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.

genesis 4 - cain and abel

Genesis 4 is a chapter of firsts for the Bible: the first mention of sex; the first murder; the first instance of polygamy; and the first genealogy. Previously, I have not summarized the events of each chapter, for reasons I will discuss below. Here, I will do so:

Adam has sex with Eve, and she gives birth to Cain. Don’t think I’m being crude there: it is the Bible itself which places the emphasis on their copulation (“And Adam knew Eve his wife...” (Genesis 4:1)). Eve then gives birth to Abel.

Cain is a farmer, while Abel is a shepherd. They each prepare a sacrifice for Yahweh from the products of his own profession. Cain offers fruits and vegetables, while Abel offers the first-born of his flock and their fat (Genesis 4:4). Yahweh is pleased with Abel’s sacrifice, but is not pleased by Cain’s.

When Cain is upset, Yahweh scolds him for being upset. In a fit of jealousy, Cain murders Abel when the two are alone. Yahweh asks what has happened, and curses Cain for his action. Cain is cast out, and “marked” so that no one will kill him.

Once again, Yahweh appears here as a personal deity, in contrast to the impersonal El. Also, we have more evidence of Yahweh’s lack of omniscience: he must ask Cain what he has done, instead of knowing automatically.

More ominously, however, is Yahweh’s preference for Abel’s animal sacrifice. This will become a theme in the Bible: Yahweh likes killing. A shocking number of verses in Exodus and Leviticus deal exclusively and in grotesque detail with the ritual slaughter of animals; it is here in Genesis 4 that Yahweh’s thirst for blood is first established.

It is therefore rather surprising that Yahweh would condemn Cain for the murder of Abel, and the only rational conclusion that the reader can draw is that Yahweh condemns the act not because it is in itself morally wrong, but because Abel was Yahweh’s favorite. This will only be the first time that Yahweh plays favorites, and when he is arbitrary and capricious in choosing those favorites.

While we are here, Genesis 4:15 – “And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him” – was long used to justify the enslavement of Africans by white Christians. It is still a favorite among far-right white supremacists.

There is evidence here that Genesis 4 was composed from two different source documents. In Genesis 4:12, Yahweh tells Cain that he will be a “fugitive and vagabond”, yet a mere five verses later (Genesis 4:17), Cain settles down, marries, has a son (Enoch), and founds a city named in his son’s honor. There then follows a genealogy and short digression that makes little sense in context, given its brevity, and which is wholly unlike the preceding verses in tone and structure. Unless the author had short-term memory loss, the best explanation here is that there were two different versions of the Cain story, and that the editor made an attempt to keep the good parts of each, no matter if they were consistent.

Genesis 4:17 (“And Cain knew his wife…”) also brings up an interesting question. Although El created multiple humans in Genesis 1, Yahweh created only two in Genesis 2. Here, Adam and Eve have produced only two children when Cain marries. So where did Cain’s unnamed wife come from? I think this may reference the original nature of Yahweh as a local god. His creation of Adam and Eve was not originally interpreted to be the creation of all humans on Earth, but merely those who would play a central role in the history of the Hebrews and the nation of Israel. Thus, El created humanity in general, while Yahweh created the specific ancestors of the Israelites. A contradiction arose here only after the two gods fell together as one.

Genesis 4 ends with the birth of Seth, who is very much a replacement for Abel. Seth is the ancestor of the Israelites. There is a whole “school” of theology based on the perceived dichotomy between Cain and Seth. This “Serpent Seed” theory holds Adam was not really the father of Cain. That would have been the serpent – the devil – who was presumably humanoid in form prior to the Fall. Cain went astray because his lineage was diabolical. Seth, on the other hand, was the offspring the Adam, and thereby the offspring of God. This theory produced manifestations in both Jewish and Christian theology. In Christian theology, it became yet another rationale for racism, where Cain’s diabolical offspring are interpreted as being all non-whites, while whites are the godly offspring of Seth.

Genesis 4 is the first chapter in the Bible to read as if it were describing real people. Genesis 1 is concerned with impersonal theological issues, while the events of Genesis 2 and 3 are clearly mythical in nature. Genesis 4 describes human actions that could be interpreted outside a mythical framework. In other words, the characters in Genesis 4 act reasonably human; they engage in actions that are recognizable as the kind that real humans would engage in. Thus, I have summarized them in more detail.

Here are also the roots of Biblical history, such as they are; if there are any moral lessons here, they are not a particularly uplifting ones: God is capricious, and God likes killing things. There is plenty of evidence further on to support these conclusions, but, if this is the point of a supposed moral lesson in this chapter, it is maltheistic in character.