Genesis 9:20 Noah, a man of the soil, began to plant a vineyard. 9:21 When he drank some of the wine, he got drunk and uncovered himself inside his tent. 9:22 Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father’s nakedness and told his two brothers who were outside. 9:23 Shem and Japheth took the garment and placed it on their shoulders. Then they walked in backwards and covered up their father’s nakedness. Their faces were turned the other way so they did not see their father’s nakedness.

9:24 When Noah awoke from his drunken stupor he learned what his youngest son had done to him. 9:25 So he said,
“Cursed be Canaan!
The lowest of slaves
he will be to his brothers.”

Several interpretative questions are raised by this passage:

1. What does the text mean when it says that ‘Ham…saw his father’s nakedness’?
2. How are we to explain the action of Shem and Japheth when they ‘took the garment and placed it on their shoulders’ and then ‘walked in backwards and covered up their father’s nakedness’?
3. Why did Noah pronounce a curse on Canaan (his grandson), rather than on Ham himself?
4. What is the nature of the curse, how far do its effects extend down the line of Canaan’s progeny, and how has been applied to the question of race and skin colour?

I’m going to focus here on the last of these.

This text has given rise to a theory, utilised in defence of the practice of slave-keeping, according to which Ham’s (black) descendants were destined in perpetuity to live in subjection to white people.

The theory became particularly popular in the American South during the first half of the 19th century:

‘Baptist pastor and Southern Seminary trustee Iveson L. Brookes (1785–1868) taught that “Negro Slavery is an institution of heaven and intended for the mutual benefit of master and slave, as proved by the Bible. . . . God himself . . . authorized Noah to doom the posterity of Ham.”’ (Source)

‘Patrick Mell (1814–1888), the fourth president of the Southern Baptist Convention, proposed: “From Ham were descended the nations that occupied the land of Canaan and those that now constitute the African or Negro race. Their inheritance, according to prophecy, has been and will continue to be slavery . . . [and] so long as we have the Bible . . . we expect to maintain it.”’ (Source)

The simple truth is that this interpretation and application are far-fetched, since the curse relates to Canaan, and not to his son Ham, and neither race not skin colour are mentioned in the text.

Kaiser (HSB) notes:

‘One of the saddest moments in the history of interpretation was when advocates of slavery decided to use this text as a justification for their inhuman treatment of dark-skinned people. It was asserted that this divine prophecy given by Noah after the flood legitimized slavery for a group of people who had been cursed perpetually. Supporters of slavery argued that the Arabic version of Genesis 9:25 reads “Cursed be the father of Canaan” instead of “Cursed be Canaan.” A vehement allegiance to the misapplication of this text has continued among some groups to the present day.’

David Whitford, in The Curse of Ham in the Early Modern Era, documents the mistranslations and misinterpretations that have been foised upon this text.

For example, John Brown’s influential and oft-reprinted Self-Interpreting Bible (first published in Scotland in 1778) includes the following comment:

‘For about four thousand years past the bulk of Africans have been abandoned of Heaven to the most gross ignorance, rigic slavery, stupid idolatry, and savage barbarity.’

Elsewhere, Whitlock notes that the link between this biblical passage and slavery and blackness goes back, in America, to the early 1700s, and became prominent after 1830:

‘Writers in the antebellum South used the philological argument that Japheth’s name could mean “whiteness” and Ham’s name “dark,” “hot” and “black.” Thus Japheth and Ham were identified as the ancestors of the white and black races, respectively. The story was used by proslavery advocates not only to explain why the Negro race was black but also to legitimize their enslavement.’ (D.B. Whitlock, in Dictionary of Christianity in America)

Keil and Delitsch comment, with particular reference to the phrase, ‘lowest of slaves’:

‘Although this curse was expressly pronounced upon Canaan alone, the fact that Ham had no share in Noah’s blessing, either for himself or his other sons, was a sufficient proof that his whole family was included by implication in the curse, even if it was to fall chiefly upon Canaan. And history confirms the supposition. The Canaanites were partly exterminated, and partly subjected to the lowest form of slavery, by the Israelites, who belonged to the family of Shem; and those who still remained were reduced by Solomon to the same condition (1 Kings 9:20-Ecclesiastes :). The Phoenicians, along with the Carthaginians and the Egyptians, who all belonged to the family of Canaan, were subjected by the Japhetic Persians, Macedonians, and Romans; and the remainder of the Hamitic tribes either shared the same fate, or still sigh, like the negroes, for example, and other African tribes, beneath the yoke of the most crushing slavery.’

