Phil Christman

I’m continuing to work my way very slowly through the Hebrew Bible, and continuing to be amazed by the compression, subtlety, and overall strangeness of it. Searching for the mind and personality of this narrator, parsing his or her intentions, gives me the same feeling you have in one of those noir thrillers where a certain influential person seems to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

(The struggle becomes a lot easier, I suppose, if you assume that every apparent change in metaphysics, or style, or morals, can be put down to a switch from J to E or from D to P. I’m not wasting my time with that shit. If the Hebrew Bible was redacted, that doesn’t have to mean it was sloppily or thoughtlessly redacted.)

Anyhoo, one device that literary critics of the Bible constantly refer to is parallelism of various kinds: at the verbal level (as in the Psalms), or at the event level, as in those “type-scenes” where the same set of incidents will recur in a new context, giving us a chance to notice how different characters handle the same basic set of incidents. (So, like, the betrothal of Rebekah as compared with that of Moses’ wife, etc.) So, throughout the story of Noah’s Flood, there are little parallels with the creation and fall stories: the earth, for example, reverts to its primordial “without-form-and-void” state of being. My first question for the elusive Biblical narrator is: immediately after creation, we get the first story of buck-passing. (Adam blames Eve who blames the snake.) When Noah, having been blessed by God (like Adam), gets drunk (a new-made world’s first sin?), and when he famously lashes out at his son, Ham, afterward, thus giving ammo to generations of racists, is this actually supposed to parallel Adam’s passing of the buck to Eve? Is the Curse of Ham actually supposed to reflect badly on Noah, rather than, as both racist bible scholars and anti-Christian race scholars have always assumed, on Ham?