attractive though it is in some respects. If the drunk Noah story was in fact earlier than the Ark Noah, then his objections to the notion of such a story being originally part of the entire Noah narrative disappears. In any case I suspect that those same objections would have militated against the transfer of the story from Ham to Noah, as he proposes, as the ideological "benefits" of making this a Noah story seem meagre.
Jair
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Re: Diachronicity in the Pentateuch - The Drunkenness of Noah (Gen 9:18-27)

Post by Jair »

I have read an article on thetorah.com that suggests something very similar to your theory here, and another article on the same site that proposes that the story may have originally been about Ham getting drunk on wine, and not Noah. Either way it’s interesting.

Edit: And I just now noticed that you mentioned the “Ham priority” theory at the end of your post. My bad. I got too excited and replied before reading the whole thing :|

Edit (again): And you linked the very article I mentioned. I am just going to shush and read your whole post thoroughly lol

Edit (for the last time I swear lol): I’ve read through your post and see that you’re not convinced of the “Ham priority” theory. I wonder, could it be possible that the story was transferred to Noah as a polemic against the priests or school that established Noah as the hero of the flood narrative? Or is this unlikely?
austendw
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Re: Diachronicity in the Pentateuch - The Drunkenness of Noah (Gen 9:18-27)

Post by austendw »

Jair wrote: Tue Jun 13, 2023 7:44 pm I have read an article on thetorah.com that suggests something very similar to your theory here, and another article on the same site that proposes that the story may have originally been about Ham getting drunk on wine, and not Noah. Either way it’s interesting.

Edit: And I just now noticed that you mentioned the “Ham priority” theory at the end of your post. My bad. I got too excited and replied before reading the whole thing :|

Edit (again): And you linked the very article I mentioned. I am just going to shush and read your whole post thoroughly lol

Edit (for the last time I swear lol): I’ve read through your post and see that you’re not convinced of the “Ham priority” theory. I wonder, could it be possible that the story was transferred to Noah as a polemic against the priests or school that established Noah as the hero of the flood narrative? Or is this unlikely?
Thanks for responding.

Frankel discusses "my" version in note 8 of his essay, and suggests that there is no sense in the OT that Israel/Jacob and Canaan were brothers
"Theoretically, this makes perfect sense. On the other hand, it implies a conception of Canaan as brother of Shem similar to the way that Genesis presents Esau/Edom as the brother of Jacob/Israel. The problem with this is that there is very little evidence of a conception of Israelite kinship with the Canaanites in biblical literature."
In response to that I'd say that Shem is not a simple stand-in for Israel, and the genealogical distances between Shem, Canaan and Israel are relevant. Shem is an N-times great-grandfather of Israel/Jacob, making Canaan Israel's N-times great-uncle (if Canaan is son of Noah, or N-times removed 1st-cousin for Canaan as son of Ham) - whereas Israel's neighbours are much closer relations: Edom/Esau is Israel's brother; Ishmael is his uncle; and at a slighly greater remove, Ammon & Moab are 2nd-cousins. Unlike those closely related eponyms, Canaan is a distant primeval character (as is Shem). In the spy story in Numbers Canaan is explicitly associated with the primeval sons of Anak and Nephilim (Numb 20:22,28,33) - confirming that Canaan was considered a relic of primordial days. For this reason I think Frankel is mistaken to suggest that the interpretation I've adopted "implies a unique tradition of familial brotherhood between Israel and Canaan that was denied or suppressed by the dominant biblical tradition" or that this in turn compromises its plausibility.

Another element that Frankel discusses is this:
The words “a man of the soil” sound like they are introducing us to a character of which we little or no acquaintance. Yet, in the current version of the text, the verse introduces the well-known Noah! What is more, it is strange that nothing was mentioned of Noah’s profession before this stage and that only now, at the end of the account of his life, do we hear that he was a man of the field.

