The Curse of Ham (more properly called the Curse of Canaan) refers to the biblical incident in Genesis 9:20–27 in which Ham's father Noah placed a curse upon Ham's son Canaan. A possible objective of the story was to justify the subjection of the Canaanites to the Israelites,[1] but racial interpretations of the "curse of Ham" were used in later times to justify the enslavement of black Africans.[2][3]
Genesis tells how Noah, the first "husbandman" (farmer), was also the first to cultivate the vine and make wine. The drunken Noah fell asleep naked, and his son Ham "saw his father's nakedness" (this phrase is important in interpretations of the story). Ham told his two brothers, Shem and Japheth, who then covered Noah with a cloak while averting their eyes. When Noah awoke and "knew what his younger son had done to him", he pronounced the curse, not on Ham, but on Ham's son Canaan. Canaan was condemned to be a "servant of servants" to the other sons of Ham, as well as a servant to Shem and Japheth.
The debate over the questions raised by this story, especially why Canaan was cursed when Ham had sinned, has been debated for over two thousand years.[4]
Contents |
Ham blessed with the other sons of Noah
Genesis 9:1 And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.
Canaan cursed by Noah
Genesis 9:20 And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard:
21 And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.
22 And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.
23 And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness.
24 ¶ And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.
25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.
26 And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.
27 God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.
(--Authorized Version)
The overall objective of the story is to justify the subject status of the Canaanites, the descendants of Ham, to the Israelites, the descendants of Shem.[5] The details of the story, however, are mysterious: What did Ham do? Why did the punishment fall on Ham's son instead of on Ham? Modern scholars have suggested that two stories have been conflated, an original Canaan-oriented one in which the sons were Shem, Japheth and Canaan, and a later one in which Noah's sons were Shem, Japheth and Ham: the "Curse of Ham" was thus an intentional byproduct of an attempt to turn a story about why Israel deserved Canaan into a story about God's sovereignty over the entire world.[6]
There are further puzzles: Genesis 9:24 says that Noah awoke and "knew what his youngest son had done to him," but when Noah's sons are listed elsewhere Ham is named second, as if he is the middle son;[7] again, Genesis 9:25 Noah names Shem and Japheth as the "brethren" of Canaan, which they are not, or not according to the main story; and the treatment of Japheth in Genesis 9:26-27 raises questions of its own (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"?)[8]
In Genesis 10, which follows immediately after this episode, Ham is the father of, among others, Canaan and Egypt (Genesis 10:6 - the Hebrew name is Misr); in other texts, Egypt is Ham, as in Psalms 105 and 106. The Bible frequently makes the association between Ham/Egypt and Canaan, stressing the sexual immorality of both; given that Persia and Egypt were enemies in the 4th century, the sharing of the curse between Ham the father and Canaan the son may reflect the Persian-era author's propaganda against both Egypt, the 4th century enemy of the Persian empire, and the "Canaanites", the religious enemies of the Jewish province of Yehud.[9]
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.[10] Nevertheless, Genesis 9:23, in which Shem and Japheth cover Noah with a cloak while averting their eyes, suggests that the words are to be taken literally,[11] and it has recently been pointed out that in 1st millennium Babylonia looking at another person's genitals was indeed regarded as a serious matter.[12]
The majority of commentators, from ancient times to today, have nevertheless been unhappy with the explanation given in Genesis. One alternative advanced by modern scholars is based on the fact that, in the Bible, to "uncover the nakedness" of a man means to have sex with his wife (e.g. Leviticus 20:11).[13] If Ham had sex with his mother, and Canaan was the product of this forbidden union, it could explain why the curse falls on his son; the weakness, however, is that Genesis 9:21 has Ham "seeing" his father's nakedness, not "uncovering" it.[14]
In biblical language, "seeing" someone's nakedness meant to have sex with that person (e.g Leviticus 20:17).[15] The same idea was raised by ancient commentators: a debate between two 3rd century rabbis, preserved in the Babylonian Talmud (c. 500 AD), introduces the arguments that Ham either castrated his father, or sodomised him.[16] 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.[17] The castration theory has its modern counterpart in suggested parallels found in the castration of Uranus by Cronus[18]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".[19]
Other ancient commentators suggested that Ham was guilty of more than the Bible tells. The Targum Onqelos (an Aramaic translation of the Bible dating from the first few centuries ) and several other sources had Ham gossiping about his father's drunken disgrace "in the street" (a reading which has a basis in the original Hebrew), so that being held up to public mockery was what had angered Noah; as the Cave of Treasures (4th century) puts it, "Ham laughed at his father's shame and did not cover it, but laughed aloud and mocked."[20]
In the Book of Jubilees the seriousness of Ham's curse is compounded by the cultic significance of God's covenant to "never again bring a flood on the earth".[21] In response to this covenant, Noah builds a sacrificial altar “to atone for the land”.[Jub. 6:1-3] Noah’s practice and ceremonial functions parallel the festival of Shavuot as if it were a prototype to the celebration of the giving of the Torah.[21][22] His “priestly” functions also emulate being "first priest" in accordance with halakhah as taught in the Qumranic works.[23][24] By turning the drinking of the wine into a religious ceremony, Jubilees alleviates any misgivings that may be provoked by the episode of Noah’s drunkenness. Thus, Ham’s offense would constitute an act of disrespect not only to his father, but also to the festival ordinances.[25]
