Of all the inexplicable events in Genesis, the story of Noah’s nakedness and its consequences stands alone. It’s an easy story to sum up. Noah got drunk and fell asleep naked; his son Ham saw him. Ham told his two brothers, Shem and Japheth, who, out of respect for their father, walked backward into Noah’s tent, so as not to see him, and put a garment over him. When Noah woke up and found out what had happened, he cursed Ham and his son, Canaan—the father of the Canaanite people, the original inhabitants of what became Palestine—as follows, in the King James version: “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.”

What is the violation involved in seeing your own father naked? Talmudic commentators thought it most likely that “see” was a euphemism, and that there were three possible crimes at hand—Ham had sex with Noah, or raped him, or castrated him. Medieval Christian theologians argued that Ham’s sin was laughing at his father’s nakedness, although the text in Genesis doesn’t mention laughter. Modern Biblical scholars have never been able to agree on a single explanation, although most agree that the verses were written with a particular purpose in mind: to justify the subjugation of the Canaanites, which at the time of its composition was likely well under way.

The Curse of Ham is perhaps the most vividly destructive story in all of the Hebrew Bible, and not just for the scenes of divinely inspired slaughter in the Book of Joshua, events that reverberate in Israel and the Palestinian territories to this day. It’s had an even more terrible afterlife: since the Middle Ages, in Europe, the Islamic world, and the Americas, the Curse of Ham has been cited as a Biblical justification for serfdom and slavery, partly because Ham and Canaan are associated with darkness or blackness—a myth that begins not in the text of Genesis but in later interpretations, whose origin is still a subject of scholarly debate.

The Curse of Ham is terrifying because it seems so arbitrary. No one can say definitively what Ham did that was so terrible and unforgivable, why the curse was not pronounced on Ham but instead on his son and all of his son’s descendants, or even why Noah, who is not God or even a prophet on the level of Moses, is able to level a command with such destructive, irreparable consequences. It’s also terrifying because, in its arbitrariness, it makes a kind of intuitive sense about fatherhood and masculinity and power.

On the day of the Senate testimony of Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh, I had to drive to the airport in the middle of the afternoon to catch an overnight flight, after a full day of teaching and office hours, leaving me just a half hour to listen to the hearings on the radio. When I tuned in, pulling out of the parking lot, I heard only dead air. Then Kavanaugh began to speak.

A page from a calendar that Kavanaugh kept in 1982. Photograph by Senate Judiciary Committee / NYT / Redux

“My dad started keeping detailed calendars of his life in 1978,” he said, and stopped. “He did so as both a calendar and a diary. He was a very organized guy, to put it mildly.” He stopped again, clearly overcome with feeling. “Christmastime,” he said, in a strangled voice, as if gulping for air. “We’d sit around and he regales us with old stories, old milestones, old weddings, old events from his calendars.”

I turned off the radio and drove in silence for a few minutes. Then, out of a sense of obligation—civic duty, I suppose—I turned it on again. I couldn’t see him, yet my impulse was to avert my eyes, or rather, my ears. Kavanaugh was having a breakdown on live radio and TV. He was apparently lying, and lying under oath; he couldn’t possibly be confirmed; it seemed to me that he didn’t want to be confirmed. He wanted to rage; he wanted to turn the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing into a bad simulacrum of a David Mamet play.

DIANNE FEINSTEIN: Well, the difficult thing is that it—the—these hearings are set and—set by the majority. But I’m talking about getting the evidence and having the evidence looked at. And I don’t understand—you know, we hear from the witnesses. But the F.B.I. isn’t interviewing them and isn’t giving us any facts. So all we have . . .

KAVANAUGH: You’re interviewing me.

FEINSTEIN: . . . is what they say.

KAVANAUGH: You’re interviewing me. You’re—you’re doing it, senator. I’m sorry to interrupt . . .

FEINSTEIN: Well . . .

KAVANAUGH: . . . but you’re doing it. That’s—the—the—there’s no conclusions reached.

FEINSTEIN: And—and what you’re saying, if—if I understand it, is that the allegations by Dr. Ford, Ms. Ramirez, and Ms. Swetnick are—are wrong?

KAVANAUGH: Yes, that—that is emphatically what I’m saying; emphatically. The Swetnick thing is a joke. That is a farce.

FEINSTEIN: Would you like to say more about it?

KAVANAUGH: No.

A week later, Kavanaugh was confirmed and immediately sworn in by the Chief Justice, John Roberts. In the two months since the hearings, the country has lurched through at least a dozen more major crises and a midterm election, and has now settled into the grinding business of resisting, or abetting, a 5–4 Supreme Court majority that favors the right.

After a traumatic event, in the short term, life has to go on. (Walter Benjamin, writing in the nineteen-thirties, put it this way: “That things ‘just keep on going’ is the catastrophe.”) This particular perverse continuity is a feature of the Trump era. But I doubt anyone who witnessed the Ford-Kavanaugh hearings has forgotten the sheer emotional chaos—the shouting, the sneering, the mockery, the raw cynicism, the red-faced hectoring and pleading, the “I like beer”—on display that afternoon. Because it was effective, it is now magnified. Politically, if not legally, it represents a new precedent.