(
Hebrew characters) was the peculiar property of the Shemites.—and may he dwell] or that he may dwell. The subject can hardly
be God (Jub. TO, Ber. R. Ra. IEz. Nö. al.), which would
convey no blessing to Japheth; the wish refers most
naturally to Japheth, though it is impossible to decide
whether the expression 'dwell in the tents of' denotes
friendly intercourse (so most) or forcible dispossession (Gu.).
For the latter sense cf. Ps 7855, 1 Ch. 510.—A Messianic
reference to the ingathering of the Gentiles into the Jewish
or Christian fold (TJ, Fathers, De. al.) is foreign to the
thought of the passage: see further below.
The question of the origin and significance of this remarkable
narrative has to be approached from two distinct points of view.—I. In
one aspect it is a culture-myth, of which the central motive is the discovery
of wine. Here, however, it is necessary to distinguish between
the original idea of the story and its significance in the connexion of the
Yahwistic document. Read in its own light, as an independent fragment
of tradition, the incident signalises the transition from nomadic to
agricultural life. Noah, the first husbandman and vine-grower, is a
tent-dweller (v.21); and this mode of life is continued by his oldest and
favoured son Shem (27). Further, the identification of husbandry and
vine culture points to a situation in which the simpler forms of agriculture
had been supplemented by the cultivation of the grape. Such a
situation existed in Palestine when it was occupied by the Hebrews.
The sons of the desert who then served themselves heirs by conquest to
the Canaanitish civilisation escaped the protracted evolution of vine-growing
from primitive tillage, and stepped into the possession of the
farm and the vineyard at once. From this point of view the story of
Noah's drunkenness expresses the healthy recoil of primitive Semitic
morality from the licentious habits engendered by a civilisation of which
a salient feature was the enjoyment and abuse of wine. Canaan is the
prototype of the population which had succumbed to these enervating
influences, and is doomed by its vices to enslavement at the hands of
hardier and more virtuous races.—In the setting in which it is placed
by the Yahwist the incident acquires a profounder and more tragic
significance. The key to this secondary interpretation is the prophecy
of Lamech in 529, which brings it into close connexion with the account
of the Fall in ch. 3 (p. 133). Noah's discovery is there represented as
an advance or refinement on the tillage of the ground to which man was
sentenced in consequence of his first transgression. And the oracle of
Lamech appears to show that the invention of wine is conceived as a
relief from the curse. How far it is looked on as a divinely approved
mode of alleviating the monotony of toil is hard to decide. The
moderate use of wine is certainly not condemned in the OT: on the
other hand, it is impossible to doubt that the light in which Noah is
