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
Shem-Tob ben Isaac of Tortosa the four seasons of the year. According to the superstitions of his time, he believed in the influence of the planets on man; and accordingly an entire treatise deals with astrology. His translation was undertaken with the view of spreading medical science among the Jews, so that they might not be dependent on Christian physicians (comp. 'Ab. Zarah ii.2). The translation is not literal; and in this Shem-Ṭob departed from the method of the earlier translators. As to the various names of diseases and medicaments, Shem-Ṭob employs all that he could find in the Bible and in Talmudic literature. Others