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Transcript 243B — "Cursed be Canaan" [Gen 9:25]
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: Yes. Could you tell me what happened to Canaan, the son of Ham, when Ham, the youngest son of Noah saw his father naked, and when he sobered up he said, "Cursed be Canaan." Could you tell me what happened to Canaan?
HC: In other words, how was the curse worked out in Canaan's life?
CALLER: Yes.
HC: Actually, the working out of that curse occurred hundreds of years later, actually a couple of thousand years later. The descendants of Canaan dwelt in the land of Canaan, which was later on the land of Palestine. And when God came to Abraham, in Genesis 15, He said, "Your descendants will be oppressed in the land for 400 years [speaking of the fact that Abraham's seed would spend more than 400 years in the land of Egypt]."
And then He said in verse 16 of Genesis 15, "And they shall come back here in the fourth generation. For the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete." Now the word Amorite is a general term that related to all the inhabitants of the land of Canaan. In other words, it is actually a name assigned to the Canaanites, or the descendants of Canaan. At this point God is effectively saying, "God's curse is coming. It's going to be fulfilled, on the descendants of Canaan. But it isn't quite ready yet. The iniquity has not been completed."
But when Israel went out of Egypt, and they entered the land of Canaan, they were told to utterly destroy the inhabitants of the land. You'll recall how they dealt with Jericho, which was really a prototype of the way they were to look upon all the cities there. They destroyed the whole city: the young men, the children, the animals, everything. God's judgment had come upon the land of Canaan. And I believe that this was the final working out of the curse that had already been pronounced by Noah on Canaan.
The children of Israel were told that they were to utterly destroy the inhabitants of the land. We read in Deuteronomy 7:1: "When the Lord your God brings you into the land which you are entering, to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Gergishites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perrizites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than yourselves, and when the Lord your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them. You shall not make marriages with them, giving your daughters to their sons and taking their daughters for your sons." Verse 5: "But thus shall you deal with them. You shall break down their altars and dash in pieces their pillars and hew down their ashram and burn down their graven images with fire." This was God's statement to Israel, as they came in the land of Canaan.
CALLER: Okay. Thank you very much.