[A] word play involving Egyptian
occurs in Genesis 9-10, centered on the name ḥām “Ham,” one of the three sons of Noah. The word play
is not truly bilingual, since the proper name ḥām “Ham” is simply that, a proper name, and does not
have a Hebrew meaning in this context (the meaning “hot” does not fit here).
But as the text puns on the meaning of this word in Egyptian—indeed on two
meanings that the word bears in Egyptian—it is akin to bilingual word play.
Ham, we learn from Gen 10:6, is the progenitor of Kush, Mizraim, Put, and
Canaan, that is to say, the extent of the Egyptian Empire during the New
Kingdom period. The word ḥām
corresponds to the Egyptian word ḥm “majesty,” used commonly in the
expression ḥm-f “His Majesty,” used to refer to the Pharaoh. But the
same biconsonantal noun ḥm also means “slave” in Egyptian, and this
supplies one of the clues for understanding Gen 9:20-27. Ham saw his father
Noah in a naked state, the punishment for which is that his son Canaan will be
a slave-note the fourfold use of the word ‘ebed “slave” (three times in
the singular, once in the plural) in vv. 25-27—to his brothers Shem and Japhet.
The text no doubt puns on the root k-n-‘ “be low, be humbled, be subdued”
in the word Kěna’an “Canaan,” as G. Guillaume noted (“Paronomasia in the
Old Testament,” JSS 9 [1964]: 272-90, esp. p. 283). But this same
scholar wrote as follows: “Canaan had to be written, and not Ham,
because the oracle demanded a name with an unhappy entail; and nothing could be
done with the name Ha, which presumably would be understood to mean ‘hot’”
(Ibid., 283). The “Canaan” part of this statement is true—and it serves as a
corrective to those scholars who would remove wě ḥām hû’ ‘ăbî Kěna’ān “and Ham was the
father of Canaan” in v. 18 and ‘ăbî Kěna’an “the Father of Canaan” in v.
22 as secondary glosses, for they are needed in order for the narrative to work—but
the “ham” part of the statement requires adjustment. Better to assume that the
author of the story also had the Egyptian meaning of ḥm “slave” in mind,
and that he in turn assumed that his intellectual readership would understand
the bilingual word play. True, the ḥ of both Egyptian words, “majesty”
and “slave,” is a voiceless pharyngeal /ḥ/, whereas the ḥ of Hebrew ḥām “Ham” represents a voiceless
velar or voiceless uvular, that is, Semitic /ḫ/ (a point that can be determined
by the Septuagint transcription of the proper name as Χαμ), and thus this word play may operate to its full extent only in
the written text and not in the text’s oral/aural treatment . . . But this
issue does not militate against the overall conclusion that ḥām “Ham” and Kěna’an “Canaan”
work together in this pericope to produce the desired effect. (Gary A.
Rendsburg, “Word Play in Biblical Hebrew: An Eclectic Collection,” in Puns
and Pundits: Word Play in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near Eastern Literature,
ed. Scott B. Noegel [Bethesda, Md.: CDL Press, 2000], 143-45)
It would be helpful to know how
the two Egyptian words ḥm “majesty” and ḥm “slave” were differentiated
from one another, and whether one or the other or both were pronounced close to
the vocalization of Hebrew ḥām. But such information is not forthcoming
to the best of my knowledge. Coptic retains only the latter in the compound
noun hont “priest,” derived from ḥm-ntr “servant of god,”
but this tells us little of the vocalization of this word in pharaonic times,
and of course we still would have no evidence for ḥm “majesty.” (Ibid.,
145 n. 31)