However, there must be some doubt about how prevalent – or even well-known – this interpretation was in the early modern period, since it is not mentioned by many noted commentators, including Calvin, Matthew Henry, Matthew Poole and John Trapp.  Even Albert Barnes, though a vocal opponent of slavery in North America, only has this to say about it:

‘It is proper to observe, also, that this prediction does not affirm an absolute perpetuity in the doom of Ham or Kenaan. It only delineates their relative condition until the whole race is again brought within the scope of prophecy.’

What we can be sure of is that:

‘Despite a long tradition of perverted exegesis in some quarters, there is nothing to connect the curse of Ham (Gn. 9:25) with a permanent divinely instituted malediction on the negroid peoples; it is explicitly applied to the Canaanites.’ A.F. Walls (NBD, art. ‘Africa’)

Mark E. Biddle discusses what (if any) elements in the text suggest that Ham might be regarded as the ancestor of all black people:

‘According to Genesis, every human being descends from Noah and from (at least) one of his three sons (and their wives): Shem (ancestor of the Semites), Ham (ancestor of the Africans), and Japheth (ancestor of the Europeans). Ham was the father of Cush, Egypt, Put (Libya), and Canaan. In the so-called Table of Nations (Gen 10), Ham’s son Cush appears only as the ancestor of Nimrod, who settled Mesopotamia (not Africa; Gen 10:10-12) and became the ancestor of the “Akkadians,” that is, the Assyrians and the Babylonians—ethnic Semites. Ham’s son Canaan was the eponymic ancestor of the Canaanites, who were also apparently Semites judging from their language, culture, and religion (Gen 10:15-19). In sum, according to Genesis, Ham had primarily Semitic descendants. In order to extend to actual Africans, the curse must apply to Ham and proceed through him to his sons, Egypt and Put.’

Biddle warns that this interpretation continues to be dangerous for a number of reasons:

‘First, bad biblical interpretation hurts people. Bad interpretations justify unjust institutions, perversely motivate immoral behaviors, and encourage harmful attitudes. Misogyny, child abuse, warmongering, and greed join racism as evils that bad interpretations of scripture have undergirded. In this case, misinterpretations perpetuate the abhorrent notion that God endorses the systematic oppression and subjugation of any given group of people.

‘Second, the proslavery interpretation of Gen 9 exhibits the major characteristics of flawed hermeneutics. It does not take the text seriously; it engages in logical trickery and a kind of reorientation by substitution (Ham for Canaan, then all black persons for Ham); it does not consider the broader context of scripture (Gen 10, for example); and it overlooks the fact that Noah pronounced the curse, God did not. This observation is particularly telling. Gen 9 does not grant divine authority to Israel’s oppression of the Canaanites—or of anyone else.

‘Third, it fails to acknowledge the situation-bound character of much of the Bible. In this case, there are no Canaanites left in the world to whom this curse could possibly apply. The Canaanites disappeared as a distinct people long ago.’

O. Palmer Robinson notes the implications of the text saying that the curse related to Canaan, the son, and not to Ham, the father:

‘So far as the line of Canaan the cursed son of Ham may be traced, his politico-ethnic line leads to the inhabitants of  Palestine. The table of nations as recorded in the next chapter of Genesis indicates this fact quite specifically: “Canaan was the father of Sidon his ˜rstborn, and of the Hittites, Jebusites, Amorites, Girgashites, Hivites. . . . Later the Canaanite clans scattered and the borders of Canaan reached from Sidon toward Gerar as far as Gaza, and then toward Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, as far as Lasha” (10:15–19). The connection of persons and places in this listing with the land of Canaan is quite evident. The land of Canaan derives its name from the fact that it was populated by the descendants of Canaan. The destruction of the Canaanites under Joshua should be understood as a major fulfillment of this prophecy. But quite obviously it was not a black race or an African community that was involved in this curse.’

John Hartley (UBCS on Genesis) comments:

‘This curse has played an important role in race relations. Slave traders and owners in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries A.D. in particular used it as a defense for their cruel trafficking in humans, even to the point of claiming that they were carrying out God’s will in their slave trading. Their faulty identification of Canaanites with Africans and the obscurity of the curse show how they twisted a text for justification of their brutal deeds. Furthermore, these slavers were very wrong in a second sense: in his redemptive death Christ freed all humans from the curses found in the old covenant.’

Kidner concludes:

‘Since it confines the curse to this one branch within the Hamites, those who reckon the Hamitic peoples in general to be doomed to inferiority have therefore misread the Old Testament as well as the New. It is likely, too, that the subjugation of the Canaanites to Israel fulfilled the oracle sufficiently (cf. Josh. 9:23; 1 Kgs 9:21).’