In Genesis 9, Noah in the aftermath of the flood cultivates the earth, becoming in effect apparently the first farmer, and becomes focused on vineyards and on drinking wine, which apparently became an art for the first time. We are told that he becomes drunk, and that his son Ham (Cham), seeing his drunken nakedness in his dwelling, then goes out to mock him. The result is that Noah curses Ham’s son Canaan by saying that he will be a slave to his sons Shem and Japheth. This passage has been used in the non-Orthodox modern West to justify enslavement of Africans by Europeans, following when especially during the Enlightenment the descendants of Ham were identified with Africans by Protestant scholars in “scientific” biblical study. However, Canaan’s descendants were identified with the Middle Eastern land of Canaan, and included the Ninevites, who repented after hearing the words of the Prophet Jonah. So any specific identification with Africans alone, or a kind of curse in perpetuity, would be wrong, especially also by Christian standards of redemption. St. John Chrysostom in commentary on Genesis 9 noted the repentance of the Ninehevites and their salvation from prophesied destruction in this regard. In addition, the descendants of Ham, as mentioned in the so-called “Table of the Nations” in Genesis 10, included Nimrod, traditionally associated with construction of the Tower of Babel, which in turn is identified with Babylon, as a type of cosmopolitan globalization in the Book of Revelation’s description of the Whore of Babylon, given her relation to world commerce. So any specifically racial identification of the curse in question does not ring true from the standpoint of Orthodox Church Tradition including Holy Scripture.
There has been much speculation on the nature of Ham’s sin, but the Church Fathers avoided prurient details, and indicated that it was a betrayal by Ham of his father, by shaming him in his drunken nakedness, and thus a type of those hypocrites and self-righteous who would delight in exposing and ridiculing other sinners for their own carnal sin. The result is servitude for the offspring. Since Ham had already been blessed by God after the flood, it is thought that Noah placed the curse on his son, as just as efficacious (Ham also was considered by the Church Fathers to have not maintained a fast from sex while aboard the ark during the flood, as the rest of his family had done, thus leading to his wife to conceive Canaan.) In any case, the account arguably can be taken allegorically as a type of the idolatrous and back-sliding leaders of the Jews, whose nations were destroyed and exiled, and who finally rejected Jesus Christ. In this it is a warning, too, to Christians and Christian nations, of the end result of such self-righteous hypocrisy, lack of respect for parents and basic decency, and prurient sensuality, in slavery to Anti-Christ in the latter days.
St. John Chrysostom in his homily on Genesis 9 wrote of Ham’s sin:
“After all, if the man who drew attention to obvious nakedness rendered himself liable to a curse and by forfeiting the respect he shared with his brothers was condemned to serve them (if not himself in person, at least all his offspring), what fate awaits those who draw attention to the sins of their brethren, not merely not concealing them but even making them more conspicuous and by this means blowing the sins up out of all proportion? You see, whenever you publicize a brother’s fault, you not only make him more shameless and perhaps more lethargic in his progress towards virtue, but you also render the listeners more indifferent and encourage [267] them in their sloth—and not merely this, but also the fact that you are responsible for God being blasphemed. Still, no one is unaware how heavy the punishment this brings those who are responsible. So let us, I beg you, avoid Cham’s example, and instead imitate the sense of shame shown by these respectful sons in regard to their father’s nakedness; let us in that fashion keep under cover our brethren’s sins, not for the purpose of encouraging them to indifference but that we may thereby in particular provide them with an even better occasion of ridding themselves promptly of that terrible affliction and of returning to the path of virtue. You see, just as such return is rendered easier for a sober person by the fact of having not many witnesses of his private failings, so when a person has passed the point of blushing and sees that the whole world knows him to be guilty of evil, it is not easy for him to reform; instead, like someone falling into the depths, submerged under countless waves, he will have greater difficulty in managing to emerge, but rather then sinks into despair and gives up the effort to return.”
(John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 18–45, ed. Thomas P. Halton, trans. Robert C. Hill, vol. 82, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1990), 208–209.)
