The Curse of Ham; or, "Race” and Biblical Exegesis* Lecture
How did blackness get associated with the "curse of Ham" when the biblical text makes no reference to skin color at all?From the earliest exegetical attempts to this of the modern age, Genesis 9 seems to have encouraged Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and secular readers to explain or harmonize the incongruities in this passage, ignoring Noah's drunkenness or the fact that the malediction was not divine but pronounced by a man, to reinstate Ham as the recipient of the curse or to argue that "Ham" was a later substitution for what originally must have been "Canaan," to if magnify the nature of Ham's transgression, and to offer more elaborate explanation of the punishment of (some) later generations. The oddities and difficulties of this passage were frequently placed into contexts that would seem to provide plausibility for nonscriptural and historical reasons. In this case, context could be more important than text.. In interpretations of morally charged genealogical origins the genealogy of interpretations may also carry unrecognized moral implications. Thus, some scholars have focused on the question whether Jews, Christians, or Moslems first connected the curse with black skin color, as if the modern uses of Ham--as a justification of the African slave trade, of segregation, apartheid, or intermarriage prohibitions--had simply inherited an ideological system that was already articulated by early saints and Church fathers, was anticipated by the Talmud, or was fully developed by the Arabs. The speculations on the nature of Ham's putative crime often were projections of what exegetes feared (or desired); and some of the most cogent reputations of the notion were offered by black American intellectuals, for example by Alexander Crummell in "The Negro Race Not Under a Curse: An Examination of Genesis ix.25" (I 862).
Unfortunately, some of the superb rebuttals came at a time that race thinking no longer relied upon biblical justification, for with the ascent of nineteenth-century racism, the subjugation of blacks could be anchored in biology rather than in theology, and the notion of "the curse of Ham" could now also be attacked by supporters of slavery and in the name of racial inequality. The concept of "race" that had perhaps developed out of the biblical “generations" and genealogical tables had fiercely emancipated itself from its own genealogical origins. Blacks were now being excluded even from a second-rate non-blessed membership in the human family story going back to Noah. The family curse of Ham had turned into the notion of permanent racial difference that extended back to the very beginning of mankind.
--Werner Sollors (Harvard University)The full essay is part of a book entitled Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of lnterracial Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, April 1997). ISBN 0-1950-5282-X. For further data, consult http://www.amazon.com under the author or the title of the book.
