The Manufacture of the Curse
How a Drunken Night in Genesis Was Made to Rank the Human Race
There is a strange, brief story near the beginning of Genesis. Noah, after the flood, plants a vineyard, drinks the wine, and lies naked and drunk in his tent. His son Ham sees him and tells his brothers, who cover their father without looking. When Noah wakes and learns what happened, he pronounces a curse, and here is the first oddity: he curses not Ham, who saw him, but Ham’s son Canaan, condemning Canaan to be a servant of servants to his brothers. From this fragment, a drunken night and a muddled curse falling on the wrong man, Christian and later Islamic tradition manufactured the doctrine that God had condemned the black peoples of Africa to perpetual slavery, and that doctrine became the single most powerful scriptural justification for the enslavement of millions.
CHARGE: a brief and incoherent episode in Genesis, in which a drunken Noah curses his grandson to servitude, was manufactured over centuries into a doctrine that God had condemned black Africans to slavery — a reading the text does not support, built deliberately to rank the human race and sanctify the trade in human beings.
Read the passage for what it says, and the manufacture becomes visible. The text says nothing about race, nothing about skin color, nothing about Africa. The curse falls on Canaan, whose descendants the Hebrew scriptures place in the land of Canaan, in the Near East, not in sub-Saharan Africa; the biblical Canaanites were the peoples the Israelites contended with for that land, and the curse in its original setting almost certainly served to justify the Israelite subjugation of them, a piece of ancient political theology about neighbors, not a pronouncement about continents. Ham, the father of Canaan, is associated in the genealogies of Genesis with several peoples, some of them African, but the curse does not fall on Ham, and the text attaches no color to any of them. The reading that made this passage a curse on black Africans required three separate moves the text does not make: transferring the curse from Canaan to Ham, identifying Ham with Africa, and identifying Africa with blackness and blackness with a divine sentence of slavery. Each move was made later, by interpreters who needed the result, and the scholarship that has traced the process shows it happening over centuries, as Mediterranean slavery came increasingly to fall on black Africans and the interpretation shifted to match and justify the fact.
Its full and poisonous form the doctrine reached in the service of the Atlantic trade, and there its function is unmistakable. As the enslavement of Africans became the economic foundation of the Americas, the Curse of Ham became its scriptural warrant, preached from pulpits across the American South and printed in the defenses of slavery that Christian ministers produced in volume. The single most widely employed passage in the biblical defense of American slavery, one nineteenth-century commentator observed, was this drunken episode in Genesis, twisted by a singular perverseness of interpretation into a sentence of bondage on a whole race. Southern preachers taught that the African was the descendant of Ham, cursed by God to serve, and that slavery was therefore no sin at all, on this teaching, but the fulfillment of divine will, a reading so useful and so widespread that it became, in the words of one African-American minister of the period, an almost universal opinion in the Christian world that the slavery of the Negro was the consequence of Noah’s curse. A study Bible printed as late as 1917 still divided humanity by the sons of Noah and assigned to the descendants of Ham an inferior and servile posterity.
What makes this the purest example of the theft the whole series traces is that the doctrine is manufactured from a text that will not bear it, and manufactured for a purpose. This is not a case of a genuine biblical teaching being misapplied. It is a case of a meaning being built, deliberately and against the plain sense of the words, because the trade needed a divine license and the book was the only authority that could grant one. The same process Volume I documented in the making of the virgin birth, where a mistranslated Hebrew word was made to carry a doctrine its author never intended, operates here in the making of the curse: a fragment is lifted from its setting, stripped of its original meaning, and refashioned into a warrant for something its authors could not have imagined. The difference is the stakes. The manufactured virgin birth altered a doctrine. The manufactured curse altered the lives of millions, and it was built, knowingly, to do exactly that, to reach into scripture and pull out a sentence that would make the enslavement of Africans the will of God.
An objection that modern believers raise sincerely must be met with equal seriousness. Almost every Christian church today, the objection runs, repudiates the Curse of Ham entirely, recognizes it as a grotesque misreading, and teaches that it has no basis in scripture rightly understood; to hang it around the neck of Christianity now is to attack a doctrine the faith itself has disowned. This is true, and the repudiation is right, and it should be stated clearly that no mainstream church today defends this reading. But the repudiation, welcome as it is, arrives after the doctrine did its work, and the work cannot be undone by disowning the tool that accomplished it. For the centuries when it mattered, when millions of human beings were being carried into bondage, the Curse of Ham was not a fringe misreading but a mainstream teaching of the churches that profited from the trade, preached from respectable pulpits and printed in respectable books, and it supplied the consciences of Christian slaveholders with the assurance that their God approved. That the churches have since abandoned the reading proves that it was always a human construction rather than a divine truth, which is precisely this series’ point, and it does nothing for the generations who lived and died under a slavery that scripture, as their masters read it, had ordained. A doctrine repudiated in the twentieth century cannot free the people it helped to enslave in the eighteenth.
Many who preached the curse did not know they were lying. They had inherited the reading as settled truth and passed it on in good conscience, and that is how a manufactured doctrine survives long enough to do its damage, carried by sincere men who never thought to check it against the words on the page. What stands is the curse itself: a doctrine with no basis in the text it claims, assembled over centuries against the plain meaning of the words, and pressed into service to sanctify the largest forced migration in human history. The book that Volume I showed to be a human compilation was mined here for a single sentence to justify the unjustifiable, and the sentence was found because it was needed, and for no other reason, manufactured from a drunken night in Genesis by men who required God’s signature on the bill of sale.
Sources for this part appear in the Evidence Docket at the close of this volume.
Forensic Plates
