Episode Transcript
Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel, and last episode we looked at how Noah brought relief from the curse of the ground, basically at reversal of Genesis three and a moment of hope for humanity. This week we're gonna be continuing that conversation. We're gonna be asking what happened next, and does what happened next dismantle or go against the idea that Noah genuinely did grant relief and that he was a success in what he did.
[00:00:50] Now, I'm not personally questioning what I said last time about the cleansing of the ground and Noah's success in granting relief there, but it's also complicated and pretty nuanced. I think looking at this complication and not oversimplifying, it will be helpful in trying to grasp a really cool point here about how God works with and by his creation.
[00:01:18] And in this case we're talking about people, but the same principles will relate in God's relationship with his spiritual creations as well. God really does participate with creation in a real way, and that doesn't infringe upon or negate his sovereignty. And while that's not really our entire point here in this episode, I think it's a salient one to keep in mind as we go through here.
[00:01:46] Now, last time I talked about that curse on the ground. I talked about Noah's name and we have been talking about frame semantics as well. This is going to be another big frame semantics episode, and I hope you'll be able to see that it's really a very helpful approach to looking at scripture.
[00:02:07] So the big question here is, how does Noah's drunkenness fit into the story of a cleansed earth? Is this a new fall or is it something else? Even if Noah did bring relief from the curse, maybe that's why his drunkenness is so unexpected, because he was a success in other ways. And again, we're asking, is this a contradiction or how does it fit into the pattern that we see? We're also gonna be asking about the morality of drinking entirely, and its biblical portrayal. We'll talk a little bit about the meaning of wine, although I'm not sure we'll really adequately get into that last bit because there's going to be a lot more to track along with the meaning of wine. But that is going to have to be part of our conversation here.
[00:03:02] And before we get into all of the stuff with Noah and everything else, I am gonna be discussing a brief history of alcohol and why alcohol is such a big deal both in the Bible as well as just general human history. And that's kind of an interesting topic for me in some ways because if you know, I was raised LDS and LDS culture is very against alcohol in general.
[00:03:31] So I grew up thinking that alcohol was just negative across the board. There wasn't anything good about it, that anybody who drank alcohol was sinning and all of those kinds of ideas, right? It took quite a while for me into my adulthood, even after I dismantled my LDS upbringing and all of the theology that came along with that, it took quite a while for me to become comfortable with the idea of alcohol at all.
[00:04:01] Now, why am I giving a history of alcohol when this is a biblical theology podcast? Well, I think understanding the nature of alcohol and what it is and what it does and its history in humanity is part of framing what it we can see here. It's necessary background information. And I'm going to give you more than what we strictly need for a biblical theology podcast, and even more than the biblical authors would probably understand about the history of alcohol because hey, it's interesting and what we know about it I think really tracks and is in line with what we see in scripture, which is quite interesting.
[00:04:48] So first of all, we know that there's problems with alcohol, right? It is basically a toxin. It is addictive in some form, at least for some people. When you have alcohol, it can give you that release of reward chemicals that go into the function of being an addict.
[00:05:09] Alcohol requires work. It requires us to make it, first of all, and it requires our bodies to work in order to get rid of it in our bodies. Okay, so, so far it's not seeming super positive here.
[00:05:24] Alcohol is definitely a vice, or at least a danger that can lead to vice. It is a trigger for violence and personal and societal harm in general.
[00:05:37] Alcohol has less nutritional value compared to other things. Although it doesn't have zero nutritional value, and that's part of what we'll talk about.
[00:05:47] Alcohol impairs our functionality. As far as our brain goes, it kind of takes our prefrontal cortex offline. It harms our liver. It slows our reflexes. It undermines goal-directed behavior. So that's a really big list of kind of net negatives with alcohol. So it's fair to ask, are there even any benefits at all with the idea of alcohol and consuming it?,
[00:06:19] One of the books that I read for this episode, I read a couple of them and one of those books by Edward Slingerland is called Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization. This book is not written for biblical studies. It's a very secular book, and it has a lot to say about evolution. So I'm saying that right now because I know at least some of you listening will not want to read a book that is positive about evolution, and that talks about evolution, having designs and kinds of a goal, right? As if evolution is a person, when it's just, even in science, it's just a process.
[00:07:06] If you wanna check this book out, it is not PG rated. It starts out very explicit and talking about some things that might make you uncomfortable. However, it's pretty well written and I found it helpful and kind of funny as well. Like it's written funny. It's helpful for grasping the deeper human functions of alcohol.
[00:07:30] And even though it does go that route of explaining things through the lens of evolution, I think that can still be helpful to us no matter what our views on that because humans and living creatures do change over time, and our genes can be adjusted in favor of positive things that produce benefits for us and away from things that produce harm. Like that's an actual thing that we see in the history of living creatures. So if you can just kind of set that aside or not, however you wanna do that. I found this book to be helpful because of the questions that it was asking.
