Curse of Ham
[3] The story's original purpose may have been to justify the biblical subjection of the Canaanites to the Israelites,[4] or a land claim to a portion of New Kingdom of Egypt which ruled Canaan in the late Bronze Age.
[7][8] 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.
[9][10][11][disputed – discuss] The concept of the curse of Ham finds its origins in 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.
[12] Biblical scholar Nahum Sarna says that the biggest challenge of the narrative is why Canaan was cursed, rather than Ham,[12] and that the concealed details of the shameful incident bear the same reticence as Reuben's sexual transgression.
The 2nd century Targum Onqelos has 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 (late 6th – early 7th century) puts it, "Ham laughed at his father's shame and did not cover it, but laughed about it and mocked.
[25] The medieval commentator Rashi (1040–1105), writes of Ham's offence against Noah: "There are those of our rabbis who say he emasculated [or castrated סרסו] him, and there are those who say he had [homosexual רבעו] relations with him.
[34] 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.
[37] 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."
[46] 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.
[47] 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.
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.
[47] 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.
[46] 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.
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".
[54] The suggestion that Canaan was the ancestor of dark-skinned people enters the Biblical tradition with the fourth century Syriac Christian Cave of Treasures.
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.
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 sporadically advanced during the Middle Ages, but its acceptance became increasingly common during the slave trade of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
In the parts of Africa where Christianity flourished in its 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.
The commentary further notes that Canaanites ceased to exist as a political force after the Third Punic War (149 BC), and as a result, their current descendants are unknown and they are also scattered among all peoples.
[74] The Anglo-Irish scientist Robert Boyle – a seventeenth-century polymath who was also a theologian and a devout Christian – refuted the idea that blackness was caused by the curse of Ham, in his book Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664).
[75][76] There, Boyle explains that the curse of Ham as an explanation for the complexion of coloured people was but a misinterpretation that was embraced by "vulgar writers", travelers, critics, and also "men of note" of his time.
Nor is Blackness inconsistent with Beauty, which even to our European Eyes consists not so much in Colour, as an Advantageous Stature, a Comely Symmetry of the parts of the Body, and Good Features in the Face.
[92]: 18 [93]: 18–19 In 1844, when Smith ran for president of the United States in the wake of widespread opposition to Mormon settlement in Illinois, he advocated for the abolition of slavery by the year 1850.
[94] 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.
