Ver. 24. "_And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him._"--That Ham was older than Japheth, appears from the circumstance that the order in which the sons of Noah are introduced is uniformly thus: Shem, Ham, Japheth; or, beginning, as in chap. x., from the youngest, [Pg 32] Japheth, Ham, Shem,--where, however, in ver. 21, the words added immediately after Shem--"the elder brother of Japheth," expressly indicate that, for a certain purpose, the writer has proceeded in order from the youngest to the oldest. It is altogether in vain that some have attempted to prove from chap. xi. 10 (according to which Shem was, two years after the flood, only a hundred years old), compared with chap. v. 32 (according to which Noah began to beget when he was five hundred years old), that Shem was not the first-born. The words in chap. v. 32 are: "And Noah was five hundred years old, and Noah begat Shem, Ham, and Japheth." That the chronology can here be determined in a way which only approximates to the truth, is implied, as a matter of course, in the statement, that all the three sons were begotten when Noah was five hundred years of age; nothing more is meant than that Noah begat them after he had finished his fifth, or at the beginning of his sixth, century. (Compare _Ranke's Untersuchungen_.) It is just an indefinite statement of time which points forward to another genealogy, in which the details will be given with greater precision. Ham everywhere stands between the two; but that, nevertheless, he is, in this passage, called the younger son, can be explained only on the ground that, in the case before us, Shem and Ham are the two more especially noticed--Shem as positively good, and Ham as positively evil, while Japheth only takes part with Shem. We have thus laid an excellent foundation for the right understanding of the subsequent prophetic utterance of Noah--for the announcement, namely, of Japheth's dwelling in the tents of Shem. Ver. 25. "_And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be to his brethren._"--_Luther_ says: "Good old Noah, who is regarded by his son as a foolish and stupid old man, deserving only of mockery, appears here in truly prophetic majesty, and announces to his sons a divine revelation of what shall come to pass in future days; thus verifying what Paul says in 2 Cor. xii., that God's strength is made perfect in weakness."