Curse of Ham but that he violated this agreement and instead chose to squat in the land delineated to Shem (and later Abraham), and so rightly deserved the curse of slavery. Philo of Alexandria, a 1st-century BC Jewish philosopher, said that Ham and Canaan were equally guilty, if not of whatever had been done to Noah, then of other crimes, "for the two of them together had acted foolishly and wrongly and committed other sins." Rabbi Eleazar decided that Canaan had in fact been the first to see Noah, and had then gone and told his father, who then told his brothers in
Tower of Babel Tower of Babel account, in , it is said that everyone on Earth spoke the same language, but this is inconsistent with the Biblical description of the post-Noahic world described in , where it is said that the descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japheth gave rise to different nations, each with their own language. Some explain this discrepancy by saying that the order of the narrative is not the same as the order of events. There have also been a number of traditions around the world that describe a divine confusion of the one original language into several, albeit without