I dreamed last night about an argument I once had with my father back when I was a young teenager; the argument had to do with his decidedly racist view that black people were inferior to white people in all ways. (That was his view, not mine: I’d like to be clear on that.) It was his claim that God became really pissed at Ham, although I don’t remember why, and “marked” Ham and all his descendents in such a way as to make their inferiority plain to everyone who saw them; the descendents of Ham, according to my father, were black and were fit only to be servants of white people. It was my father’s view that being marked by black skin by God somehow justified chattel slavery of blacks and made it okay for whites to treat blacks as inferior in every way. Even in my dream, the details weren’t as clear as they once were. I do remember trying very hard to find a passage in the bible where this punishment of Ham and his seed was made clear----something along the lines of “God caused Ham and his seed to be born with black skin, thus indicating that they were inferior” and I was never able to find such a passage. So, my question is: Does such a passage exist and if not, by what tortured reasoning did people arrive at my father’s conclusion and beliefs concerning black people?
I guess I should say that the “bible” in question was the King James version as interpreted and taught as gospel truth by Southern Baptists. I have no idea as to why I dreamed about this argument and I realize that there may be no crystal clear answer to my questions; I don’t even know why it’s important to me. If this question should have been posted in another forum, I hope the moderators will move it. Anyway, if there is an answer, I’d like to hear it it-----or them, as the case may be.
Thanks in advance; all inputs will be received with gratitude.
I don’t think anyone today believes it is, either.
And it’s a lot better than the people who claim dark skin was the curse of Cain, since that would mean that either black people died off in the flood, or Noah (or his wife) was part-black, which is anathema to the people making that argument.
See Genesis 10 for the Toledoth section that is a sort of Torah Ethnologue. Not that their ethnic grouping is nothing like our own: the children of Ham included the ancient Egyptians, the Canaanites, and the peoples of the Nile Valley, South Arabia, and the Horn of Africa – plus Nimrod. (Note that the term Hamitic" was formerly applied to a lumping together of the five non-Semitic branches of the Afro-Asiatic language stock.)
There is no such mark, or at least it isn’t mentioned in the bible. Ham/Canaan were cursed, but they were never marked.
There has been a rather tortuous linguistic attempt at retrofitting of the curse to apply it black people. One of the many, many possible Hebrew origins of the name “Ham” is “heated” which, with further torture, can be translated as “blackened”. Of course this is a load of dingo’s kidneys. “Heated” is one possible origin of the name, but there is no reason to believe it is the correct one out of a dozen possibilities. Moreover even if it is the correct origin, heated doesn’t equal “blackened” any more than it equals “hardened”, “comforting”, “clean” or any of the plethora of other attributes that can be instilled in an item by heating. IOW it is linguistic torture heaped upon linguistic gymnastics to arrive at a pre-conceived conclusion.
Just as importantly Noah had named his son Ham at birth, several chapters before Ham’s son was cursed. So if Ham does mean “Blackened” the child was born in that state, it wasn’t an effect of the curse. IOW Noah and Mrs. Noah gave birth to a “blackened” son. Not particularly surprising, especially in that part of the world, but not at all in keeping with the notion that the blackening was the result of a curse. It’s certainly not what racists want to hear, since it proves that all of humanity are descended from “mixed race” origins.
The other way that the curse gets applied to black people is via the traditional genealogy that Polycarp explained. The problem with this is that the Hamites populated regions north, west and east of Israel, as well as to the south. It’s not like the people of Arabia and Egypt were any darker than the Israelites. So if the descendants of Ham were cursed with dark skin, it apparently wore off on most of them.
Cain was marked, but the mark was restricted to him only, not his descendants, so that can’t have been dark skin.
I wish no one believed it anymore. I heard it being taught in (LDS) Sunday School within the past few years. The version I heard was Ham’s wife was the black descendant of Cain (not Mr or Mrs Noah). Ham supposedly “caught the black” as well when he saw daddy Noah naked in a drunken stupor, and the curse was passed on to his son Canaan. I’m not sure how any of that makes sense. But to be fair that passage of the Bible is pretty nonsensical. The straight forward reading makes no sense. Noah curses Canaan because Ham saw Noah naked? So it is all too easy to make up some other “deeper real reason” to make the passage make sense. I’ve heard several explanations of this passage and they all are pretty stupid. Here is the passage in question.
In the medieval period there was some confusion between Ham and Cain, partly due to minims (in = m) and partly due to sounds (if you take ‘Ham’ as “kham” /xam/ it makes a little sense… almost). It’s a real stretch, obviously. Mythologically, it was a way of bringing the Cain story and thus the problem of evil to the post-Flood world. Ham, then, was sort of Cain 2.0 in some of medieval Europe.
As for the blackness thing, that appears to be traditional,* but the way that it got used in America to justify race-based slavery is obviously not. In other words, the Bible contains the raw ingredients, but any idea of black inferiority is purely a modern invention. People like to get the Bible to support their ideas, and if you don’t look at the whole text and its context, it usually will.
ETA: At least, the notion of being turned black as a punishment is traditional. In some traditions about Noah (not in the Bible, obviously) the raven he sent out after the flood was white, but stopped to feed on carrion instead of reporting back like the goody-two-shoes dove, and that’s why it was cursed to be black. But that’s black the colour, not black the human skin colour.
Other than the connection to black Africans the story makes as much sense as many biblical stories - there is a situation, a wrong choice, a right choice, and a rewards and punishments to be earned.
After stumbling in on his dad, naked and on a bender, all Ham could think to do was go get his brothers and show them. (not having digital cameras back in those days). The brothers immediately did the sensible thing, and covered him up so the old man could sleep it off with a little dignity. When he woke up, he cursed the son of the first brother to be the slave of the other two brothers. One did the wrong thing and the others did the right thing. His grandson must pay.
As far as being on a drunken bender himself - it must have been a “do as I say, not as I do” kind of situation.
Also, that Canaan was allegedly the ancestor of the Canaanites - who were, of course, not “Black”, something the redactors of the OT would have known very well.
Indeed, the whole myth was intended to support the Israelite mastery over the Caananites.
And Cheese, in all his forms, was also punished, along with his handmaidens Mustard and Ryebread, to submit to the will of all the trayfedichter Tribes…