Curse of Ham
In the Book of Genesis, the curse of Ham is described as a curse which was imposed upon Ham's son Canaan by the patriarch Noah. It occurs in the context of Noah's drunkenness and it is provoked by a shameful act that was perpetrated by Noah's son Ham, who "saw the nakedness of his father". The exact nature of Ham's transgression and the reason Noah cursed Canaan when Ham had sinned have been debated for over 2,000 years.
The story's original purpose may have been to justify the biblical subjection of the Canaanites to the Israelites, or a land claim to a portion of New Kingdom of Egypt which ruled Canaan in the late Bronze Age.
In later centuries, the narrative was interpreted by some Jews, Christians and Muslims as an explanation for black skin, as well as a justification for enslavement of black people. Nevertheless, many Christians, Muslims and Jews now disagree with such interpretations, because in the biblical text, Ham himself is not cursed, and neither race nor skin color are ever mentioned.
Biblical narrative
The concept of the curse of Ham finds its origins in Genesis 9:The objective of the story may have been to justify the subject status of the Canaanites, the descendants of Ham, to the Israelites, the descendants of Shem. The narrative of the curse is replete with difficulties. It is uncertain what the precise nature of Ham's offense is. Verse 22 has been a subject of debate, as to whether it should be taken literally, or as "a euphemism for some act of gross immorality". In verse 25, Noah refers to Shem and Japheth as the "brethren" of Canaan, whereas in verse 18 they are identified as his uncles. The Table of Nations presents Canaan and Mizraim among the sons of Ham. In the Psalms, Egypt is equated with Ham. A land claim on Canaan which fell under the rule of New Kingdom Egypt in the late Bronze Age has been suggested as a motive for the curse on Canaan and the association with Ham via Ancient Egypt's rule over Canaan.
The treatment of Japheth in verses 26–27 raises questions: Why is YHWH named as the God of Shem, but not of Japheth? What does it mean that God will "enlarge" Japheth? And why will Japheth "dwell in the tents of Shem"? Further difficulties include Ham's being referred to as "the youngest son", when all other lists make him Noah's second son. Biblical scholar Nahum Sarna says that the biggest challenge of the narrative is why Canaan was cursed, rather than Ham, and that the concealed details of the shameful incident bear the same reticence as Reuben's sexual transgression.
The narrative's short five verses indicate that Canaan's Hamite paternity must have had great significance to the narrator or redactor, according to Sarna, who adds, "The curse on Canaan, invoked in response to an act of moral depravity, is the first intimation of the theme of the corruption of the Canaanites, which is given as the justification for their being dispossessed of their land and for the transfer of that land to the descendants of Abraham."
Ham's transgression
Scholars have debated the exact nature of Ham's misdeed with many identifying it as either voyeurism, castration, paternal incest, or maternal incest.Voyeurism
The majority of commentators, both ancient and modern, have felt that Ham's seeing his father naked was not a sufficiently serious crime to explain the punishment that follows. Nevertheless, Genesis 9:23, where Shem and Japheth cover Noah with a cloak while averting their eyes, suggests that the act of "seeing nakedness" is to be taken literally, and it has been pointed out that, in first millennium Babylonia, looking at another person's genitals was indeed regarded as a serious matter. Other ancient commentators suggested that Ham was guilty of more than what the Bible says. The 2nd century Targum Onqelos has Ham gossiping about his father's drunken disgrace "in the street", so that being held up to public mockery was what had angered Noah; as the Cave of Treasures puts it, "Ham laughed at his father's shame and did not cover it, but laughed about it and mocked."Paternal incest or castration
Ancient commentaries have also debated whether "seeing" someone's nakedness meant to have sex with that person. The same idea was raised by third-century rabbis, in the Babylonian Talmud, who argue that Ham either castrated his father, or sodomised him. The same explanations are found in three Greek translations of the Bible, which replace the word "see" in verse 22 with another word denoting homosexual relations. The castration theory has its modern counterpart in suggested parallels found in the castration of Uranus by Cronus in Greek mythology and a Hittite myth of the supreme god Anu whose genitals were "bitten off by his rebel son and cup-bearer Kumarbi, who afterwards rejoiced and laughed... until Anu cursed him".The medieval commentator Rashi, writes of Ham's offence against Noah: "There are those of our rabbis who say he emasculated him, and there are those who say he had relations with him." Rashi cites Sanhedrin 70a, which adds that those who believe that Ham had homosexual relations with his father agree that he also emasculated him. Rashi continues: "What did Ham see that he emasculated him? He said to his brothers: Adam the first man had two sons, yet one killed the other because of the inheritance of the world Cain killed Abel over a dispute how to divide the world between them according to Genesis Rabbah 22:7, and our father has three sons yet he seeks still a fourth son."