Instead, it seems that two different characters are being conflated in the present form of the Hebrew text—Noah, originally the hero of the flood, and Ham the man of the soil who was molested by his son Canaan.
I explain this differently (and more in line with some older scholars): Noah was not originally the hero of the flood at all: he was originally the man of the soil who first planted the vine (and suffered for his efforts). Only later was the story of the flood associated with him. I find it hard to believe that, if Noah was originally the hero of the flood, a later editor would have had good enough reason to move the story of Canaan's outrage & curse from Ham and attach it to Noah. Frankel's suggested reasons seem to me to be too weak to justify it.

There is one attractive part of Frankel's thesis that makes me sorry to reject it and that is that if this story originally appeared after Gen 10:6, which names the sons of Ham as "Cush, Egypt, Put, and Canaan" then the curse on Canaan
"fits well with historical reality. The Canaanite territory was politically subservient to Egypt for a long period of time."
Nevertheless, as the curse makes Canaan subservient to his brothers in the plural, Frankel's proposal to relate it to Egypt as historical overlord of Canaan doesn't quite fit the context as accurately as he would like; there is after all no historical context for Canaan being subservient to "Cush and Put" as well. My own view is that the curse on Canaan & blessings for Shem & Yaphet reflected the writers idea that the primordial Canaanites in the southern levant were ultimately displaced by descendents of Shem and Yaphet: the Israelites and Philistines (understanding the Philistines as being of Mediterranean origin).

Finally, you ask whether "the story was transferred to Noah as a polemic against the priests or school that established Noah as the hero of the flood narrative". I don't particularly go for that, for a couple of reasons. I can't see that Noah-as-hero-of-flood was, or was likely to have been, an issue of much contention and would therefore be a pretty oblique polemic. But more importantly for me, I don't think the story is told to undermine Noah. Noah is the farmer who first planted the vine and made wine, and it was for this reason that he received his name:
And he called his name Noah (נֹחַ), saying "This one shall bring us relief (yenahamenu /יְנַחֲמֵנוּ] from our work and from the toil of our hands from out of the ground which YHWH has cursed." (Gen 5:29)*
The implication of the story is that, as "inventor" of wine, he was unawares of its effects and his drunkenness wouldn't have had a negative connotation. In any case, Canaan's behaviour, be it mild disrespect or serious abuse of his father, would surely have been considered totally reprehensible: this filial ingratitude made Noah, like King Lear, "more sinned against than sinning".

By the way, I think that the passage in italics above was added later when the Eden story was added. Idan Dershowitz in this essayrightly sees Gen 8:21a ("And YHWH said in his heart: 'I will never again curse the ground for man’s sake'") as an explicit reference to the curse of the ground at the end of the Eden story (Gen 3:17), and I suspect that when the Eden story was added, Noah's was upgraded to the man who found favour with God (Gen 6:8) and thereby ended the curse on the ground. It was because of this that, in yet a further textual development, the flood story was then attached to him.

* This, by the way, is another reason for thinking that the vine-planting story is the earliest story attached to Noah: his name/naming explicitly alludes to it.
StephenGoranson
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Re: Diachronicity in the Pentateuch - The Drunkenness of Noah (Gen 9:18-27)

Post by StephenGoranson »

Thanks, austendw, for this proposed instantiation of diachronicity.
Without endorsing every detail above, myth and religion do appear to go far back.
Perhaps neilgodfrey is busy elsewhere, painting views other than his own as, in effect, due to zombification.
rgprice
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Re: Diachronicity in the Pentateuch - The Drunkenness of Noah (Gen 9:18-27)

Post by rgprice »

This is interesting because there are other aspects of Genesis 6 that give the impression that this is all part of a longer story that has been crudely summarized. Gen 6:1-8 seems oddly short on details, while making some significant assertions.

I've long wondered if "Ham" (or possibly in this analysis Canaan), raped Noah. If, instead of telling his brothers upon seeing his father naked, he raped him. This would seem to make sense of the statement that, "Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him."

