And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.
And he said - apparently upon awaking and learning what had happened. If we assume a connection of cause and effect between Ham's offence and the malediction which followed, Noah's words were a natural outburst of holy indignation against Ham's impiety and brutal heartlessness; and the imprecation invoked upon his youngest son was a just retribution, as Hofmann and Drechsler, quoted by Delitzsch, call it, for the outrage which the youngest son had done to his father. On this principle of interpretation, the other parts of Noah's effusion, which were addressed to his two dutiful sons, must be considered in the same light, as an expression of his earnest wishes that the filial piety of both might be equally rewarded. But this is a most inadequate view of the passage. Though the verbs are in the optative, not the future tense, they involved an oracular announcement of the destinies of Noah's sons; and though it is not expressly said, they were predictive.
The analogy of sacred history leads us to suppose that the address was not uttered at the time of the wine-taking. The Hebrew copulative conjunction and does not always indicate immediate sequence, but, on the contrary, is used to connect sentences which record events separated from each other in point of time (see Genesis 1:2). It is probable that there is a long interval included between Genesis 9:24-25, and that the following utterances, like those of Isaac and Jacob, addressed to their sons (Genesis 27:27-40; Genesis 49:1-33), were not spoken until near the close of Noah's life, when the prophetic spirit came upon him. This presumption is strengthened by the record of his death immediately after.
There was a sacramental importance attached to the last speeches of the patriarchal priests, which, though commonly called a blessing, sometimes expressed severe judgment of the conduct of the sons (Genesis 49:3-7); and this of Noah's contained not only a benediction, but a denunciation. Actuated on these occasions by a supernatural impulse, they gave expression to their fervent thoughts in the mashal or parallelistic meter (Numbers 23:7; Numbers 23:18; Psalms 49:4; Psalms 78:2) which was appropriate to prophecy; and in like manner this of Noah bears the form of a rhythmical poem in three stanzas:
Cursed be Canaan, A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. Blessed be Yahweh, the God of Shem,
And Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, And he shall dwell in the tents of Shem,
And Canaan shall be his servant.
The Arabic version has in the first line: 'Cursed be Ham, the father of Canaan:' a reading which seems, in the opinion of some commentators, to be required by the rhythm, no less than the tenor of the context; but which is not supported by sufficient manuscript authority. "Canaan," derived from a Hebrew verb, to humble oneself, to submit, is a name expressing the depressed condition of the bearer. х `ebed (H5650), a servant]. This word occurs here for the first time, and, according to early usage, signified labour, service of any kind; but not that specific servitude which was afterward called by the name of slavery: as employed by Noah, it meant inferiority, subjection; and the strong idiomatic expression "servant of servants," a Hebrew superlative, described a state of the most abject degradation. There is no evidence that the doom was inflicted personally on Canaan but, as in similar cases, fulfilled in the national subjection of his posterity (cf. Genesis 27:29; Genesis 27:37; Genesis 27:40; Genesis 25:23; Genesis 14:4). And accordingly this malediction took effect in the moral degradation of the Canaanites, expulsion from the land of Canaan, and in the reduction to the most abject servitude of the few who were exempted from destruction by the Israelites (Joshua 9:23).
The observant mind of Noah saw in Ham, and in his youngest son, who bore a close resemblance to him, those mental characteristics which would impress their stamp upon his posterity. Noah discerned in those feelings of filial disrespect and indecent levity which had been developed in his outrage upon his venerable father the germ of their national character already matured in his prophetic view. In short, the libertinism of the father is regarded as the type of the intellectual and moral character of his descendants; and thus connected by links of national depravity and debasement, they are viewed as one. In those early times the spiritual and moral relation subsisting between father and son possessed a direct and permanent influence, which was not interrupted or destroyed by any of those obstacles which the artificial state of society in modern times raises. Among the patriarchs, it has been well said: 'Individuality is almost lost in the stereotyped nationality, and thus the nation formed a persona moralis' (Wolfe).