101 Myths of the Bible: how ancient scribes - Conscious Evolution TV

Myths of the Beginning 77
In the above scenario, Ham had previously seen his father naked and told his two
other brothers what he saw. The other two brothers then covered their father. But,
when Noah awoke he cursed“his younger son,” Canaan, not Ham, who had seen him
naked. Since this occurs shortly after Noah and his family came off the ark, where did
this Canaan come from and how could he be old enough to cause such mischief unless
he had also been on the ark?
Lest there be any confusion that the author mistakenly substituted Ham for
Canaan as the youngest child, we should note that on all the occasions when the Bible
mentions Noah’s three sons together, Ham’s name appears in second place. This
would have been a literary formula intended to convey to the reader that Ham was the
middle son, not the youngest.
Who fathered Canaan: Noah or Ham? Some confusion must have surrounded
this issue because somewhere along the way at least one biblical editor felt it necessary
to repeatedly stress that Ham was the father. The confusion stemmed from the fact
that in the Hermopolitan tradition all four males on the ark were the fathers of the
same child and this didn’t make sense to the monotheistic Hebrews in later times. The
question of parentage had to be re-examined.
The identification of Ham as father of Canaan would have been a late development,
well into the period of Hebrew monarchy (see Myth #45). It originated from
the idea that the land of Egypt (i.e., Ham) fathered the land of Canaan, a belief
reflected in Genesis 10, which purports to trace the origins of nations after the flood.
This suggests that Canaan originally had a different name, one that reflected his
connection to the solar god Re in his form as a child. (Re had many different names.
One litany lists at least seventy-five.) That would explain why Noah cursed Canaan
instead of Ham. Canaan originally represented the god Re, the Hermopolitan Creator
deity, and Hebrew priests needed to diminish the influence of the Egyptian Re on
the beliefs of the early Hebrew refugees from Egypt.