[00:08:13] Another book you might wanna check out is called Drink: a Cultural History of Alcohol. This is by Iain Gately. It's slightly older than the other one I just mentioned, and I'm pretty sure it was probably a source for the other one that's mentioned.
[00:08:30] There's a few others out there, but those two are kind of two that I can recommend to give you a bit of a basis for understanding the history of alcohol be cause I'm not gonna be able to cover even a small portion of it here in this episode.
[00:08:45] Now, the reason I liked Slingerland's book was because of his questions that he was asking. He was going after the question of why we drink when it's so obviously a negative thing for us in a lot of ways.
[00:09:02] Well, have you ever heard the idea that they drank wine in the Bible because they lived in a time where drinking water wasn't as safe as it is today? So drinking wine actually was a safer drink. And they drank wine during the time of the Bible, so the explanation goes, and it wasn't very potent and it was maybe even diluted and didn't really have the tendency to get you drunk. Have you heard that story before?
[00:09:33] Well, it is true that often alcohol wasn't as strong as what we can do today, but the idea that they drink it because of the bad water isn't really an explanation that works across the board.
[00:09:50] So let's talk about those explanations for why we drink, and all of these explanations are unsatisfying and they don't really answer the question. Slingerland puts this as two different boxes for the explanations that we can talk about.
[00:10:07] One of those boxes we could call the hijack theories. Alcohol hijacks our reward system and it just happens to be an evolutionary accident that it hasn't gotten selected out and it's really fundamentally a bad thing and it hijacks our reward system. It tricks us into thinking that it is more adaptive than it is. But it kind of just comes along with things because it doesn't have a big enough negative impact to actually go away over time.
[00:10:42] Another box of explanations for why we drink has the label of hangover theories. This is the idea that maybe alcohol in the past has had adaptive or positive uses, but we no longer need it. And so now alcohol is maladaptive instead of positive.
[00:11:05] This set of theories as to why we drink is similar to why we have a predilection for junk food. Junk food is a high impact resource. It's high fat, it's high sugar, and that has benefits when you're working hard or when you're running for your life. But when we live sedentary lives, it's not a good thing to have that kind of food available to us, especially in the amounts that we have it.
[00:11:36] There's also the drunken monkey hypothesis. This is the suggestion that alcohol led early humans to fruit because they could smell it, and it was a sign of high quality nourishment.
[00:11:50] Another hangover theory is that fermenting turned perishable resources into better resources for some purpose. There is the idea of a biological ennoblement. Biological ennoblement is the idea that alcohol helped to round out the diets of people in the past. Like in Mesopotamia, where there was less access to fruit, vegetables, and they didn't eat a whole lot of meat, alcohol provided a better nutrition in addition to just eating what they could eat, and also alcohol could be preserved better.
[00:12:32] A final element we could put into the hangover theories of why we drink alcohol is that alcohol is really good at killing bacteria. And so the idea goes that people drink alcohol because it would help them be more healthy overall.
[00:12:51] Okay. So that's kind of an overlay of what these ideas typically are for explanations as to why we drink alcohol. Now, why don't those theories all work? Why are they unsatisfying?
[00:13:05] Well, in spite of everything, alcohol still has a real cost and maybe one of the most potent idea that draws us in most about water purification is that, well, they drank tea, they cooked food with water, and so they could just drink tea and the water that they're cooking their fish in instead of the alcohol if water purification was really the big deal.
[00:13:36] But there's also the fact that in places where they have substandard water, whether that's in the past or today, people will still drink the water. And a lot of times the people who are in a place will get adjusted to the bacteria and things that are in the water so that it doesn't affect them so well.
[00:14:00] So why do we drink alcohol when it has such a high cost, potentially?
[00:14:04] Well, I will cut to the chase and tell you why instead of dragging it out and giving you the long explanation. Basically we can see that alcohol does have a positive benefit to humanity, and in fact it has several positive benefits.
[00:14:22] Alcohol is not just an indulgence, but it aids creativity. It aids social cohesion. It assists courage and social bonding in general. The three points that Slingerland notes, is that alcohol has benefits for creativity, for cultural purposes, as well as communal purposes. And I do wanna talk about those for a minute because this is super interesting and possibly can have some impact as to how we view Noah's actions after the flood.
[00:14:58] Okay, so the point for creativity. See, before I did all of this study, I had the naive idea that alcohol just kind of takes our brains offline and it doesn't really help us to do anything functionally and cognitively. And that confused me, honestly, because you can actually work creatively better with some of that alcohol because it takes that prefrontal cortex offline to a certain degree for a short period of time. And it is a short period of time compared to what it has an impact for other creatures. Like for humans, we are very good at processing alcohol.
