The story of Noah ends with an odd and disturbing episode which you can read in parallel versions here.
Early on we were told that Noah was a good and virtuous man but what we see in this strange story makes us wonder. Noah plants a vineyard and uses the grapes to make wine. Unfortunately, he overindulges, gets drunk, and passes out naked in his tent. Noah's son Ham happens to see his father in this state and tells his brothers. That might seem like bad manners to us but it's deadly serious to Noah.
That's something that's always puzzled me about the story. Seeing someone naked (especially a parent) sounds very embarassing, but it's hardly a crime. Why was Noah so upset that he insisted on punishment?
It probably has to do with the fact that the ancient Middle-East was dominated by a culture of honor. We think of honor as a man keeping his word and doing the right thing, but that's not what the word originally meant. In these cultures your standing in the community came from what people thought of you. If they saw you as someone who was smart, strong, and ruthless--someone they didn't want to mess with--you had a lot of honor. If you did something that made you appear weak or unreliable to the community, you lost honor.
Things get brutal in this kind of culture. If someone does something that harms your reputation, you have to take revenge to get your honor back. If someone insults you, you may have to fight a duel with them. If your daughter disobeys you and marries a man you don't approve of, or dresses inappropriately, or becomes the victim of rape, or otherwise embarasses the family, then an honor killing is called for. Honor is all about what people think of you, not the sort of person you actially are. In other words, the problem wasn't that Noah couldn't control his drinking, it was that there was a witness who knew how badly he had embarassed himself.
Noah's other sons, Shem and Japeth, do what loyal sons are supposed to do in the culture of honor: they covered things up, literally. They walked in backward so they could pretend that they had no knowledge of their father's embarassment, and covered him with a sheet so that nobody else could see him like that. They preserved his reputation, which in this kind of culture, is preferrable to telling the embarassing truth.
Under the rules of the culture, Noah had good reason to be angry with Ham, but that's not who he punishes. Instead, Noah proclaims that his Ham's son, Canaan, has lost his status as a member of the family. He and his descendants are to be the slaves of Shem and Japeth and their descendants.
It's not at all clear why Noah doesn't punish Ham directly. Other than that, though, the punishment fits the code of honor. Ham dishonered his father, now Noah dishonors Canaan by making his descendants slaves. It is disproportionate revenge, but that's what the code of honor calls for. It's a harsh thing to do, but that's not the point. In this culture, love is not the priority, reputation is. If you had to kill every single one of your children to restore your family's honorable name, you would would do it and the culture would praise you for it. (We can still see this dynamic in cultures that practice honor killings).
If I haven't made it clear yet; I believe that culture of honor is a terrible thing. Just because Noah lived this way is no reason to assume it is a good set of values, or that we are supposed to imitate him. As we move through the Bible one of the things you'll see is how God leads the people away from this unjust and brutal way of life into a culture of justice and compassion. For Christians the example for living needs to be the humility of Jesus, not the honor-obsessed brutality of Noah.
There's one more thing to say about this story and that is a note on how it has been misused in history. Before the Civil War, preachers in the South used to use this story to justify slavery. Canaan, they claimed, was black and became the ancestor of the peoples of Africa while white people were the descendents of Shem and Japeth. They pointed to Noah's curse on Canaan as "proof" that God meant for black Africans to be the slaves of white people.
i doubt that I need to go into all the reasons that this is a case of badly messed-up thinking, but I will, just to be complete.
1) The curse was from Noah, not from God. The action of a prideful man seeking to restore his reputation is not the same as God's will.
2) There is nothing in scripture that claims either that Canaan was black or that Africans are descended from him. In fact, the historical Canaanites were ethnically pretty much identical to the Jews, the only differences were religious and cultural.
3) The most important point: The story of Noah is not a historical story! As I've several times, this is a made-up story, like a parable. It's meant to teach us about God and humanity but it's not meant to be taken literally.
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