Maternal incest
Some modern scholars, such as Bergsma and Hahn, have suggested that Ham engaged in intercourse with his mother, Noah's wife. Support for this theory can be found in verses such as Leviticus 20:11: "And the man that lieth with his father's wife hath uncovered his father's nakedness". According to this interpretation of the story, Canaan was the offspring of the illicit union between Ham and his mother, which accounts for the curse falling upon Canaan rather than Ham.Disrespecting a religious festival
According to Devorah Dimant, the Book of Jubilees depicts Noah planting, harvesting, and drinking wine in accordance with the stipulations of the Torah such that Noah's drunkenness appears less problematic and Ham's offense appears more problematic than in Genesis. Dimant writes that the timing of Noah's viniculture and the procedure of Noah's sacrifice in Jubilees 7:1–6 match Second Temple Judaism interpretations of Leviticus 19:23–25 and Numbers 29:1–6. Thus, Dimant claims "Jubilees alleviates any misgivings that may be provoked by the episode of Noah's drunkenness. In this light, Ham's offense constitutes an act of disrespect not only to his father, but also to the festival ordinances."Curse of Canaan
- Genesis 9:25: "And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren"
Dead Sea Scrolls
, a pesher on the Book of Genesis found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, explains that since Ham had already been blessed by God, he could not now be cursed by Noah. The 4Q252 scroll probably dates from the later half of the first century BC. A century later, the Jewish historian Josephus argued that Noah refrained from cursing Ham because of his nearness of kin, and so cursed Ham's son instead.A new alternative interpretation of 4Q181, which is a Dead Sea scroll of Genesis, parallels the Book of Jubilees, suggesting that Canaan was cursed because he defied Noah's division of the land.
Jubilees
The Book of Jubilees also recounts the incident between Ham and Noah, and Noah's resulting curse against Canaan, in similar terms. Later, however, Jubilees explains further that Ham had allocated to Canaan a land west of the Nile, and all Noah's sons agreed to invoke a curse on anyone who tries to seize land that was not allocated to them. But Canaan violated this agreement and instead chose to squat in the land delineated to Shem and his descendants, and so Canaan brought upon himself the full force of this second curse.Classical Judaism
, 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 the street; this, said Eleazar, "did not take to mind the commandment to honour one's father." Another interpretation was that Noah's "youngest son" could not be Ham, who was the middle son: "for this reason they say that this youngest son was in fact Canaan."According to Rashi, Ham castrated Noah and prevented him from having a fourth son; therefore, Noah cursed Ham's own fourth son, Canaan.
In halakhic legal texts, the term "Canaanite slave" is used generically for any non-Jew held in bondage by an Israelite. According to Jewish law, such a slave should undergo a form of conversion to Judaism, after which they are obligated to perform all mitzvot except positive time-dependent mitzvot, granting them a higher status than ordinary non-Jews.
Racism and slavery
In the past, some people claimed that the curse of Ham was a biblical justification for imposing slavery and racial discrimination towards black people, although this concept has been criticized for being an ideologically driven misconception. Regarding this matter, the Christian leader Martin Luther King Jr. called such an attempt a "blasphemy" that "is against everything that the Christian religion stands for." James Burton Coffman similarly argues that the curse was a "prophecy of what would happen" not that it should happen. He believes that the curse is an allusion to Canaan's history of being dominated by numerous foreign powers. These powers include Assyrians, Chaldeans, Greeks and Romans.For Southern slave owners who were faced with the abolitionist movement to end slavery, the curse of Ham was one of the many grounds upon which Christian planters could formulate an ideological defense of slavery. Even before slavery, in order to promote economic motivations within Europe associated with colonialism, the curse of Ham was used to shift the common Aristotelian belief that phenotypic differentiation among humans was a result of climatic difference, to a racialist perspective that phenotypic differentiation among the species was due to there being different racial types. This often came as a result of European anxieties to avoid being sent to the colonies, as they were terrified of the high casualty rate of settlers due to disease and warfare. Thus, many of them formulated the idea that being sent south of the equator "blackened" them and thus made them inferior.
In the 15th century, Dominican friar Annius of Viterbo invoked the Curse of Ham to explain the differences between Europeans and Africans in his writings. Annius, who frequently wrote of the "superiority of Christians over the Saracens", claimed that due to the curse imposed upon black people, they would inevitably remain permanently subjugated by Arabs and other Muslims. He wrote that the fact that so many Africans had been enslaved by the heretical Muslims was supposed proof of their inferiority. Through these and other writings, European writers established a hitherto unheard of connection between Ham, Africa and slavery, which laid the ideological groundwork for justifying the transatlantic slave trade.
Similarly, the Catholic mystic Anne Catherine Emmerich testified that in her visions, she discovered that black people are descendants of Ham: "I see that the Black, idolatrous, stupid nations are the descendants of Ham. Their color is due, not to the rays of the sun, but to the dark source whence those degraded races sprang." She also says that, after killing Abel, Cain's skin darkened.
The historian David Whitford writes of a "curse matrix" which was derived from the vagueness of Genesis 9 and interpreted by racialists to mean that it mattered not who was cursed or which specific group of people the curse originated with, all that mattering being that there was a vague reference to a generational curse that could be exploited by those seeking to justify their actions against black people, such as Southern slaveowners.
Pro-slavery intellectuals were hard-pressed to find a justification for slavery and racism within Christian theology which taught the belief that all humans were descendants of Adam and they were therefore one race, possessed with equal salvation potential and deserving to be treated as kin. The curse of Ham was used to drive a wedge in the mythology of a single human race, as elite intellectuals were able to convince people that the three sons of Noah represented the three sects of Man and their respective hierarchy of different fates. Leading intellectuals in the South, like Benjamin Morgan Palmer, claimed that white Europeans were descended from Japhet, who was prophesied to cultivate civilization and the powers of the intellect by Noah, but Africans, being the descendants of the cursed Ham, were destined to be possessed by a slavish nature which would be ruled by base appetites.
Some were dismissive of the "Asiatic Japhethites" since they engaged in industries "fitted to the lower capacities of our nature". Others re-interpreted the African descendants of Ham as sympathetic victims, suffering at the hands of Romans, Saracens, Turks and finally, Christian nations who "engaged in the iniquity of the slave trade". Philip Schaff believes this constituted historic prophecy, which is fulfilled gradually.