[00:15:41] Now, what's the deal with a prefrontal cortex and why does that matter? Well, the prefrontal cortex is part of your brain that develops quite late in a human. It's not done developing until your mid twenties, and that's kind of a big deal.
[00:15:57] Now, let's talk about birds for a second, right? Okay. Now, why are we talking about birds? Well, there's different kinds of birds, right? You have a chicken, for instance. A chicken hatches and is fairly fully formed. Like within a matter of weeks, a chicken is going to achieve the highest level of development it can ever possibly achieve.
[00:16:22] Now, that is as opposed to other types of birds, where the babies who hatch out of an egg are actually completely helpless for a time. And there is a difference here. So let's take a type of bird called a corvid, where you have the crows and the ravens. And a lot of us understand that those are very smart birds.
[00:16:46] They can make tools and they can have creative thinking, flexible thinking in a way that a chicken cannot have. So like if a crow understands how to create a tool to use for a purpose, and then the resources for creating that tool are no longer available, well, it can figure out a new way to create that tool. That's very flexible thinking.
[00:17:13] So tool making and invention is connected to how long a juvenile takes to develop in a species. So in a human, our prefrontal cortex isn't developed until quite late, which means that we have a long period of time where we have that creative, flexible thinking. It's otherwise known as lateral thinking.
[00:17:39] When you're a child and your prefrontal cortex has not yet perfectly solidified, basically, then we are able to think more creatively. We have that lateral thinking that we don't have when we're adults. So what do we do when we're adults? And how do we re-access that state of creative thinking? But there's a twist to it as well, because we also want to maintain the ability to be goal oriented and in control, which is what our prefrontal cortex is really good at. It helps us to be goal oriented and actually have enough self-control to pursue a goal.
[00:18:22] This is also where our socialization comes into play. Creativity is magnified through the transmission of culture and social learning. So if you have a species like humans where our young take a really long time to develop self-control, and our brains are fully formed to be that goal oriented, but if we can combine that with some flexibility and socialization, that's when you get the rise of civilization.
[00:18:54] So alcohol might have been quite the civilizational technology really, and an assistant to creativity, invention, and society in general.
[00:19:07] Now here we can enter into the conversation of which came first, alcohol or agriculture. And of course if you think there's no actual development and Adam just had all of the knowledge already, well, this part of the conversation might not be for you, but what we see in actual history is that agriculture really did take time to come about. And normally the explanation is that we have agriculture and then once we figured out agriculture, we figured out how to make alcohol.
[00:19:42] But there is now some suggestion that we actually have beer before bread, and that beer actually helped us to come together as people in order to figure out things like agriculture. So one of the things we could look at is Gobekli Tepe, which is a really ancient site where they had some monumental building and there is suggestion that there was production of grain at the time, but probably not cultivated crops. In the area around Gobekli Tepe it seems like there was a lot of wild barley, and so people might have been gathering together in groups in order to harvest it at harvest time, right. They weren't planting it themselves, but they were coming together to harvest it in groups.
[00:20:36] Well, so now the question is were they brewing things? Because if they were, that's a pretty good indication that beer may have come before bread, at least as far as what we're talking about with agriculture and cultivated crops. We do have chemical residues in vessels. We have large limestone vessels found at Gobekli Tepe, some with capacities of up to 160 liters. So they're very large, and we do have indication that there was some fermenting of grains going on. We also have the context of feasting at Gobekli Tepe. They seem to have been hosting large communal feasts because we have a whole lot of animal bones and food processing tools.
[00:21:27] So alcoholic beverages like beer or something similar to beer may have played a role in these gatherings, serving as a social or ritualistic element to attract and motivate people for the monumental construction projects. Personally, I think that makes a whole lot of sense. You wanna get people together without fighting and to actually work together and to bond together well, alcohol can bond socially. So it seems like the desire to produce beer may have been the driving force behind agriculture.
[00:22:07] All right, so that's pretty interesting. Now let's go into the Bible's context where wine is a sacred and symbolic, possibly divine and dangerous beverage as well. The Bible talks about wine, obviously, but it also talks about strong drink, which is probably a term that is referencing something that is fermented, that is not wine. So something like beer.
[00:22:37] In numbers 28 7 it says, quote "The libation with it will be a fourth of a liquid measure for each male lamb. In the sanctuary, you will pour out the libation of fermented drink for Yahweh." End quote.
[00:22:54] So we have strong drink, fermented drink, something like beer that is given in the context of the sacrificial system at the sanctuary.
[00:23:05] One of the earliest mentions of alcohol in human texts is in Gilgamesh. Endiku in the book of Gilgamesh is the wild man who is tamed by sex and beer. So when Genesis tells us that Noah planted a vineyard and then he drank, it might not be just a character flaw. This might be talking about a cultural and a symbolic and a societal act, and it's certainly a literary one.
