Noah Gets Drunk (A sample from "Easter in Eden")

Sample from our commentary on Genesis 1-11, "Easter in Eden"

9.18-21: And the sons of Noah, that went forth of the ark, were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth... and Noah planted a vineyard: And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.

 WE NOW STUMBLE upon a seemingly grotesque affair. Many preachers, picking their way through Genesis’s thorny brambles, would sooner avert their eyes than linger right here. To be so drowned in alcohol as to sprawl out naked, senseless in the rank folds of a tent—this is no portrait of a great patriarch clad in solemn dignity. It is, rather, the lurching debauchery of some backwater vagrant, reeking of moonshine and ruin. Why, one might hiss, did our historian bother to etch such sordidness onto the sacred page?

Yet this is no mere stain on Noah’s tattered honor, no fleeting lapse to be brushed aside like ash from a smoldering altar. This is the second “slumber” woven into Scripture’s tapestry.

The first recorded sleep, if we remember, was Adam, who was sunk in a holy trance, as his side was rent to birth Eve. This sleep was a picture―a shadowed prophecy―of the blood and water that would one day spill from Christ’s pierced side, summoning forth his bride, the Church.

Noah’s nap is also a picture that points beyond himself. Sprawled out under the influence of homemade wine, he serves as a flickering hint of the promised Redeemer.

The truth slithers into focus when you trace the naps of holy men and what they accomplish in Scripture. That and the crimson thread of vineyards, grapes, and wine, that haunted elixir, through Scripture’s prophetic veins.

Wine is no trifling draught. As the taste of wine is to an initiated palate, its symbolic meaning in the Bible can be complex and multi-layered. At times in Scripture, wine can speak of comfort or love. In addition, wine can serve as a potent symbol of blood.

In much of the Bible, wine is also the chalice of Heaven’s fury, brimming with judgment. Isaiah 51 conjures a picture of Jerusalem, reeling as she gulps “the cup of the Lord’s wrath,” her lips stained with the dregs of celestial rage. So it is in Gethsemane’s garden, when Peter, all reckless steel and bluster, draws his blade, and Christ, heavy with the weight of the coming doom, declares, “Shall I not drink the cup?” What is in “the cup”? It is the wine of God’s unrelenting ire against evil. Its bitter lees are the sum of sin’s penalty, which Jesus would swallow to the last, bitter drop.

In Noah’s sprawl, we receive a glimpse, not merely of a man undone by folly, but we see, darkly, as through a distorted mirror, the one who will drink the full measure of Heaven’s wrath, transforming the wine of condemnation into the blood of salvation. The tent, reeking of shame, becomes a sanctuary, whispering of a tomb yet to come. 

The Tent & the Tomb

In the aftermath of the deluge, Noah stands as a second Adam, the crowned head of a new humanity, drenched in frailty and clawing its way from the muck.

Yet Christ, the last Adam, looms on the distant horizon, destined to forge an eternal race, unyielding to decay. When Noah, reeling and drunken from the vine’s bounty, collapses into a naked stupor, it is no mere lapse to be whispered away in shame. No, the second Adam, in his unraveling, casts a shadowed likeness of the last Adam, who would drain a far more dreadful cup and undergo the passion of crucifixion, stripped and scorned beneath a blackened sky.

Noah’s debasement in his tent summons various responses. Some look sympathetically. Some mock. So too does the Cross draw forth a mixture from the mob: jeers, tears, and the dull stare of an indifferent soul. Yet, just as Noah stirs from his sleep to utter his blessings and his curses, so Christ rises, radiant and unbowed, to proclaim the final reckoning—judgment sharp as a blade and love vast as the ocean.

Heavenly symmetry unfurls across the millennia from the vineyard to the Cross. Noah’s shame prefigures Christ’s sacrifice, and the tent foreshadows the tomb. 

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An extract from our new book "Easter in Eden: Christ in Genesis 1-11"