What is your view of Noah's curse on Canaan in Genesis 9, and how was it fulfilled?
A viewer asks Robert's opinion of Noah's prophecy over Ham and Canaan in Genesis 9:25 and how it was fulfilled.
Answer
Noah came out of the ark, got drunk, and lay uncovered in his tent, which was itself a fault, since there were strict rules about nakedness then. Shem and Japheth walked in backwards to cover him, which shows how grave the sin of exposing or fondling him would be. The text says Noah knew what his 'younger son' had done to him, and it intimates a sexual sin, but it is deliberately ambiguous about whether Ham or his son Canaan was the culprit; some think it was homosexuality, some think it was merely seeing Noah naked, and everything in between. The reason it matters is the curse: if Canaan is the one cursed, we would expect Canaan to have been involved, because it makes no sense for Noah to curse Canaan for a sin Ham committed. And this becomes a prophecy fulfilled in history. God told Abraham his descendants would be four hundred years in Egypt and could not take the promised land yet because the iniquity of the Amorites, who are Canaanites descended from Canaan, was not yet full. Counting ten generations from Noah to Abraham in Genesis 11, plus the four generations named in Egypt, you get about fourteen generations from Canaan's sin to the total destruction of the Canaanites under Joshua; that is the finality of the prophecy. As for the alternate theory that Ham committed incest with Noah's wife and so fathered Canaan, to me that is a stretch; Noah's wife is not even mentioned, and the text already tells us each son had his own wife. And the curse being a generational curse does not mean the Canaanites were made evil by it; they became evil on their own by refusing the religion of Noah and living as pagans, which is why God had to wait so long, until their iniquity was full, before bringing judgment.