ᶜᴸ Refutation of the 'Curse of Ham' and the Black Race: In Ge | The Catloaf Channel

ᶜᴸ Refutation of the 'Curse of Ham' and the Black Race:

In Genesis 9, it is said that "Noah... was drunken... and uncovered... and Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren... [they] covered the nakedness of his father..... and Noah awoke... and knew what his younger son had done unto him... and said cursed be Canaan, a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren... God shall... dwell in the tents of Shem, and Canaan shall be his servant."

This story presents a very simple scenario - Ham sees the nakedness of his father Noah and does nothing to help nor look away, and so Noah curses Ham's son Canaan to be a servant for this act, specifically to Shem. Of course this nakedness might be some greater metaphor, but that will not be discussed here.

Two things must be noted - only Canaan was cursed, and no one else was cursed.

This entire passage only covers 8 verses, and could not be more clear or concise in its result- that Canaan must be subjugated by Shem - which is what happened when the sons of Shem i.e. the Israelites came forth from Egypt and conquered Canaan and subjugaed the native Canaanites.

But this passage has been purposely misconstrued to produce a meaning that makes no sense by any reading of the text - that God punished Ham and his children with dark skin, and this is where the Black race comes from.

This 'intepretation' cannot be informed from the original text, so where does it originate?

It does not in fact originate in any Christian work, but instead the Jewish Talmud. Specifically, Sanhedrin 108b of the Babylonian Talmud states that "Ham, son of Noah... engaged in intercourse while in the ark... and Ham was afflicted in that his skin turned black."

This tractate is from the Mishna, and so dates to around the 3rd century AD and was primarily based on Pharisee Oral Law.

Thus this belief is not Christian, and is in fact a Talmudic Judaic Pharisee belief that is not found in the Bible, nor would any reading of the Bible be able to create this intepretation.

This is amplified by the fact Canaanites were never black, so blackness can in no way be the implication - and of the sons of Ham, only one could be considered Black; Cush i.e. Nubia. The rest, Egypt (Mizraim) and Phœnicia (Put), were not in any way black.

Thus for this curse to explain the origin of Blacks, it would mean that somehow Palestine and Lebanon are the source of the black race and that they migrated to Sub-Sahara Africa. This assertion is of course refuted by all scientific, linguistic, and archeological evidence, as well as common sense.

This Talmudic belief appears to have only entered Christianity in the 15th century through Doninican friar Annius of Viterbo, who is now infamous for being a fraud who claimed to speak Etruscan, and also buried objects to later claim to have found them so he could claim to be an archeologist.

The belief only became widespread in the English and American world in the 17th and 18th century to justify slavery, but even then many theologians disproved it through common sense - with the belief only survivng, even to today, through ignorance.