Noah's Perfect Milieu

The King James translators applied a 'loincloth', as it were, to Noah's historical record, it seems to me. Plain, old fashioned hero- worship seems to be the inspiration of the translators' help, in this case. Genesis 9:20 (with the translators' help) reads: "And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard." This is an innocuous- enough statement; though perhaps somewhat artificially so.

According to the law of parsimony: if it isn't broken, it shouldn't be fixed. The text under examination reads just fine without the 'help' of the king's translators; and their addition of the two words "to be" changes the chronological nature of the passage from one of origins to that of new beginnings; as if Noah never drank wine until he was six hundred years old. That would be altogether incredible.

Perhaps the reason the translators found it necessary to add to the text of verse twenty is what follows in verse 21. Taken together, without the translators' help, the verses read: "20 And Noah began an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard: 21 And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent [Genesis 9:20 & 21]." This makes it seem as if drunken nakedness were Noah's normal milieu– before and after the flood– and it probably was; but that's not terribly flattering to one of Christianity's most- worshipped heroes. 

Worship is what it's all about, according to Revelation 13:15.