Genesis 9:18–28

Interpretation of Scripture has been foundational for America’s social institutions, values, and beliefs, especially in the South. The “Curse of Ham” passage in Gen 9:18–28 was, and still is, in some Christian churches and organizations the foundational Scripture that legitimizes slavery. This passage generates many questions for which there is little scholarly consensus. For example, what was the nature of Ham’s indecent act? Why is his son Canaan cursed, instead of Ham? ¹

Nothing was more deeply embedded in the Southern Christian justification of enslavement of black people than the thickly textured, multilevel inquires lodged in this passage. The supposed inferiority of black people and the defense of enslaving them arose within a historical worldview that white Southerners transmitted from generation to generation in an environment that encompassed religious dogma and ethics, communal protocol and perspectives, financial systems and policies, and political ideologies and special interests. Thomas Peterson writes: “No story was more symbolically persuasive in resolving certain tensions between white Southerners’ racial values and their most fundamental religious beliefs than was the myth of Ham. Southern versions of the Ham myth placed the institution squarely within the context of divine purpose.” ²

David Brion Davis asserts that this specific biblical text raises two major problems for sermonic development in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim proclamations. First, the punishment of eternal slavery seems excessive for Ham’s crime. Augustine stressed that the word “slave” does not appear in the Bible until Noah branded the sin of his son with it, proving that slavery is the result of human sin. ³ But what was this sin? Jewish midrashic literature postulates that Ham’s sin was the castration of his naked father in order to humiliate him, or that it was sodomy. In certain biblical passages, “uncovering nakedness” is a euphemism for sexual intercourse (see Lev 18:18–19). Ham’s seeing his father’s nakedness (Gen 9:22) could have been considered a violation of Lev 18:22, which forbids a man from lying with another man. David Davis explains how the penalty then fits the crime: Ham saw Noah’s genitalia, which was a way of obtaining illegitimate “mastery and control” over his father, so the penalty of slavery, which is losing all mastery and control, would be appropriate punishment. ⁴

The second problem arises from that fact that Noah does not curse Ham, the offender, but rather Ham’s son (Noah’s grandson) Canaan (v. 25). For well over two thousand years, Jews, Christians, and Muslims have wrestled with this irregularity. Terence Fretheim speculates that there were two different traditions regarding Noah’s sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth (Gen 9:18), and that at some point, material about Canaan, based on Israel’s later experience of the Canaanites, made its way into the story. ⁵ The “Curse of Canaan” narrative introduces and justifies the subjugation of the Canaanites based upon the Israelites’ conception of the Canaanites’ moral depravity and idolatry. ⁶

How did race become part of the equation? Davis notes that in the often overlooked “Table of Nations” that follows this pericope (Gen 10:1–32), the genealogical lists of Noah’s descendants make no reference to race or skin color. ⁷ Robert Hood writes that images of blackness and blacks and the shaping of those images by Europeans and Americans did not begin with the slave trade but have deep roots in the very formation of Western culture, with Greco-Roman antecedents that were developed by Christianity. The concept of blackness as an inferior trait initially was related to a cultural appraisal of strangeness, as in the Greek word barbaros (“barbarian,” a foreigner or someone who speaks a strange language). Hood traces how the Romans added to the concept of ethnicity a racial component: the inferiority of blackness. The Christian tradition provided the metaphysical category of the inferiority of blackness via its metaphor of the struggle between darkness and light (e.g., John 1:5). ⁸

Globally, theology undergirded oppression, particularly enslavement. Within a climate where Iberian or Portuguese merchants had identified the tremendous economic profits within slave trafficking, Pope Nicolas V enacted the 1455 papal bull, Romanus Pontifex, which gave Portugal permission to enslave all persons south of Cape Bojador on the western Sahara coast. He declared all sub-Saharan Africans to be subjects of perpetual slavery, forevermore. This theological pronouncement legitimized the older practice of “raiding and ransom” on both sides of the Mediterranean and the beginnings of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. ⁹ Thus, according to the Christian church, black bodies were property for the taking. ¹⁰

Thomas R. Dew, who was a professor of history, metaphysics, and political science at the College of William and Mary in the mid-nineteenth century, was among the first Southern scholars to offer preachers a theological defense of slavery. Dew reconciled Southern ideas about human nature, social values, and universal truth to explicitly reject abolitionist arguments based on the Declaration of Independence that all men are created free and equal. He insisted that people are born with innate physical, intellectual, and temperamental differences, and that the institution of slavery regulated the differences between black and white people. Dew also recognized that the defense of slavery had to be consistent with Southern society’s most deep-seated beliefs about the relationship between man and God revealed in the Bible. Dew proclaimed that slavery “was established and sanctioned by divine authority, among even the elect of heaven, the favored children of Israel.” In 1841 Thornton Stringfellow, a Baptist clergyman from Virginia, cited Gen 9:18–28 and Canaan’s slavery to show that the institution of slavery was decreed by God. ¹¹

In turn, abolitionists challenged the practice of tracing the lineage of the black race to Canaan. Moreover, they argued that the spirit of Christianity, encapsulated by the Golden Rule, cancelled many of the special dispensations in the Old Testament such as polygamy, divorce, and slavery. Proslavery advocates countered that Noah’s curse was an ordinance of God, and that Noah spoke by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Some theologians and preachers joined biblical scholars who argued that Paul sanctioned slavery in his letter to Philemon, and that Jesus never explicitly condemned slavery. ¹²

The abolition of slavery has not ended racial conflict in America. Robert Hood challenges us to ask whether our civil ideals of racial tolerance and inclusiveness are still being eroded by hidden primal myths and interpretations of ambiguous passages of Scripture like Gen 9:18–28. Such myths have been religiously sanctioned and subsequently secularized through historical, political, economic, pseudoscientific, and social conditions. These myths have been legitimized by claims of the superiority of light and whiteness juxtaposed against the inferiority of darkness and blackness. Are these polarities and value judgments so deeply embedded in Christian tradition and cultural myths that our modern religious and civil ideals about equality and inclusiveness are sabotaged and unrealizable? What does such a legacy say about the Christian church’s claim to be a moral agent for transforming our individual and communal psyches about blackness and inducing acceptance of multicultural diversity in civil society? Is such a legacy transitory and therefore bridgeable, or will it remain eternal and unbridgeable? ¹³