The Other Patriarchal Narratives

Malka Z. Simkovich

The patriarchal narratives of Genesis 12–50 are often taught as a cohesive narrative that tells the story of how God cultivates a relationship with the family of Abraham and Sarah, whose descendants develop into the nation of Israel. This linear narrative, however, occasionally digresses into stories about other families whose descendants form nations that later become antagonists of the Israelites. In contrast to the biblical narratives about Abraham and Sarah, the stories about these other families are covenantal dead ends. They appear as active players just once in Genesis, in the wake of massive catastrophe, and their descendants don’t appear again until later in the Torah, when they provoke the Israelites centuries later.

Two such stories, the story of the flood in Genesis 6–9 and the story of Sodom’s destruction in Genesis 18–19, bear striking parallels to one another. The flood story, which is framed in Genesis as a divine response to humanity’s sins, is preceded by a brief passage that describes how the sons of God sleep with human women, a union that raises God’s ire. The flood culminates in a story about Noah’s sons—Shem, Ham, and Japheth—who become patriarchs of nations from which a new human family emerges. This story gives special attention to Ham, who observes Noah’s nakedness after Noah plants a vineyard, makes wine, and becomes drunk. Rather than covering Noah, Ham tells his brothers Shem and Japheth about their father’s nakedness, and his brothers cover Noah without observing his naked body. When Noah awakens, he understands what Ham has done and curses Ham’s son, Canaan. When read back into the flood story, Noah’s curse suggests that the flood narrative is about the formation of a tripartite human family. Each member of this family bears certain characteristics that can be traced to their earliest ancestors, and the nation of Canaan is associated with corporeality, indulgence, and sexual shame.

The story of Sodom’s destruction in Genesis 18–19 shares similar features. God’s plan to destroy Sodom is justified when its inhabitants reveal their sexual depravity by mobbing the house of Abraham’s nephew Lot and demanding that he turn over his guests to be raped. Lot responds by offering his daughters instead. Like Noah, Lot and his immediate family become the sole survivors of a divine act of destruction that is prompted by the moral abominations of an entire community. And like Noah, Lot is not deserving of his own salvation, and his children do not prove themselves to be immune to the temptations of moral depravity. The story ends much like Noah’s: with Lot’s sexually tinged humiliation at the hands of his children, which takes place after Lot drinks too much wine. Finally, just as the flood story closes its story of destruction with a vignette about survivors who become ancestors of nations that later become enemies of the Israelites, the story of Sodom’s destruction culminates in sexual humiliation that leads to the birth of two boys, Ammon and Moab, whose descendants form nations that later antagonize the Israelites.

Genesis 6–9:

The flood story is bracketed by details that clarify the sexual nature of humanity’s evil behavior. It begins with a description of people breaching the chasm between the human and divine realms:

When humankind began to increase on earth and daughters were born to them, the [males among the] divine beings saw how pleasing the human women were and took wives from among those who delighted them. The LORD said, “My breath shall not abide in humankind forever, since it too is flesh; let the days allowed them be one hundred and twenty years.” It was then, and later too, that the Nephilim appeared on earth—when divine beings cohabited with the human women, who bore them offspring. Such were the heroes of old, the men of renown. The LORD saw how great was human wickedness on earth—how every plan devised by the human mind was nothing but evil all the time. And the LORD regretted having made humankind on earth. (Gen. 6:1–6)

The description of humanity’s sins uses language from Genesis 1–3, which describes the world’s creation and the story of the first man and woman in the Garden of Eden. Genesis 6:2, which states that “the [males among the] divine beings saw how pleasing the human women were,” evokes the first human sin recorded in the Torah, when the first woman sees that “the tree was good for eating and a delight to the eyes” (Gen. 3:6). In both verses, someone sees a forbidden object, deems it “good,” and partakes of it. The presence of the first two parallels—in which people see something and observe its goodness—suggests that the third parallel, which marks the sin itself, is linked. As these parallels imply, the forbidden unions described in Genesis 6:2 perpetuate the sin of Eden. These unions, moreover, undermine God’s mandate to procreate and build families and thus breach God’s intended natural order.

The flood story is not merely a story about human sin. It is an origin story about the family of nations and their moral tendencies. For this reason, genealogy brackets the flood story. Just as the story introduces Noah, it diverts to introduce his sons:

This is the line of Noah. Noah was a righteous man; he was blameless in his age; Noah walked with God. Noah begot three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. The earth became corrupt before God; the earth was filled with lawlessness. (Gen. 6:9–11)

The reference to Noah’s sons disrupts the flow of the narrative and forewarns the reader that Noah’s sons will reappear later in the story and play a central role in its conclusion. This foreshadowing is confirmed in the story’s coda, which picks up on the theme of sexual violation and confirms that the human propulsion toward sexual shame has not been quashed. After Noah departs from the ark onto dry land, he plants a vineyard. This act marks a new relationship between humans and the earth they cultivate—rather than obtaining sustenance by planting and sowing the earth, Noah converts what food he has into something else: wine. This wine, it turns out, will yield a moral abomination that culminates in a curse that will impact later generations. This closing story reads:

