The Curse of Ham

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 JEFFREY ST. CLAIR>>

+ Under questioning from Sen. Chris Van Hollen, Donald Trump’s nominee for United Nations Ambassador, Elise Stefanik, said she agrees with the view that “Israel has a BIBLICAL right to the entire West Bank.” Does she have an opinion on whether the descendants of Ham hold a legal title to Egypt?

+ The curse of Ham (really his fourth son, Canaan) is one of the strangest episodes in the very strange book of Genesis. Noah is 500 years old but still randy as ever, and on this night, he has passed out drunk and naked in his tent. Ham happens to see his father in the nude and tells his brothers, Shem and Japheth, who grab a blanket, put it on their shoulders, then walk backward to Noah’s tent and cover their inebriated and insensate dad. Genesis emphasizes that “their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness.” (The image of the possessed Regan’s backward face in The Exorcist comes to mind.)

When Noah wakes up with a  hangover, he begins shouting curses at Ham’s son, Canaan, condemning the poor kid to slavery: “Noah knew what his youngest son had done to him, and he said: “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.” And he said [still hung over and not making a lot of sense] Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem [Shem will give his name to the Semites]; and let Canaan be his servant. God enlarge Japheth and let him dwell in the tents of Shem, and let Canaan be his servant.” From this passage, generations of Judeo-Christian and Islamic slavers have derived divine authority for enslaving other humans, especially dark-skinned humans, based on a mistranslation of Ham as meaning “burnt” or “black.” (See David Goldenberg’s The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity and Islam.)

+ Noah sounds like a lot of alcoholic fathers, blaming their sons and wives for their own acts of debauchery.

+ What went down in Noah’s tent has been debated for millennia. Was he simply ashamed his son had seen him naked? Did Ham castrate Noah? Or did he anally rape him?  (The latter two explications by Talmudic scholars have dominated the exegesis of the episode for centuries.)

The real question, though, is why Canaan was condemned to slavery for Ham’s transgression. And there’s a relatively new theory that makes a lot of sense to me: the Rabbis who wrote the Old Testament had Noah lay a curse on Canaan to justify the Israelites conquest of the land of Canaan, a conquest that involved the wiping out of its original population (genocide) with the few survivors being placed into perpetual slavery (See: Steven Haynes, Noah’s curse: the biblical justification of American slavery).

+ Good luck to the Biblical Title Insurance companies in untangling these competing land claims.