Most of us know the story of Noah, the Flood, and the Ark. In simply 4 chapters of Genesis, the primary e book of the Bible, we’re instructed the story of God’s resolution to destroy the Earth by way of a cataclysmic flood attributable to human wickedness. Apart from Noah, his household, and the animals he took with him within the Ark, all life perished. Afterwards, Noah and his three sons – Shem, Ham, and Japheth – grew to become the progenitors of a brand new humanity.
Much less well-known is the story of what occurred to Noah and his household after the Flood. Genesis tells us the very first thing Noah did after leaving the Ark was ‘to plant a winery’. He then made wine and handed out in a stupor. The drunken Noah was seen bare by his son, Ham, earlier than his nakedness was coated by his different sons, Shem and Japheth. After awakening from his drunken state, Noah blessed Shem and Japheth, however cursed Canaan, the son of Ham. Canaan was made the slave of Shem and Japheth: ‘Cursed be Canaan, lowest of slaves shall he be to [Ham’s] brothers.’
Typically, by the center of the sixteenth century, the descendants of Shem (later to be often known as Semites) had been thought of to have populated the Center East and Asia, these of Ham, Africa, and people of Japheth, Europe. This was a convention that, kind of, reached again to the first-century Jewish historian Josephus. In line with Josephus, Ham occupied elements of Africa and Asia, Japheth elements of Europe and Asia, and Shem Asia (though no additional east than Afghanistan). But it surely was Alcuin of York (c.735-804), scholar on the courtroom of Charlemagne, who created the clear-cut three sons-three continents view – that the three sons occupied the three continents of Europe, Africa, and Asia. It was this alignment of sons and continents that obtained pictorial illustration within the first printed version of Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae in 1472. These Biblical classifications of the continents – Hamitic, Shemitic, and Japhetic – had been to proceed from the sixteenth nicely into the nineteenth century.
Over this era, these classifications shifted register – from geography to ethnology, from locations to races. Not tied to issues of peoples or nations however to races, the identical classifications strengthened the emergence of the thought of racial superiority, and with it the beginning of contemporary racism. For instance, within the third version of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s On the Pure Historical past of Mankind (1795) we discover a flip away from the theological to the secular within the origins of the trendy thought of race. That being mentioned, his three foremost racial varieties – Caucasian, Mongolian, and Ethiopian – had been nothing however secular variations of Japhetic, Shemitic, and Hamitic respectively.
By the third and fourth centuries AD, the curse laid upon Canaan had been remodeled into the curse of Ham. By the tip of the sixteenth century, Canaan had disappeared from the narrative altogether. The causes of what now grew to become the curse of Ham had been regarded as varied: that he had mocked his father Noah, that he had castrated him, magically made him impotent, or slept together with his personal mom. From the late fourth century, Christians believed that Noah had established slavery as the results of the sin of Ham and his descendants had been to be in subjection to the descendants of Shem and Japheth.
The earliest evaluation of the curse of Ham got here within the writings of the unknown Biblical commentator often known as Ambrosiaster or pseudo Ambrose (late fourth century). He declared that sin created slaves ‘as Ham, the son of Noah, was made a slave due to his sin and lack of prudence’. For Ambrosiaster, Ham mocked the daddy to whom he owed reverence. ‘Slaves are made by sin’, he declared, ‘like Ham, the son of Noah, who was the primary to obtain the title of slave by benefit.’
With the unfold of medieval serfdom a brand new interpretation of the curse of Ham arose. It was initiated by Honorius of Autun within the eleventh century in his encyclopaedic Imago Mundi. In his dialogue of the age after the Flood, Honorius declared that it was throughout the time of Noah that the ‘species of man’ was divided into three teams of individuals: ‘Freemen from Shem, troopers from Japheth, slaves from Ham.’ In impact, in response to Honorius, the division of individuals on the time of Noah mirrored the medieval construction of society into the freeman, the noble, and the serf.
In the midst of the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries yet one more Western studying of the curse of Ham arose as the results of the rising commerce in sub-Saharan African slaves. Within the entry on ‘Cham’ (Ham) within the 1728 complement to Augustin Calmet’s Dictionnaire historique et critique, Calmet informs his reader that:
Noah directed his curse to Ham and Canaan. The impact of this curse was not solely that their posterity was enslaved to their brothers, and thus born into slavery, but in addition that all of a sudden the color of their pores and skin grew to become black.
As Calmet understood it, the curse of Ham had turned his African descendants black. Thus, within the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the curse of Ham was repurposed to clarify – and justify – the slavery of black Africans. Regardless of occasional dissenting voices, the curse of Ham continued to serve this poisonous objective all through the 18th and nicely into the nineteenth century. Because the American Methodist Samuel Baldwin put it in Dominion (1858), for the reason that Flood of Noah, there was ‘a common and everlasting trinity of races … within the occupation of the Shemitic wilderness of America by Japheth; and within the service of Ham to Japheth within the Southern States, within the islands, and in south America’.
By the later many years of the nineteenth century, with the rise of historic scepticism in regards to the historicity of the e book of Genesis, growing doubts in regards to the story of Noah, the common Flood, and the repopulation of the world by his three sons, references to the curse of Ham as a justification for slavery additionally disappeared. It was not, after all, the tip of white supremacy or racism. However proponents of white supremacy needed to look elsewhere than the story of the curse of Ham to help their arguments.
Philip C. Almond is Emeritus Professor in Spiritual Thought on the College of Queensland and writer of Noah and the Flood in Western Thought (Cambridge College Press, 2025).