It also explains how it is that he could "know" what happened while he was passed out drunk.
andrewcriddle
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Re: Diachronicity in the Pentateuch - The Drunkenness of Noah (Gen 9:18-27)

Post by andrewcriddle »

rgprice wrote: Mon Jun 19, 2023 10:17 am This is interesting because there are other aspects of Genesis 6 that give the impression that this is all part of a longer story that has been crudely summarized. Gen 6:1-8 seems oddly short on details, while making some significant assertions.

I've long wondered if "Ham" (or possibly in this analysis Canaan), raped Noah. If, instead of telling his brothers upon seeing his father naked, he raped him. This would seem to make sense of the statement that, "Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him."

It also explains how it is that he could "know" what happened while he was passed out drunk.
This idea is found in rabbinic analysis See sanhedrin

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neilgodfrey
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Re: Diachronicity in the Pentateuch - The Drunkenness of Noah (Gen 9:18-27)

Post by neilgodfrey »

StephenGoranson wrote: Mon Jun 19, 2023 8:11 am Thanks, austendw, for this proposed instantiation of diachronicity.
Without endorsing every detail above, myth and religion do appear to go far back.
Perhaps neilgodfrey is busy elsewhere, painting views other than his own as, in effect, due to zombification.
Thanks for the civil reference to me, Stephen. Nice to say Hi to you, too.

The reason I did not respond to this post (though I think I made some reference to it in my discussion with austendw in another discussion) is because it did not address the question I was asking. Austendw begins by saying,
The point of all this is to try to find the rifts in the text that cannot be explained synchronically and then try to find a composition history that will make plausible sense of the text's diachronic development.
-- which I thought was good-- that was exactly what I was looking for... "rifts that cannot be explained synchroncally"... but then when it came to his example he made clear its limitation:
Here's what I (at this moment) think is the best diachronic explanation for these discrepancies that I can think of.
In other words, it does not explain why the passage cannot be explained synchronically. It only presents another interpretation of the text on the assumption of the Documentary Hypothesis or any other diachronic model being true and what is in fact behind the text of Genesis.

It does not explain why it be interpreted another way. It only presents a rationale for the hypothesis under question without addressing the counterclaims.

If we read the Flood story -- I am not denying its composite nature, by the way -- in the light of sociologist Donald Levine's The Flight from Ambiguity: Essays in Social and Cultural Theory, we learn that the questions arising among us moderns about this story are uniquely modern ones. It is moderns who approach texts with an intolerance for ambiguity and a need to set them straight in some way. Ancients, on the other hand, at least the ones we are talking about, tended to cultivate ambiguity - deliberately - very often in their texts.

The Jews created a Book whose sparse detail has been a standing invitation for evocative interpretations. Generations of Talmudic scholars and then Kabbal- ists spent lives in savoring the wisdom and the mysteries of polysemous words and phrases. Jesus and his followers loved to represent spiritual truths in terms of familiar worldly images and events. Christian preachers over the centuries have delighted in unraveling the strands of thought entwined in his parables. Medieval dramatists and Renaissance poets proclaimed moral truths through elaborate allegories. The Platonic tradition made much of the multiple meanings of words, both in their dual capacity as referents to sensible and ideal objects and as signs whose meanings shift in the course of dialectical inquiry. Ciceronian rhetoric made much of the paradox as a device for startling and persuading one’s audience, and figures of all sorts were celebrated in handbooks of classical rhetoric. These were all manifestations of those modes of expression and thought that writers like Locke and Condorcet sought to combat in prescribing a curriculum that excluded the classics.

The fact that ambiguity was cultivated in so many forms in so many traditional cultures suggests that ambiguous expressions serve a number of social and cultural purposes. These purposes should be examined before one endorses without reservation the modern project of eradicating ambiguity.

(Levine, p 24)
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billd89
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Buggering Dad

Post by billd89 »

"Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him."

