genesis 9:18-29 - the curse of ham

The second part of Chapter 9 may be only 12 verses in length, but they are chock full of goodness. This is typical of the Bible: either one thing (or nothing) is covered excruciatingly slowly, or many things are covered so quickly that the reader’s head spins. I wonder if this was on purpose: bore the reader to the point of exhaustion, and then fill his head with a lot of facts he is too tired to question.

Noah has three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. These were actually introduced way back in Chapter 6 (Genesis 6:10), but it is only now that they become important. It is from these three men that all the peoples of the world are the descended. This is an important point. Pay attention: you will be graded.

Noah plants a vineyard, makes wine, and gets drunk off the wine. He falls asleep naked in his tent. Ham sees his father naked, and tells his two brothers. Shem and Japheth cover Noah, but take the precaution of approaching him backwards and not looking at him as they do so.

When Noah wakes up, he knows “what his younger son had done unto him” (Genesis 9:24). So he curses—

Wait! What?!

All the Bible says is that Ham saw Noah naked. There is no evidence here that this was anything other than an accident. If so, it is hardly likely that he would have reported it to his brothers.

Yet Noah knows “what [Ham] had done unto him.” This implies that Ham’s offense was far greater than seeing his father naked. The offense is so great that Noah curses not only Ham, but his offspring, the Canaanites. Thenceforth, the Canaanites will be enslaved to the descendants of Shem and Japheth (Genesis 9:25-27 – when the King James Version uses the word “servant”, it is translating the Hebrew word for “slave”).

Either Noah is seriously overreacting here, or the Bible has left quite a bit out. It has been suggested that Ham raped his drunken father, but there is absolutely no evidence in the text itself to support this. And, once again, if Ham had done this, why would he have told his brothers about it? Prideful boasting? We are given no evidence of any sort of grudge between Noah and his son, or reason to believe that Ham is an evil sort of person.

Basically, this comes out of nowhere, blindsiding the reader, and providing yet another justification for the worst abuses of Christianity.

You see, the “Curse of Ham” was the principle Biblical passage used to support the enslavement of black Africans. Recall that Noah’s children produce three human lineages. For ages, Europeans divided humanity into three races. The “Negroid” race, to which black Africans belonged, was identified with the Canaanites, the cursed descendants of Ham. God had ordained that the Canaanites would serve the members of the other two lineages, so it was only proper that black Africans would be enslaved.

This argument, if one can call it that, reached its height of popularity in the United States, where the enslavement of black Africans became institutionalized. Although slavery had been practiced by virtually every culture in history, it was only in America that it was identified with one particular race of people. In the south, a free black person was an oxymoron; by definition, a black person was a slave, and it was primarily on this Biblical passage that that idea was based.

Thus ends the story of the good and righteous Noah: with his enslavement of an entire people for what was likely nothing more than his own bruised ego. Noah lives to be 950 years old, despite God having, at the start of this whole episode, restricted human lifespans to 120 years (Genesis 6:3).

It is on that unfair and depressing point that we must end this entry.