[00:23:36] In short, when your prefrontal cortex is taken offline, you become a more social creature because some of your self-control has been repressed or you don't have access to it. It's gone. You are able to make social connections in a way that you wouldn't be doing if you were fully guarded and fully in control of all of your senses.
[00:24:01] So you might think that drinking alcohol when you're trying to do some big construction project is going to actually hamper people. But when you think about these social aspects and the bonding that can happen can actually make those projects go a lot better because it lowers your defenses and it increases your ability to trust, right? Like this is part of the way the brain functions in more than just humans. Also in animals.
[00:24:34] Okay, so let's talk about the theme of wine in general in scripture. Wine is both seen as a blessing as well as a burden. So in the story with Melchizedek in Genesis 14, it is a good thing. Melchizedek, the king of Salem brought out bread and wine. He was the priest of God most high and he shared that in a communal feasting meal with Abraham.
[00:25:02] Next mention of alcohol is in the story of Lot with his daughters in Genesis 19, and it's not seen in a positive light there because his daughters get him drunk and then reproduce with him.
[00:25:17] We see wine also in the story of Isaac, blessing Jacob, and in this story we have that strong theme of trickery and deception. So is the wine part of a good thing or a bad thing? Well, again, I think we have a mixed message here because the wine is a blessing and associated with the blessing of Jacob. And the text doesn't come right out to say this, but it might have been part of the trickery to trick Isaac into doing what he did.
[00:25:50] There is no mention of wine with the story of Judah and Tamar, but it could be an implied thing as far as what's going on in the story, because this is happening at the time of shearing sheep, which was often a time where people would come together and they would celebrate and feast and have alcohol. And if alcohol is playing any kind of a part in that story, it would probably not be a positive one.
[00:26:18] But then at the end of Genesis, we have Joseph and his brothers where wine is seen as a good thing. It's part of their feasting.
[00:26:27] In Genesis 43, verse 34 says, "And portions were served to them from his table, and the portion of Benjamin was five times greater than the portion of any of them, and they drank and became drunk with him." End quote.
[00:26:43] Now that's kind of the end of this section, so you might think, oh, that's not necessarily positive, but it's definitely not negative. It's in the form of celebrating and feasting, and even the idea of being drunk. We can't just draw a line in the sand and say, well, obviously it's always bad. It might be neutral here in some sense, except that it is in the context of a happy feasting atmosphere.
[00:27:14] So wine is often seen as a gift. In Psalm 1 0 4, which is fascinating because this is a creation psalm. I'll read a couple of verses here.
[00:27:25] Psalm 1 0 4 verses 13 through 15, say, quote, "You are the one who waters the mountains from his upper chambers. The earth is full with the fruit of your labors who causes grass to grow for the cattle and herbs for the service of humankind to bring forth food from the earth and wine that makes glad the heart of man so that their faces shine from oil. And bread that strengthens the heart of man." End quote.
[00:27:55] This is part of God's gift to humanity.
[00:27:59] In Deuteronomy 1426, it says, "You may spend the money for anything that you desire for oxygen or for sheep or for wine or for strong drink or for anything that you desire. And you shall eat it there before Yahweh your God, and you shall rejoice you and your household." End quote.
[00:28:20] So there it is, part of covenant joy.
[00:28:24] We also have the Passover. We have the Lord's Supper in the New Testament.
[00:28:30] But wine can also be connected to judgment or folly.
[00:28:34] In Proverbs 20 verse one, it says, quote, " Wine is a mocker; strong drink, a brawler, and any who go astray by it are not wise." End quote.
[00:28:47] That's not positive.
[00:28:49] In Isaiah 28, 5 through seven, this is a really interesting passage. Want you to note some details here, particularly about the theme of judgment.
[00:29:02] Again, this is Isaiah 28, verses five through seven. It says, quote, "In that day, Yahweh of hosts will become a garland of glory and a diadem of beauty to the remnant of his people and a spirit of justice to the one who sits over judgment and strength to those who turn back the battle at the gate. And these also stagger because of wine and stagger because of strong drink. Priest and prophet stagger because of strong drink. They're confused because of wine. They stagger because of strong drink. They err in vision, they stagger in the rendering of a decision." End quote.
[00:29:48] I think that is a very important passage for what we're talking about today. Here in Isaiah 28, God has a spirit of justice and he wants good judgment. But what's happening is that his people are becoming drunk, or at least this is a metaphor for what they're doing, and they are not rendering proper justice and proper judgment.
[00:30:15] Okay, so now what happens when we step back a bit, not just to define wine and alcohol for themselves and see how they track through scripture and to ask if it's good or bad in and of itself, but we need to ask, what kind of world does drunkenness evoke in the biblical imagination? In other words, what kind of frame are we stepping into when we look at this passage in Genesis nine?
