In a previous post, one of my most read, I explored what happened between Noah and Ham in Genesis 9. There are two particular possibilities, both plausible, though I come down on one side in that post. However, I’d like to nuance what I said previously, by exploring Noah’s relationship with wine.
Noah sometimes gets lambasted as a drunkard. You occasionally see these lists of sins going around, which suggest that all of God’s ‘heroes’ were terrible sinners: Noah was a drunkard, Jacob was a liar, David an adulterer etc. The point usually is to say, ‘do you really think God can’t use you?’ It’s a good point. However, good rhetoric softens what the Bible is actually saying. Was Jacob a liar? Yes, but that’s forcing a frame on the story that elides as much as it clarifies. Was David an adulterer? Obviously, but what he did was much worse than that.
But was Noah a ‘drunk’? That seems a stretch.
Noah’s Story
We’re in Genesis 8 and 9. Noah has survived the flood, with all the animals in his floating box-zoo. He builds an altar to the Lord and offers some of every sacrificial animal and bird on it. That’s interesting, since the Law hadn’t yet been given. It does explain why he brought 14 of every sacrificial animal. Noah is the first person in the Bible to offer an ascension offering. Abel had brought a different kind of sacrifice, and the implied sacrifice that God makes to clothe Adam and Eve isn’t given a specific term.
In response to the smell of the ascension offering, God makes a covenant to never again curse the soil because of our sins, and never to wipe away all living things. Then the Lord makes it clear that Noah is another man like Adam by giving him and his sons the command to be fruitful and multiply (9.1). Noah is in essence the ‘second’ Adam in the Bible, of which there are a long succession, Jesus being the last (1 Corinthians 15). Of course there’s a different, more theological sense that Jesus is the ‘second’ to Adam, which is why Paul in that same passage calls him the ‘second man.’
The Lord then treats Noah like Adam, telling him what he can eat—the animals this time, not the fruit of the garden—with some prohibitions. Then the sign of the cloud-bow (rainbow) is given so that they will know that in the future wrath will point up, not down. There’s a similarity here to the promise made to Eve in Genesis 3.
Then, just before the incident with Ham, we’re told that Noah ‘began to be a man of the soil,’ a man of the adamah. The link with Adam could not be stronger. But, unlike Adam, the sentence finishes telling us that he plants a vineyard. Then he drinks of the wine and becomes ‘drunk.’
A Man of Wine
Noah, which means ‘rest,’ is the hope of the world. He’s a new Adam, he’s been put in what is essentially a new world after the last one was steadily decreated into watery chaos. This is a new garden of Eden, that he’s planted himself. It’s true that unlike Adam and Eve he doesn’t have the same kind of direct access to God, however he does ‘go up’ to the heavens with his ascension offering, and he is given the animals of the whole earth to eat, not just the trees of the garden. My point is that this is lesser than the garden, but in other ways its more. There’s a progress here, a maturity.
The man of rest also farms the ground, but he doesn’t grow crops, he plants vines. If Adam was, typologically, a farmer, then Noah is, literally, a vintner. If Adam was a man of bread, Noah is a man of wine. Progress from bread to wine is a common biblical motif. It takes time and civilisation to grow grain and make bread, but it takes much longer and a much more sophisticated culture to develop wine. There is maturity here. It would have taken at least three years between 9.20 and 9.21, because it takes that long to grow the vines to the point where you’re going to get wine from them.
Wine is a biblical sign and symbol of blessing, over and over again in the Old Testament. It is also, often, a sign of cursing, so there is some ambivalence in the symbol. However, we’re meant to see this as a positive, even exciting development in Genesis 9. The man of rest, Noah, has achieved his mission and planted a vineyard. He’s going to stay in one place and drink the drink that is given as a gift to gladden our hearts (Psalm 104). This is blessing.
Noah’s Drunkenness
Then Noah drinks, ‘became drunk,’ and lies down to sleep.
First, we should notice that this is the first time he or, as the story is presented, anyone else, has ever drunk wine. The idea that the first person in history making wine and enjoying wine and then getting sleepy makes then ‘a drunk’ is a stretch.
Let’s assume for a moment that he did overindulge, setting up the narrative that follows, at worst we can acknowledge the way that wine is an ambivalent symbol, and be warned to not overindulge. I don’t think we can blame Noah for this, how is he supposed to know?
There are reasons for taking it more gently than that even. The Hebrew word translated ‘became drunk’ (shakhar) definitely does mean that, but is also sometimes used to mean ‘be merry.’ It’s only other use in Genesis is positive (Gen 43.34). Wine is supposed to gladden the heart (Psalm 104.15), and merriment is not drunkenness. This line in a binge drinking culture like the UK’s can be difficult to draw, but is a natural thing to say in lots of cultures that have healthier attitudes to alcohol.
The term is used negatively more than positively across the rest of the Bible, but it does open the possibility that Noah enjoyed his vineyard’s first vintage, felt sleepy as a result, and had a nap. That may not be true, but either way I think it should encourage us to extend some grace before we call Noah a drunk. We should give the Old Testament saints the charity we ourselves would like to receive.
Moralistic Applications
However we read that, we should certainly not use the story as one about the evils of the demon drink. Quite the opposite, the vineyard is a sign of blessing. God gifts us a world to rejoice and rest in, wine is part of that. We should read and preach it as Noah being able to enjoy the rest of the world after it was rescued through the waters of death. We move from baptism into the Lord’s Supper. There’s even an argument there for only the baptised being welcomed to the table, which is a much easier way to read the text than about our personal relationships to alcohol.
We can certainly learn something about moderation from this story, but without blaming Noah for it; however, that’s a long way from the first point we’d look to draw. Beyond even the points about maturity, about the Lord’s Supper, and about the gift of the world to us, we should see that a man of rest comes like Adam but better. This man of rest will be a man of wine, perhaps even accused, falsely, of being a drunkard because he liked company and merriment. He will fulfil the promise given to Noah in the cloud-bow, that wrath will point upwards, as the Lord becomes a man of the soil himself to bear the sins of the world. He will even gift us wine, as priests in the old covenant didn’t drink, but priests of the new drink as they worship: the fruit of the tree of wisdom.
Noah’s story is about Noah. It’s about Jesus. It’s about wine as a gift.
Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash
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