THIS IS MY TWENTY-FIFTH MONTHLY TEACHING LETTER AND BEGINS MY THIRD YEAR OF PUBLICATION. It is my striving goal to make each succeeding letter to transcend, eclipse and outshine the ones preceding it. It is a very rigorous, difficult and demanding goal to try to meet each month. I established in the last lesson that Canaan, the son of Ham, was born of incest and pointed to a couple of scriptures to prove the point. It was a case of Ham looking upon his father’s nakedness, which turns out to be his mother’s nakedness.
It was hard to find anything of value in the various commentaries on the subject, as the writers seem to want to dance a jig around the topic trying to suppose it means a stepmother or a concubine, and in some instances this is what is intended. They also try to insinuate that these prohibitions were for the prevention of disease, and in some cases this might also be the purpose. In other cases they will just generalize that it was an immorality of some kind, or just skip over the verse as if it weren’t there.
I only found one comment from The Wycliffe Bible Commentary, page 99, which was worth quoting and I will repeat it here: “The nakedness of thy father. These laws were addressed to men. Hence this verse contains a prohibition not against incest between father and daughter, but against incest between son and mother only. The shame brought upon the mother was brought also upon the father. As they were of one flesh (Gen. 2:24), any act committed against the mother could be considered to have been likewise committed against the father.”