Page:A critical and exegetical commentary on Genesis (1910).djvu/287

 was the peculiar property of the Shemites.—and may he dwell] or that he may dwell. The subject can hardly be God (Jub. T$O$, Ber. R. Ra. IEz. Nö. al.), which would convey no blessing to Japheth; the wish refers most naturally to Japheth, though it is impossible to decide whether the expression 'dwell in the tents of' denotes friendly intercourse (so most) or forcible dispossession (Gu.). For the latter sense cf. Ps 78$55$, 1 Ch. 5$10$.—A Messianic reference to the ingathering of the Gentiles into the Jewish or Christian fold (T$J$, Fathers, De. al.) is foreign to the thought of the passage: see further below.

The question of the origin and significance of this remarkable narrative has to be approached from two distinct points of view.—I. In one aspect it is a culture-myth, of which the central motive is the discovery of wine. Here, however, it is necessary to distinguish between the original idea of the story and its significance in the connexion of the Yahwistic document. Read in its own light, as an independent fragment of tradition, the incident signalises the transition from nomadic to agricultural life. Noah, the first husbandman and vine-grower, is a tent-dweller (v.$21$); and this mode of life is continued by his oldest and favoured son Shem ($27$). Further, the identification of husbandry and vine culture points to a situation in which the simpler forms of agriculture had been supplemented by the cultivation of the grape. Such a situation existed in Palestine when it was occupied by the Hebrews. The sons of the desert who then served themselves heirs by conquest to the Canaanitish civilisation escaped the protracted evolution of vine-growing from primitive tillage, and stepped into the possession of the farm and the vineyard at once. From this point of view the story of Noah's drunkenness expresses the healthy recoil of primitive Semitic morality from the licentious habits engendered by a civilisation of which a salient feature was the enjoyment and abuse of wine. Canaan is the prototype of the population which had succumbed to these enervating influences, and is doomed by its vices to enslavement at the hands of hardier and more virtuous races.—In the setting in which it is placed by the Yahwist the incident acquires a profounder and more tragic significance. The key to this secondary interpretation is the prophecy of Lamech in 5$29$, which brings it into close connexion with the account of the Fall in ch. 3 (p. 133). Noah's discovery is there represented as an advance or refinement on the tillage of the ground to which man was sentenced in consequence of his first transgression. And the oracle of Lamech appears to show that the invention of wine is conceived as a relief from the curse. How far it is looked on as a divinely approved mode of alleviating the monotony of toil is hard to decide. The moderate use of wine is certainly not condemned in the OT: on the other hand, it is impossible to doubt that the light in which Noah is