If Ham was guilty, why was Canaan punished? 4Q252, a pesher (interpretation) on the Book of Genesis found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, explains that as Ham had already been blessed by God (Genesis 9:1) he could not now be cursed by Noah.[26] The 4Q252 scroll probably dates from the latter half of the first century BCE;[27] a century later the Jewish historian Josephus gave this argument a twist, arguing that Noah refrained from cursing Ham because of his nearness of kin, and so cursed Ham's son instead.[28]
Others thought that Canaan must have been guilty of something. The Book of Jubilees explained that Noah had allocated Canaan a land west of the Nile along with his brothers, but that he chose instead to squat in land which was delineated to Shem (and later Abraham), and so rightly deserved the curse of slavery.[29] 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 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."[30]
Genesis 9 never says that Ham was black or cursed. How then did he become associated with black skin and Noah's curse? Underlying the process may have been a folk-etymology deriving the name "Ham" from a similar, but actually unconnected, word meaning "dark" or "brown".[31] Thus the influential 1st century BC philosopher Philo of Alexandria turned Genesis 9 into an allegory: the name of Ham, he said, meant "heat", and Ham was "warm" towards sin.[32]
The next stage, in the first half of the 1st millennium BC, seems to have been Jewish folk-tales aimed at explaining why some of the world's peoples have black skin: according to one folk-tale God cursed Ham because he broke a prohibition on sex aboard the ark and was cursed with blackness, while according to another Noah cursed him because he castrated his father.[33] Two separate traditions existed, one explaining dark skin as the result of a curse on Ham, the other explaining slavery by the separate curse on Canaan, and the two were never joined.[34]
They first became merged in the 7th century, among Muslim writers, the product of a culture with a long history of enslaving black Africans. The origin and persistence of the "Curse of Ham", in which Ham, blackness and slavery became a single curse, was thus the result of Islam's need for a justifying myth.[35]
In Medieval Europe, the "Curse of Ham" became used as a justification for serfdom. Honorius Augustodunensis (c. 1100) was the first recorded to propose a caste system associating Ham with serfdom, writing that serfs were descended from Ham, nobles from Japheth, and free men from Shem. He also followed the interpretation of 1 Corinthians 7:21 by Ambrosiaster (late 4th century), which held that as servants in the temporal world, these "Hamites" were likely to receive a far greater reward in the next world than would the Japhetic nobility.[36][37]
The idea that serfs were the descendants of Ham soon became widely promoted in Europe. An example is Dame Juliana Berners (c. 1388), who, in a treatise on hawks, claimed that the "churlish" descendants of Ham had settled in Europe, those of the temperate Shem in Africa, and those of the noble Japheth in Asia — a departure from normal arrangements, which placed Shem in Asia, Japheth in Europe and Ham in Africa — because she considered Europe to be the "country of churls", Asia of gentility, and Africa of temperance.[38] As serfdom waned in the late medieval era, the interpretation of serfs being descendants of Ham decreased as well.[39]
Ham also figured in an immensely influential work called Commentaria super opera diversorum auctorum de antiquitatibus. In 1498, Annius of Viterbo claimed to have translated records of Berossus, an ancient Babylonian priest and scholar; which are today usually considered an elaborate forgery. However, they gained great influence over Renaissance ways of thinking about population and migration, filling a historical gap following the biblical account of the flood.[40] According to this account, Ham studied the evil arts that had been practiced before the flood, and thus became known as "Cam Esenus" (Ham the Licentious), as well as the original Zoroaster and Saturn (Cronus). He became jealous of Noah's additional children born after the deluge, and began to view his father with enmity, and one day, when Noah lay drunk and naked in his tent, Ham saw him and sang a mocking incantation that rendered Noah temporarily sterile, as if castrated. This account contains several other parallels connecting Ham with Greek myths of the castration of Uranus by Cronus, as well as Italian legends of Saturn and/or Camesis ruling over the Golden Age and fighting the Titanomachy. Ham in this version also abandoned his wife who had been aboard the ark and had mothered the African peoples, and instead married his sister Rhea, daughter of Noah, producing a race of giants in Sicily.
The explanation that black Africans, as the "sons of Ham", were cursed, possibly "blackened" by their sins, was advanced only sporadically during the middle ages, but became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries.[41] The justification of slavery itself through the sins of Ham was well suited to the ideological interests of the elite; with the emergence of the slave trade, its racialized version justified the exploitation of a ready supply of African labour.
In the parts of Africa where Christianity flourished in the early days, while it was still illegal in Rome, this idea never took hold, and its interpretation of scripture was never adopted by the African Coptic Churches. A modern Amharic commentary on Genesis notes the 19th century and earlier European theory that blacks were subject to whites as a result of the "curse of Ham", but calls this a false teaching unsupported by the text of the Bible, emphatically pointing out that this curse fell not upon all descendants of Ham but only on the descendants of Canaan, and asserting that it was fulfilled when Canaan was occupied by both Semites (Israel) and Japethites (ancient Philistines). The commentary further notes that Canaanites ceased to exist politically after the Third Punic War (149 BC), and that their current descendants are thus unknown and scattered among all peoples.[42]
After the death of Joseph Smith, Jr., Brigham Young, the church's second president, taught that Black Africans were under the curse of Ham, although the day would come when the curse would be nullified through the saving powers of Jesus Christ.[43] In addition, based on his interpretation of the Book of Abraham, Young believed that as a result of this curse Negroes were banned from the Mormon Priesthood,[44] but in 1978 Spencer W. Kimball claimed he received a revelation that extended the Priesthood to all worthy males.[45]