[00:30:44] Well, we have the idea of drunkenness and something negative happens, right? It's obviously bad because it ends in somebody being cursed.
[00:30:53] But I suggest if we keep our assessment at that really simple level, we're missing some crucial points. So let's look at the frame of intoxication in general. What does it actually mean to be drunk, biologically, symbolically, socially, theologically, in all of the ways.
[00:31:16] Again, remember that even though the ancient world may not have understood the past of how we developed alcohol and why it might benefit us, wine was never just about pleasure. It was also about connection. People did not make a covenant with other people without alcohol being involved. And alcohol lets people put their guards down and enter into a relationship, celebration, and there is a ritual atmosphere in that, at least as far as what we see in things like ritual meals, fellowship meals, covenantal meals. Alcohol creates a liminal space, kind of that in-between world, between spaces. It is a socially acceptable type of disorientation that facilitates community and socialization.
[00:32:12] So to be intoxicated wasn't necessarily a shameful, bad thing. Sometimes it was involved with the sacred and with covenant, with relationships with other people. So yes, with intoxication comes vulnerability, but it's not always a bad thing.
[00:32:34] Now, morally, let's talk about thresholds and boundary lines. There is a line which is not always super visible between joy and folly and delight and disorder. Proverbs 20 verse one, warns us that wine is a mocker, and Isaiah 28 speaks of priests and prophets who reel under the influence of alcohol and do not produce Yahweh's judgments properly. So there is a sense where you can have your judgment impaired and no goodness follows when that happens.
[00:33:14] So think about Isaiah 28. Think about what happened with Noah. If we connect these two texts, are we reading something into the past, into Genesis nine? Well, we have to keep in mind that probably by the time scripture was formulated into the canon that we have it, or something similar, the Torah and the prophet were seen as being connected and they were being read in tandem.
[00:33:43] And this was in fact a hermeneutical principle. So yes, Genesis nine may not have had some sort of original meaning, although it depends on if you think Genesis comes strictly from the exile or not. But whether or not it did, I think that Genesis nine and Isaiah 28 would be read in tandem in some form because we have the idea of drunkenness in both and the idea of judgment. And I kind of brought that out in last week's episode where it seems like Noah was truly giving a righteous judgment. It's not called a righteous judgment straight out, but his judgment actually was fulfilled in the end, which tells us that he was probably judging rightly. Canaan actually was under a curse.
[00:34:39] We might see this as a type of moral testing. When Noah's restraint was loosened by the wine, what happened? Did Noah himself stumble? Did Noah himself do something wrong?
[00:34:56] It's rarely the case that we see good things happening when somebody's drunk, but here we have Noah in a state of drunkenness and he's in a state of shame. This is being activated by the frame of nakedness, very much connected to the idea of shame, as we've talked about before. So Noah might be in a shameful situation, but he's not doing some public nudity here. He's inside his own tent. He is being violated instead. And I would suggest that in the end Noah comes out positively because he gives a righteous judgment of what happened.
[00:35:35] Oh, there's just so much more we could say about wine and alcohol in the Bible and maybe we'll just continue that conversation out into the future. But we clearly have kind of a dual frame here. Wine suggests there's danger and peril and potential bad things that can happen. And it can also include the idea of judgment. But it can also just be celebration and goodness.
[00:36:05] Wine or alcohol enters the picture and we suddenly have the potential for holiness or desecration, either way.
[00:36:15] When Genesis tells us that Noah gets drunk, it's not just reporting a fact, it's activating that deep frame, a frame that is about joy, vulnerability, danger, and divine consequence in some form.
[00:36:33] Okay, so I said we're going to get deep into frame semantics this episode. So let's go ahead and do this. Now I have filled out some frame semantics worksheets myself, and I will put those in the show notes. They'll probably be available in a blog post or something like that that's going to be accessible to you so that you can follow along with what I'm saying. If you don't have those, don't worry about it. I hope this will still be communicated adequately without the handout in front of you, but if you do have that in front of you, you might wanna follow along.
[00:37:08] So we're gonna look at the word "became drunk" and understand what it's evoking here. Doesn't the drunkenness seem like Noah fell again and that this is just a second fall and that he really wasn't a success in providing the relief? And maybe the story is telling us that even the second Adam here is going to sin and fall into bad things here.
[00:37:34] Okay. So in order to do that, we are going to compare two different frames. We're gonna compare the frame of drunkenness with the frame of the fall in Genesis three. And this is I think, one of the most useful purposes of looking at things from a lens of frame semantics, because you can really do those comparisons side by side.