That
. The Internet is almost as terrible as the Bible; there's a whole sub-genre of DadPorn along this line.
What can I say: "Don't drink!"

I suppose there's another bowdlerized Semite myth buried underneath the Noah version. Egypt as "the land of Ham" (Psalm 78:51; 105:23, 27; 106:22; 1 Chronicles 4:40) suggests the buggering son of Ham was Canaan, or that Canaan castrated Ham. In the hypothetical myth, the Canaanite 'son' f*cked over the Egyptian 'dad', shamed him, and received punishment in divine retribution. Yet I also recall the Kronos castration story as related:

Ancient Greek mythology tells a story with a couple of details that bear a striking resemblance to the biblical account. The god Ouranos (Uranus) and goddess Gaia, representing heaven and earth respectively, had six children—the titans. As Ouranos attempted to lie with Gaia, four of their sons, Krios, Koios, Iapetus, and Hyperion held Ouranos, while another son, Kronos, castrated him with a sickle.

Of course, this story sounds rather silly to our modern minds. However, two points should be considered before writing it off as total fantasy. The titans, more specifically Iapetus, gave rise to all of humanity through his sons. So, just as the Bible explains that all people have descended from Noah’s family, the Greek myth also focuses on the progenitors of humanity. Second, look closely at the name of the titan from whom humanity descended: Iapetus. Does the name look familiar to you? It should. It is simply the Greek spelling of the name Japheth, Noah’s oldest son. Interesting, isn’t it?

The major problem with this view is that nothing in the text gives the slightest hint that Ham castrated Noah. Such an idea must be read into the passage.

Feeling some Castration Anxiety? Be my guest here.
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neilgodfrey
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Re: Buggering Dad

Post by neilgodfrey »

billd89 wrote: Mon Jun 19, 2023 4:20 pm "Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had doneYet I also recall the Kronos castration story as related:

Ancient Greek mythology tells a story with a couple of details that bear a striking resemblance to the biblical account. The god Ouranos (Uranus) and goddess Gaia, representing heaven and earth respectively, had six children—the titans. As Ouranos attempted to lie with Gaia, four of their sons, Krios, Koios, Iapetus, and Hyperion held Ouranos, while another son, Kronos, castrated him with a sickle.

Of course, this story sounds rather silly to our modern minds. However, two points should be considered before writing it off as total fantasy. The titans, more specifically Iapetus, gave rise to all of humanity through his sons. So, just as the Bible explains that all people have descended from Noah’s family, the Greek myth also focuses on the progenitors of humanity. Second, look closely at the name of the titan from whom humanity descended: Iapetus. Does the name look familiar to you? It should. It is simply the Greek spelling of the name Japheth, Noah’s oldest son. Interesting, isn’t it?

The major problem with this view is that nothing in the text gives the slightest hint that Ham castrated Noah. Such an idea must be read into the passage.

Feeling some Castration Anxiety? Be my guest here.
An absolute "must read" is chapter 2 of Levine's book. The very ambiguity of the Genesis narrative makes perfect sense as an attempt to both concede and hide the story's debt to the castration myth.
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Re: Diachronicity in the Pentateuch - The Drunkenness of Noah (Gen 9:18-27)

Post by AdamKvanta »

A quick overview of the topic is here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_Ham