Hieromonk Theodore Stanway, on the misinterpretation of the Curse of Ham as applying to and justifying the slavery of sub-saharan Africans:
“The most controversial aspect about the Curse of Ham has been its use in recent centuries as means of defending the enslavement of black Africans, and not only by Western European Christians, but by Muslim slavers too. Although it has been claimed that the idea that the Curse of Ham entailed the ‘blackening’ of Ham and his progeny and their lower status amongst man originated within Christianity, this is far from true. Even if it did develop within Christianity, it would still be a false understanding of the scriptures, as Kidner points out that, since the curse was limited to Canaan and that branch of the Hamites alone, “those who reckon the Hamitic peoples in general to be doomed to inferiority have therefore misread the Old Testament as well as the New.”Even while certain Christian denominations may have been the most vocal about supporting this theory, particularly churches in the United States and the pseudo-Christian cult of the Mormons – the latter of whom used it as an excuse to deny the priesthood to black believers – the theory itself finds its germination in the rabbinical writings of Judaism. The Jewish scholar Harold Brackman writes that:The most famous of these anti-Negro legends cluster about Ham and Noah’s cursing of Canaan […] there is no denying that the Babylonian Talmud was the first source to read a Negrophobic content into the episode by stressing Canaan’s fraternal connections with Cush […] the Talmudic glosses of the episode added the stigma of blackness to the fate of enslavement that Noah predicted for Ham’s progeny.One of the stories quoted by Brackman has Noah telling Ham that, because he had been abused in the darkness of the night, his children would be born black, among other derogatory remarks about typical black features. Michael Hoffman comments that:Canaan is identified as a black man and blacks as an inferior people only in the Gemara, Midrash, and later writings of the rabbis, not the Bible. The rabbinic account of the malediction against Ham stipulates that Ham’s son Canaan, and all Canaan’s issue, are forever fated to suffer perpetual slavery and black skin without the possibility of their condition ever being ameliorated.This teaching did not become common among Christians until much later, around the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although it appeared from time to time in the Middle Ages, probably due to a cross-pollination of ideas with Jews living in Christian lands. This cross-pollination also occurred with Islam and, although the story of Ham’s sin is not in the Quran, later Islamic texts such as the Book of the Zanj state that Ham’s descendants were doomed to ‘blackness and slavery.’ Bearing in mind that Muslims were the first major slavers in sub-Saharan Africa, it can be assumed that they had this was known to them when they went seeking captives.Sarfati, in his commentary on Genesis, posits that the adoption of this theory in some Christian quarters was as a justification for an already-instituted practice, not vice versa. Interestingly, he points out that only in societies supposedly built on a Biblical worldview or a high concept of equality and justice, such as the United States of America or the Afrikaner republics of South Africa was this justification used, therefore “various absurdities were embraced to try to square this circle: all men created equal, but some men had the right to own other men.” Other slave states, such as Brazil, had no need to try and justify slavery, as that state was not founded on notions of equality in any sense, therefore the Curse of Ham was never used in pro-slavery discourse. Sarfati concludes that “black slavery was the cause of silly ‘curse of Ham’ notions, not the result.”While Sarfati is well-meaning and mostly correct in his analysis of the problem, he does not refer to the Talmudic teachings on this issue and, with his being an evangelical, we may be able to guess his motives for that. The correct conclusion would be not to say that the Curse of Ham was introduced in order to justify slavery, but that it was adopted, having already existed for centuries in the Jewish milieu, with learned Christians being aware of this.This weaponised use of the Curse of Ham was not only the burden of black Africans, but also of poor Europeans in the Middle Ages. It was used to justify serfdom in the twelfth century by Honorius Augustodunensis, who declared that serfs were descended from Ham, while nobles and free men were descended from Japheth and Shem respectively. In a peculiar fourteenth century interpretation, Juliana Berners moved the usual lineages around, writing that it was the “churlish” Europeans who were descended from Ham and therefore were fittingly subjected to serfdom, while Africa was home to the temperate Semites and Asia to the noble Japhetites.It can be concluded, therefore, that slavery has been a burden for all men from all races throughout history, but it is definitely not Biblical to argue that certain groups have been condemned to perpetual slavery due to the sin of Ham. Of course, there was a prophetic curse placed on Canaan, with slavery being a part of that, but, as has been noted above, not only were the Canaanites completely destroyed before the coming of Christ, but they were never exclusively associated with black Africans – in fact, Egyptian art from antiquity shows the Canaanites to be relatively fair-skinned, in contrast to the Nubians, for example. The exclusive association with Ham or Canaan with black Africans and slavery certainly originates in Judaism and, either through cross-pollination or the ‘rehabilitation’ of the Talmud that occurred by the fifteenth century, was later adopted a means of justifying the mass enslavement of black Africans during the colonial period, just as it had been used to defend serfdom during the Middle Ages, although on a less frequent and less formal basis.”
Hiermonk Theodore Stanway, The Curse Of Ham (Genesis 9:18-27) Its Nature, Reasons, And Effects In Historical Exegesis, An Exegetical Research Paper, HTS Dec 2019 (an excerpt from the larger paper, via Dionysius Maurus)
Footnotes:62 Kidner, 104. 63 Brackman, Harold, The Ebb and Flow of Conflict: A History of Black-Jewish Relations Through 1900 (1977 Ph.D dissertation), 79-81. 64 Hoffman, 512.65 Sarfati, 623-624.66 Ibid., 624.
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