[00:37:58] All right, so if you look at my handouts or like whatever you wanna call 'em, I don't know what to call 'em. My study guides. I have one centered on drunkenness in Genesis 9 21. Now here we have several lexical units that might be important to what we're talking about here. We have the word drank or to drink. We have the one that is really the one I'm concerned about, is becoming drunk to become intoxicated. And then also we have the idea of uncovering himself. So those are all kind of connected in a narrative way, obviously. And the uncovering can relate to the drunkenness because of that concept of vulnerability.
[00:38:44] Okay, so here's our frame elements that I've kind of laid out here in the handout. We have the agent or the one who's drinking. This is Noah, obviously, right? The main person in the passage. He is the one who drinks. The substance is specifically wine. And that's important that we note that it's a specific substance.
[00:39:08] We have an act of consumption where he drank. And look, I know this might seem really obvious, but all of these elements are going to matter when we compare the frame with the fall. Okay, so the act of consumption, we have the resulting state, which is that he became drunk.
[00:39:27] We have a physical consequence that he uncovered himself. There is a location that is mentioned specifically, he's inside his tent. There is an observer or a witness, and that observer is Ham. And then there is a social consequence in the end. We have the cursing of Canaan. We have the idea of shame and exposure and all of those things wrapped up there.
[00:39:56] Now again, we can recall that wine is about blessing and happiness, but it can also have to do with shame, excess and judgment. Because Noah's action occurs at this time in the story, and we've had mentions of things that echo creation, right? We can look at the mirroring there with the frame of the fall in Genesis three.
[00:40:21] Now, when we just look at this frame and we think about the functions of it, there's several functions we can think about. From a theological perspective, we have vulnerability and the return of disorder after that divine cleansing that I talked about earlier. From a narrative perspective, we have moral breakdown and conflict between the members of Noah's family. From a cultural lens, we have dishonor shame exposure, and those are not good things in a cultural sense.
[00:40:56] So it seems like this is in fact a replay of the fall, right? Instead of the garden, we have the vineyard.
[00:41:06] Okay, so now let's go into the Genesis three fall frame.
[00:41:11] Now, there's no lexical unit that is explicitly exactly like the drunkenness in Genesis nine. We have several things that kind of match up though. So we have the seeing and the taking and the eating and eyes opening and knowing that they were naked. All of those do have echoes in the story in Genesis nine.
[00:41:36] How do the eyes opening relate? Well, Noah actually wakens from slumber.
[00:41:42] So in Genesis three, here's the frame elements that we have. We have two agents, the woman and the man. We have the object of desire, which is the fruit from the tree. We have the action that is forbidden, which is the eating. We have a source of command, and this is God who commands. The immediate result of their eating is that their eyes were opened and that they were aware of their nakedness. There's an emotional consequence of shame and fear. We've talked about those before. There is a covering response where they sew fig leaves as clothing. Then we have the fallout where we have the divine judgment and curse.
[00:42:31] So here, unlike with Genesis nine, we have the tree of knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life. We have the origin of sin here in Genesis three. We have death, we have exile. And as far as the function goes, Genesis three explains the rupture between humanity and God. It sets the pattern in a narrative fashion for future stories of rebellion and redemption. And from a human perspective, we have the idea of human agency, choice, desire, guilt, hiding.
[00:43:09] Now, not all of those are going to line up with the frame of drunkenness from Genesis nine. So let's talk about the comparison of those two frames. And I have a worksheet for that specifically as well. The different agents in the story. In Genesis three, we have Eve as well as Adam. And in Genesis nine we just have Noah. In Genesis three, we have seeing, taking, eating, eyes opened, knowing nakedness. In Genesis nine, we have drinking became drunk, uncovered himself, as well as awakening. The object in both cases is parallel, but different. Right? In Genesis three, we have fruit directly from the tree. Genesis nine, we have fruit from the vine, but it's been processed into wine, right? There's been work involved to create wine as opposed to Genesis three, where the tree was just taken from.
[00:44:12] The forbidden or excessive act is that in Genesis three, they ate the fruit. Genesis nine, Noah drank to the point of getting drunk, and it implies the idea of excess, right? The immediate result of the fall is that eyes were opened and they were aware of their nakedness. The immediate result of the drunkenness of Noah was a loss of control and physical exposure.
[00:44:42] Now, here's a difference here, because there is a parallel in Genesis three and Genesis nine with the eyes right? In Genesis three, their eyes were opened and they saw something that they didn't wanna see and that caused them to be fearful. But Noah was only awakened later. Noah's awakening may be seen kind of as a result of his drunkenness because you know, eventually he's gonna wake up. But it's not really a causal thing. And so I think that maybe there is a difference here in the stories, and that is important to notice, and this is what a frame can bring out for us when we're comparing the two.