The sons of Noah who came out of the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth—Ham being the father of Canaan. These three were the sons of Noah, and from these the whole world branched out. Noah, the tiller of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard. He drank of the wine and became drunk, and he uncovered himself within his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father’s nakedness and told his two brothers outside. But Shem and Japheth took a cloth, placed it against both their backs and, walking backward, they covered their father’s nakedness; their faces were turned the other way, so that they did not see their father’s nakedness. (Gen. 9:18–23)

After Noah falls into a drunken slumber and Ham tells his brothers about his father’s nakedness, Noah awakens and, realizing what has happened, declares that his sons and their descendants will share an entangled destiny:

When Noah woke up from his wine and learned what his youngest son had done to him, he said, “Cursed be Canaan; the lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers.” And he said, “Blessed be the LORD, the God of Shem; let Canaan be a slave to them. May God enlarge Japheth, and let him dwell in the tents of Shem; and let Canaan be a slave to them.” Noah lived after the Flood 350 years. And all the days of Noah came to 950 years; then he died. (Gen. 9:24–28)

Noah’s realization of his shame is encapsulated in the phrase vayeda, “and he learned.” This word is associated in earlier Genesis stories with sexual intimacy and is thus indicative of the sexual undertones of what Ham has done: something akin to a forbidden act between parent and child, though the specifics are left vague in the text. In response to this humiliation, Noah speaks for the first time in the flood story. His opening words curse his grandson Canaan and, by extension, his son Ham. Noah’s curse introduces a new player into his lineage, Canaan, whom he mentions three times. The meaning of Canaan’s curse is only fully understood in light of what comes later: Canaan becomes a thorn in the side of the Israelites and does not enjoy divine favor.

The stories that bracket the flood narrative suggest that the people who lived prior to the flood, and some of the people who lived after it, perpetuated the sin of the first man and woman, a sin that led to sexual awareness and shame. Like the first man and woman—who were tempted by the snake’s assurance that eating from the forbidden tree of knowledge would give them divine-like powers—the people who lived prior to the flood mingled with divine beings and, in so doing, endangered the line between the human and divine realms. Rather than leading to the elevation of humanity, it leads to sexual shame.

The flood story itself, moreover, can be read as a divine effort to establish a firm line between the divine and human realms. It culminates in a revised covenantal relationship between God and humanity, in which God promises to refrain from destroying the earth again, regardless of how evil its inhabitants may become. It does not, however, culminate in a promise to refrain from wiping out an entire city.

Genesis 18–19:

The language and structure of the biblical account regarding Sodom’s destruction evoke the flood story of Genesis 6–9. When divine messengers inform Abraham in Genesis 18 that God intends to destroy the city of Sodom, Abraham attempts to negotiate by asking God to spare the city if righteous people live in it. Abraham’s issue, it seems, is not with the notion of destruction per se but with the notion of collective punishment, wherein righteous people die with the wicked. The language that Abraham uses to ask God to spare the city of Sodom if it contained just fifty, forty, thirty, twenty, and then ten righteous people—“Will You sweep away the innocent (tzaddik) along with the guilty?” (Gen. 18:23)—recalls the language used to describe Noah in Genesis 6:9, which introduces him as a righteous man (tzaddik).

The stories’ descriptions of destruction also parallel one another. In Genesis 7:4, God brings destructive precipitation, described with the verbal form of matar:

For in seven days’ time I will make it rain (mamtir) upon the earth, forty days and forty nights, and I will blot out from the earth all existence that I created.

The same form of matar appears in the later description of God destroying Sodom:

The LORD rained (himtir) upon Sodom and Gomorrah sulfurous fire from the LORD out of heaven. (Gen. 19:24)

These two verses, which describe God’s destruction of the created world, contrast with the creation story, which uses the same verb to denote God’s intention to irrigate the earth and prompt humanity to till it. In this account, matar denotes a future blessing and plays a central role in the natural order that God has established. According to Genesis 2:5,

No shrub of the field was yet on earth and no grasses of the field had yet sprouted, because the LORD God had not sent rain upon the earth and there were no human beings to till the soil.

These stories are also linked in their descriptions of God’s remembrance following widespread destruction. According to Genesis 8:1,

God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the cattle that were with him in the ark, and God caused a wind to blow across the earth, and the waters subsided.

