It
should come as no surprise when people seek to justify immoral actions by
appealing to a Biblical precedent. That was the case with the enslavement of
black people by whites, which they claimed was sanctioned in the Book of
Genesis.
Noah
and Ham
Genesis
Chapter 9 tells the story of Ham, the third son of Noah, finding the latter
drunk and naked in his tent and telling his brothers, Shem and Japheth, who
avert their gaze as they go into the tent to cover their father up and prevent
any further embarrassment. On waking up, Noah is angry with Ham and lays a
curse on the latter's youngest son, Canaan , which is
that he is to be a bondservant to his two uncles.
On
the face of it, this seems to be particularly unfair to both Ham and Canaan . If Ham had not been first into the tent,
presumably it would have been one of the other two. And why does Canaan , who was presumably only a child at the time, get
it in the neck? However, that is the story as given, whatever the justice or
otherwise of the case. Later interpreters have ascribed various degrees of
significance to this passage.
The
descendants of Noah
Genesis
Chapter 10 outlines the descendants of the three sons of Noah. This is not
exactly a riveting read, but it is important as an account of how the world was
repopulated after the Flood, bearing in mind that, according to Genesis, these
were the only human beings left alive.
Shem’s
descendants are therefore the Semites, who include the Jews, with Abraham being
a direct descendent of Shem by nine generations. Ham’s descendants are the
Hamites, whose tribes include the Canaanites, who were to become the enemies of
the Jews. This may explain the curse placed on Canaan .
Other descendants of Ham were to populate much of North
Africa .
Fact
or myth?
Whether
or not one regards the foregoing as fact or myth, depending on one’s
interpretation of Genesis, what follows surely comes under the heading of myth,
because it is based on such things as supposition, misreading and prejudice,
with little if any Biblical justification. In short, Ham is judged to have been
the father of the black races of the earth, and these are seen to be inferior
to the white races.
For
example, one early Jewish text has it that Ham was the only brother who had
sexual intercourse during his time in the Ark (he is the only one mentioned as
having a son immediately after the Flood) and for this he was “smitten in his
skin”. Later writers also connected punishment with being made black, and
linked blackness with slavery. For example, Patriarch Eutychius of Alexandria
wrote: “Cursed be Ham and may he be a servant to his
brothers … He himself and his descendants, who are the Egyptians, the Negroes,
the Ethiopians…”
The curse in modern times
These myths persisted down the centuries, so
that the most terrible things could be written by people who were
well-respected and venerated in their time and later. For example, the
visionary Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774-1824), who was placed on the road to
sainthood in 2004 by Pope John Paul II, was able to write:
“I saw the curse pronounced by Noah upon Ham
moving toward the latter like a black cloud and obscuring him. His skin lost
its whiteness, he grew darker. His sin was the sin of sacrilege, the sin of one
who would forcibly enter the Ark of the Covenant. I saw a most corrupt race
descend from Ham and sink deeper and deeper in darkness. 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".
One of the worst Victorian exponents of the
myth was the explorer John Hanning Speke (1827-1864) who made three
explorations of Africa in searching for the source of the Nile. He claimed that
the Tutsis of Rwanda were superior to the Hutus because they had more “white”
characteristics and did not suffer from the curse of Ham. This division into
“good” and “bad” races led indirectly to the genocide of 1994 in which maybe as
many as a million Tutsis and thousands of Hutus died within a hundred days.
It is an undisputed fact that the curse of
Ham has been used as a justification for the enslavement of black people.
Indeed, some have even regarded it as a virtual duty of white people to enslave
black people, because of the Biblical example. In seeking to defend slavery at
the time of the American Civil War, the crime of Ham was blown up to include
rape and incest, with the clear implication that his black descendants were
still guilty and deserved his punishment.
It is unfortunate that, in the eyes of many
misguided people even today, black is bad and white is good. The perniciousness
of this view, that has caused so much misery and injustice down the centuries,
is largely due to the Hamitic heritage, and it is high time that we, as the human
race, grew up and came to recognize the evil of maintaining this belief, and
others that have no basis in reality but lurk under the cloak of religion to
destroy so many innocent lives.
© John Welford
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