[00:45:25] The eyes opening and the awareness of nakedness for Adam and Eve may not have been a bad thing for them to have ultimately accomplished. Right? Maybe it wasn't bad that they had their eyes opened, but they had their eyes opened in a way where they had taken for themselves. Noah's waking up wasn't really a result of anything morally bad happening by necessity.
[00:45:51] Okay, so back to parallels in the two stories. We have shame in both. In Genesis three, we also have a fear which is not implied in the story in Genesis nine. The response in Genesis three is that they sowed fig leaves. The response for the story of Noah is that his sons actually responded rather than him. Noah remains uncovered and he is covered by his children. Not by himself.
[00:46:23] Again, we have two locations. We have the Garden of Eden, and then we have the interior of Noah's tent, which we might just see that as you know, this is his tent to where he lives. But it might be kind of echoing a little bit of that element of sacred space because remember, no matter who's reading the book of Genesis, whether it's during the wilderness wanderings or later on, they have a context of what it means to have a tent and a personal space that is bounded. Like an individual's tent may not have been sacred space compared to the Tabernacle, which was also a tent by the way. But you still have the idea of the threshold of the tent or the dwelling, and that was a liminal sacred space.
[00:47:13] Continuing on with the comparison in Genesis three, we have God as a witness. He is that implied witness at any rate. In Genesis nine, we have Ham and we have his two brothers, but they don't witness because they walk in backwards. There is a judgment in both cases. In Genesis three, it's obviously God who is forming the judgment, but it's Noah who is doing the judgment in Genesis nine. Again, I think this is a distinctive point to mention and notice.
[00:47:48] Cultural symbolism. In Genesis three, we have knowledge, autonomy, exposure, exile, shame. Genesis nine, we have wine. Shame, probably a loss of honor on the part of Noah, at least in relation to Ham.
[00:48:06] Theological parallels, is that in Genesis three, we have the entry of sin into the world. Most people think of this as the cosmic fall, right? Genesis nine, we do have the reintroduction of disorder into that cleansed world. But again, there's some distinctive differences in that reintroduction of disorder compared to Genesis three. In Genesis three, the overlapping frames are things like temptation, shame, nakedness, judgment, corrupted wisdom. And in Genesis nine, again, it's shame and nakedness. Family and inheritance which might relate back to Genesis three, as well, in regards to after the fall, where Adam is going to rule over Eve.
[00:48:56] The narrative function is that in Genesis three, we have the origin of sin and bad things, right? Exile, being kicked out of God's sacred space. And the episode with Noah is definitely a breakdown of relational things and reintroduction of things that are negative. It might not be a total breakdown from righteousness, though.
[00:49:24] All right, so I hope you can see how it's very clear that these two passages mirror each other. They mirror each other in narrative fashion, in theological fashion. They both highlight sin and cursing and disruption of God's order. So Genesis nine in some form is a reenactment of the fall.
[00:49:47] But those distinctive differences in the two frames can help us answer a few questions. All right. Here's some options I'm gonna give you. As far as Noah's experience in Genesis nine, does it, A, reflect the fall narrative in mirroring fashion? Like Adam was the first fallen man. Is Noah also seen to be that second fallen Adam.
[00:50:14] Or B, does what happens in Genesis nine participate in a reimagined or a reframed version of the fall?
[00:50:26] Or C, another possibility does Genesis nine invert the fall narrative by showing a righteous judgment after a moment of vulnerability? Well, let's look at this a little bit more closely.
[00:50:41] Let's look at option A, where we have Noah as the second fall figure, right? We have Noah as a second Adam, and he has also fallen, right? We have the consumption of the fruit, we have the disorder that enters the family. Shame and covering. Is this saying that the post-judgment world, just like in Eden, starts out good but descends almost immediately? Is that what we should take away from this story? In that case, Noah would be that second Adam, who is also a fallen figure.
[00:51:20] Option B, Noah as a reframed Adam or the second Adam, who judges righteously. This is where we get a little bit spicy here. Noah's drunkenness doesn't appear to result in personal condemnation of Noah himself. God doesn't rebuke him. He's not cursed. Instead, he awakens. He knows what Ham has done and he is the one who pronounces the curse.
[00:51:51] He is in the same role that God had in Genesis three, in other words. In at least some form, Noah is in the role of God here. And as I mentioned last time, only the Lamech from Genesis four and God have judged prior to this. And Noah's judgment is measured. It is rooted in the actual violation that happened. And I might argue that Noah is acting as a covenantal guardian of generational blessing and curse.
[00:52:26] So in this way of looking at it, Noah isn't a sinner. He is the vulnerable, but still righteous figure who is exploited by others. So they're still fall, but here Noah is not the second fallen Adam, he is still a successful Adam. But we might say that part of the story is that even with a successful patriarch and a successful Adam, there's still consequences that are negative that end up in cursing. Just because the ground's cursing was done away with, that doesn't mean we don't still have further problems and further cursing.