Regarding the birth order of Noah's sons, Kugel has some interesting remarks:
Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible As It Was at the Start of the Common Era
James L. Kugel
Harvard University Press, 1998
Pages 220-221.
Shem Was Noah's Oldest Son - or Was It Japhet? The biblical evidence is somewhat equivocal. Noah's three sons are always listed as "Shem, Ham, and Japhet." Normally, this would indicate that Shem was the oldest. However, in the genealogies of Genesis 10, the descendants of Japhet appear first, then those of Ham, and only after these the descendants of Shem. (The same is true in 1 Chron. 1:5-17.) So perhaps Japhet is the oldest. In Gen. 10:21, Shem is referred to as ăḥi yepet haggādôl. Once again, the Hebrew is ambiguous; this phrase could mean either "the older brother of Japhet" or "the brother of Japhet, the oldest." The ambiguity had to be resolved by the translators of this verse into Greek, and in the Septuagint Japhet is thus unequivocally the older brother. (The Greek translation of Symmachus likewise holds Japhet to be the oldest brother.) Genesis Rabba 37:7 also says that Japhet was the oldest son on the basis of Gen. 11:10; compare b. Talmud, Sanhedrin 69a. In contrast, Jubilees 4:33 expressly states that Shem was born before Ham and Ham before Japhet, and that Shem is the firstborn is likewise the opinion of Pirqei R. Eliezer 8:14 and Aggadat Bereshit 42, as well as of Jerome's Vulgate. A section of the Genesis Apocryphon recently read by Jonas Greenfield with enhanced lighting has yielded the phrase lĕšēm bĕrî rabba', "to Shem my oldest son" (see Beyer, Aramäichen Texte, 68). The Apocalypse of Adam 4:1 suggests the birth order Ham, Japhet, and Shem. Josephus (Jewish Antiquities 1:108-111) has the order Shem, Japhet, and Ham, apparently because of the reference to Ham as "his youngest son" (Gen. 9:24; see Ephraem below). The same reference was understood by other exegetes as "small in merit." See Philo, Questions in Genesis 74; Genesis Rabba, 36:7. See also Ginzberg, Die Haggada bei den Kirchenvätern, 89; Aptowitzer, "Malkizedek," 96 n. 1.
Kugel then writes about the main issue (what was Ham guilty of):
https://books.google.com/books?id=QUkaV ... &q&f=false

My solution is in the key verse Gen 9:24 (NASB20):
When Noah awoke from his wine, he knew what his youngest son [bᵊnô haqqāṭān] had done to him.
The Hebrew word bēn (H1121) could mean both son and grandson. Canaan was the youngest son of Ham so we can also presume he could be the youngest grandson.
bēn (H1121): https://www.blueletterbible.org/lexicon ... 0/wlc/0-1/

So maybe the correct translation should be:
When Noah awoke from his wine, he knew what his youngest grandson had done to him.
Interesting is also the fact that the more older brothers a male has from the same mother, the greater the probability he will have a homosexual orientation.
older brother effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraternal ... rientation

So, in my opinion, it was Canaan who sodomized Noah and then another event happened when Ham the father of Canaan saw the nakedness of Noah. Therefore, the diachronicity doesn't have to be so radical. The later editor just edited out the part, when Canaan sodomized Noah.

BTW, the phrase youngest son is sometimes translated as younger son because the Hebrew bᵊnô haqqāṭān could mean both. However, the basic meaning of the word qāṭān (H6996) seems to be: young, small, insignificant, unimportant, and the meaning younger is usually used only when there are only two brothers. So based on the context, the translation youngest fits better.
qāṭān (H6996): https://www.blueletterbible.org/lexicon ... 0/wlc/0-1/

And I agree with the austendw's metathesis (transposition) hypothesis:
Here "tents of" (אהלי) becomes "God of" (אֱלֹהֵי) by means of the transposition of two letters. It's unclear whether this was a scribal error, or the scribe intentionally changed it, thinking that he was correcting the defective version he was copying.
It reminds me of the metathesis solution for the conflict in the Psalm 22:16 verse "they pierce my hands and my feet" (LXX) vs "like a lion, they are at my hands and my feet" (MT).
From Wikipedia:
Gregory Vall proposes that the text originally read אסרו (’asaru), which means “they have bound” before ס and א got inadvertently swapped, resulting in the meaningless סארו, which was later changed into כארי (ka'aru); this could explain why Aquila of Sinope, Symmachus, and Jerome all translated it the word as “to bind”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_have ... nd_my_feet
Gregory Vall article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3266745?read-now=1&seq=10
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