Curse of Ham that, in 1st millennium Babylonia, looking at another person's genitals was indeed regarded as a serious matter. Other ancient commentators suggested that Ham was guilty of more than what the Bible says. The "Targum Onqelos" has Ham gossiping about his father's drunken disgrace "in the street" (a reading which has a basis in the original Hebrew), so that being held up to public mockery was what had angered Noah; as the "Cave of Treasures" (4th century) puts it, "Ham laughed at his father's shame and did not cover it, but laughed about it and mocked." Ancient commentaries have also debated
Curse of Ham whether "seeing" someone's nakedness meant to have sex with that person (e.g. Leviticus 20:17). The same idea was raised by 3rd-century rabbis, in the "Babylonian Talmud" (c. 500 AD), who argue that Ham either castrated his father, or sodomised him. The same explanations are found in three Greek translations of the Bible, which replace the word "see" in verse 22 with another word denoting homosexual relations. The castration theory has its modern counterpart in suggested parallels found in the castration of Uranus by Cronus in Greek mythology and a Hittite myth of the supreme god Anu whose genitals were "bitten