[00:53:09] So then we come to our option C. This kind of explains what I was just talking about, where we have the disruption without a personal fall. This episode with Noah activates the fall frame, but it doesn't do so because he is a fallen moral agent like Adam.
[00:53:29] But this story instead shows that the pattern is still going to continue. It's possible you could still have a righteous patriarch, but even with a righteous patriarch, we're still in trouble.
[00:53:44] Maybe what we have here is both the story of the fall, but also the idea that people can judge righteously and that it is okay for God to put us in that position. Maybe Noah is a shadow of something new that is happening. And this seems to be what the story of the flood is in general. So even though the ground is no longer cursed, curse can still happen.
[00:54:17] All right, so where does all of that leave us? Hopefully this has shown you how helpful frame semantics can be and it can help us hold together the stories structure, symbolism a narrative purpose without flattening it into: it has to be either that Noah fits Adam's role or he doesn't, but rather we can see the pattern and we see how that pattern is shifted and changed in the future. By doing that, we see not just like movie writers who create a new movie and they just pattern the new movie onto the old movie because well everybody liked that old movie, so let's just make the old movie again. Rather there is a distinctive message that is being told here.
[00:55:06] Genesis nine is obviously constructed to echo Genesis three. But it goes beyond Genesis three to say something specific. It's broader and it shows humanity with more responsibility. Remember last time we talked about how Noah kind of got an upgrade in his job description compared to what Adam had.
[00:55:28] And that echo of Genesis nine and Genesis three serves to show us that God's image bearer now judges and can curse, even though Noah isn't God.
[00:55:42] I don't see how else to see this because Noah doesn't seem to be a fallen figure like Adam. He's not invincible, but it's really a surprising role that he fits here. And again, I think this directly ties back to what we see in the prophets. Does Genesis nine do something like anticipate Isaiah 28? We have Noah who is the righteous judge, even though he is drunk, versus the priests and the prophets of Israel later who are drunk and they don't judge well.
[00:56:17] But again, just because we have a cleansing of the ground and just because we have a successful Noah, it doesn't mean that Noah is fully the Messiah either. He still remains in this kind of liminal space between curse and covenant. We have a new part of humanity that's starting and a new burden upon humanity.
[00:56:43] And I think that all of that kind of ties together this message of how we can see the echoes of scripture throughout scripture with that little adjustment and that little shift that gives us some new information.
[00:56:58] And why do I think it matters? Well, again, like I said back at the beginning, for people who really want to understand and take seriously the fact that God is sovereign over everything, we can kind of struggle with the idea that mankind or even spiritual beings can participate in God's judgment and God's ruling. But that is what we see in stories like this.
[00:57:29] Now, the point is that you're supposed to judge rightly, in which case you are effectively judging like Yahweh judges, right?
[00:57:40] You're doing God's work. That's why we have the mirroring of heaven and earth. Are you in alignment with God? And if you are, then you are actually able to judge and you are actually able to participate in a real way. If you are out of alignment and you are in a disordered relationship with God and you're in a relationship with, say, another spiritual being or something, then you are out of alignment with God's judging and you are responsible for that.
[00:58:15] The judging that you do is something that you are responsible for. It seems as though God's creatures can truly make decisions, and in the decision making, if we're in alignment with God, then all is good. If we're out of alignment with God, then all is not good.
[00:58:36] All right? So I don't know. I hope that all of that kind of communicates that to you and shows you my point here. I think this shows something very essential and important to what humanity's relationship is with God and God's relationship is with man. I think it shows a moment of hope in the midst of even something that is going to end up in curse for somebody.
[00:59:02] All right, so anyway, if you guys want, you can come and message me and let me know, how do you read Noah's moment in this tent? Is it a failure? Is it an inversion of the fall or is it this idea of the righteous Adam that still has some tough things to do in the world? I'd love to hear what you think.
[00:59:26] I hope you enjoyed listening to this episode. Don't forget to grab my Frame Semantic study guide and use it with some other people. I would love to get some feedback on it. I am already working on the second iteration of it with a little bit of improvements. So when you go to do the download of my original frame semantics study guide, that download will probably change as I improve it, but the one that is specifically for this episode, I will leave that in the blog post, unchanged so that in the future, even if I change the way I'm approaching frame semantics, you can still access what I'm talking about here in this episode specifically.
[01:00:10] Alright, so that is it for this week. I really appreciate you guys and thank you guys for all of you who have downloaded that material and given me some thoughts back already. Really appreciate it. If you want to help me to create these documents, because I'm going to need some people to test them out and to give me feedback, I would really love to hear from you if you are interested in participating in that. It doesn't require a whole lot of obligation on your part, just a little bit of practice and feedback.
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