What did the Early Rabbis do with the Drunken Sailor (Gen 9:18-29)? Keeping Sober in the Eyes of the Amoraim in Genesis Rabbah

The purpose of this paper is to explore how ancient interpreters, and particularly the Amoraim in Genesis Rabbah, provided new meanings to the Noah drunkenness biblical text (Gen 9: 18-29). These Jewish interpreters in the third and fourth centuries C.E. made hermeneutic decisions at critical junctures in this biblical narrative and sometimes reconfigured the story's plot and characters to correspond to their understanding of its central message. Their elaborations and clarifications therefore restricted and channeled the meaning of the biblical narrative in distinctive directions. Their reconstructed narrative indeed offers a rich vista into the thematic and literary formulation of early rabbinic interpretation. In addition , it explores how the authors of early rabbinic literature established standards of rabbinic morality by reshaping and developing the biblical narrative. While the Bible does not explicitly condemn Noah for his act of drunkenness, the Amoraim in Genesis Rabbah go to great lengths to demonstrate that not only was Noah guilty of a grave sin of inebriation, but that his actions were the cause of Is-rael's future exiles and troubles. Their interpretations may in fact offer an assessment of what the early Rabbis considered moral behaviour .