God’s “remembering” of Noah, which makes no mention of the rest of his family, indicates that Noah was the sole person deserving of God’s attention. Genesis 19 similarly notes God’s remembering of one individual following an act of divine destruction. In this case, however, the person saved and the person remembered are different people:

Thus it was that, when God destroyed the cities of the Plain and annihilated the cities where Lot dwelt, God was mindful of Abraham and removed Lot from the midst of the upheaval. (Gen. 19:29)

God only saves Lot because of his connection to Abraham, to whom God is loyal. Unlike Abraham, Lot has not earned God’s beneficence through pious actions.

Perhaps the most significant parallel between the flood story and the story of Sodom is that they are bracketed with anecdotes about sexual violation. In the account of Sodom’s destruction, messengers who have just informed Abraham of God’s intent to destroy Sodom arrive at Lot’s house to warn him of the plan. Lot implores these mysterious men to stay with him overnight rather than sleep in the street, and when Lot’s lustful neighbors arrive with the intent to assault them, Lot—in a perversion of Abraham’s earlier hospitality—offers his own daughters in their stead. After Sodom’s destruction, these daughters panic that the entire world has been destroyed and seduce their father in order to perpetuate humanity upon the earth:

Lot went up from Zoar and settled in the hill country with his two daughters, for he was afraid to dwell in Zoar; and he and his two daughters lived in a cave. And the older one said to the younger, “Our father is old, and there is not a man on earth to consort with us in the way of all the world. Come, let us make our father drink wine, and let us lie with him, that we may maintain life through our father.” That night they made their father drink wine, and the older one went in and lay with her father; he did not know when she lay down or when she rose. 

The next day the older one said to the younger, “See, I lay with Father last night; let us make him drink wine tonight also, and you go and lie with him, that we may maintain life through our father.” That night also they made their father drink wine, and the younger one went and lay with him; he did not know when she lay down or when she rose. Thus the two daughters of Lot became pregnant by their father. The older one bore a son and named him Moab; he is the father of the Moabites of today. And the younger also bore a son, and she called him Ben-ammi; he is the father of the Ammonites of today.

While readers of this story understand that the scale of Sodom’s destruction is exponentially smaller than the scale of destruction in the earlier flood story, the daughters within this story perceive the destruction of Sodom as universal and on the same scale as the flood generations earlier. Their misperception clarifies why they decide to seduce their father, and it adds heightened irony. While the flood story marked God’s response to the sexual perversion of humanity, acts of sexual perversion that undermined God’s natural order continued, first with Ham and Canaan and then with Lot’s daughters.

Genesis includes another story about a city, notorious for sexual depravity, that is destroyed. When Shechem abducts Jacob’s daughter Dinah in Genesis 34, her brothers Simeon and Levi hatch a plan to take their vengeance on him and his city, also called Shechem, by pretending to engage in a treaty that would require the men of Shechem to undergo circumcision. After they undergo the procedure and are in the process of recovering, the brothers invade Shechem and slaughter its men. Upon receiving the news of this attack, Jacob is furious with Simeon and Levi and later curses them on his deathbed. Like the stories of the flood and Sodom, the account of Shechem’s destruction can be understood as an origin story for a community that would later provoke the Israelites. But Jacob’s unfavorable response to Simeon and Levi’s zealotry suggests that acts of vengeful destruction can only be wrought by God. Humanity does not have the moral authority to go on the offensive by wreaking collective punishment upon the cities of their enemies.

Connecting These Stories:

The stories of the flood and Sodom’s destruction both describe God’s response to humans who defy the natural order that God established at the moment of creation. Rather than leaving one’s ancestral home to produce new families, as dictated in Genesis 2:24, the people of Noah’s generation and the people of Sodom breached the chasm between humanity and the divine, producing moral abominations that prompted God to destroy their societies and create new ones. Yet immediately after their destruction, the natural order is once again undone: first by the son of Noah, who fathers Canaan, and then by Lot’s daughters, who become the mothers of Ammon and Moab. These acts of transgression lie at the foundation of their descendants’ identities, and those descendants later antagonize the Israelites and denounce the natural order with which God created the world.

The story of Sodom highlights God’s expectation that all people, even those who live outside the covenantal community, observe the natural order established at creation. The failure to preserve this order prompts a divine realization, so to speak, that without a binding covenant that obligates a community, a sustained relationship with God will not be cultivated. As other nations fail to preserve the natural order in Genesis, the onus of covenant shifts from God to the people who receive God’s love but do not reciprocate it by observing its moral terms.

All told, the stories about Noah and Lot can be read as responses to the problem of chosenness. While it seems that Abraham was chosen by God in Genesis 12 at random, these stories imply that, even if Abraham did not actively choose God, other families refused to comply with God’s moral precepts and were therefore undeserving of a special covenant. In the early Common Era, rabbinic writers would pick up on this theme by recording midrashic traditions suggesting that, at the moment of creation, God offered the Torah to other nations, who rejected its moral precepts. For these writers, the story of Genesis is indeed one cohesive story about how the Torah functions as a moral blueprint—not just for the Abrahamic family, but for the world.