Misreading the Torah: The Curse of Ham and Racism
October 23, 2009 by Alan Yuter
Filed under Philosophy
Misreading the Torah: The Curse of Ham and Racism
Guest Post
By Alan Yuter
The curse of Ham has wrongly been cited to wrongly justify the wrongful treatment of human beings without power by human beings with power. In this essay, we first define the problem, outline the facts recorded in the Hebrew Bible, summarize the thoughtful findings of Rabbi Professor David Goldenberg, and offer a literary understanding of the literary problem. The essay concludes with a conversation regarding what is at stake in the conversation, the uses and misuses to which the Bible has been put, and what the problem, the curse of Ham, really means.
I. The problem
The facts of the Biblical narrative [Genesis 9:18-27] are rather clear. Noah leaves the ark to find a desolated world. He plants a vineyard because his world is desolate. While in a state of toxic stupor, Noah’s son, Ham, and Ham’s son and Noah’s grandson, Canaan, violate Noah. Upon realizing that their father was violated, Noah’s other two sons, Shem and Yafet, cover their shamed father without casting an immodest eye on the horrific evidence of violation. Shem and Yafet, the ancestors of Semitic and Aryan civilizations, which have “culture,” are blessed, but Ham and Canaan are cursed with the burden of being slaves to superior cultures.
In the Biblical economy of ideas, the sexually aggressive descendants of Ham populated Egypt, and its “son” was Canaan, Egypt’s northern outpost, according to the Egyptian accounts. In the West and for the Islamic world as well, Noah’s curse of Ham, that his offspring should be slaves, was seen as a divine mandate that justified the bondage of Africans in order that they fill the role Scripture providentially had intended.
II. David Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham
The curse of Ham was studied in detail by Professor David Goldenberg, a personally observant graduate of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, who was a member of the Seminary’s one-time Kollel, the “Talmud” special program, and completed his doctorate at Brown in Religious Studies under Professor Jacob Neusner.
That the “sons of Ham” were taken to be Black is a misunderstanding that is first found in the 7th Christian century Christian and Islamic writing, while the very concept is not attested in any canonical Torah book. Social structure made it easy to justify the enslavement of Blacks, with the Torah, twisted by people who spoke, or so they thought, in God’s voice, to justify the demoting a race from the status of divine human dignity to being beasts of burden.
Latter day saintliness perverted Scripture’s content, the theme to which we now turn.
III. The Literary Facts and their Theological Implications
The curse of Ham was uttered not by God, the author of the moral law, but by Noah, a victim of incestuous homosexual rape. To understand the Noahide curse of Ham, we review God’s disappointment, disapproval, and distancing from Cain.
Scripture reports two cases of Cainite misdeeds. First, his offering to God was the fruit of the earth, while his brother offered meat. Ancient humankind regarded meat as a superior gift to vegetables; the leg of lamb is more prized than the heart of lettuce. And because God saw that the anthropomorphic intent of Cain was spiritually and qualitatively deficient, God rejected the offering.
Responding to the rejected, dejected Cain is told that he can do better, the choice of destiny is his to make, and he retains the power to choose his actions. But because he was dejected and his offering to God was rejected, his subsequent behavior required that he be ejected from before the divine presence.
So while walking in the field, Cain rose over his brother, whose offering God accepted, and killed him. Note well that Cain the person, the gavra, is never abandoned by God, even though God rejects what he does, actions that he takes. God confronts Cain Socratically, or perhaps to be historically more precise, pre-Socratically, with as before, a probing question, “Where is Abel, your brother?” God asks the question with the idiom, “your brother,” as an adjectival appositional phrase. Morally obtuse and remaining insensitive, Cain takes, or to be precise, mistakes the appositional idiom as a follow-up question, understanding God’s one rhetorical question as a quest for information:
1. Where is Abel?
2. Where is the man who also happens to be your brother?
Cain’s answer anticipates the modernist mood in Western literature, where the exterior gesture and spoken word reveal a window into the narrator’s character. To the first question, “where is Abel,” Cain lies to God, saying “I do not know”;
To the second “question,” “where is the man who happens to be your brother, Cain lies to God and to himself, asking the avoidance and guilt- ridden rhetorical question, “am I my brother’s keeper?” Ignoring the excuse articulated in the guise of a question, God confronts Cain with the challenge, “Listen [qol!] your brother’s blood[s] are calling to me from the earth.
God condemns Cain to be a wanderer, [na-va-nad] Cain acknowledges that either the punishment or the guilt [avoni] is too great to bear, and because of contrition, Cain will not wander but will reside in the land of Nod, halving the punishment of na va-nad. Recalling that upon ejection from Eden, God provided clothing for the exiled first family of humankind, when God is informed of Cain’s terrifying fear, that as the first murderer, he is a target for being a murder victim. The mark/curse of Cain, like God’s pep talk after Cain’s abortive offering, is a divine challenge and blessing and a condemnation or rejection.
God will not overly protect Cain. He who kills Cain, so marked as a murderer, will be avenged sevenfold. God never removes the human freedom to choose, the very right to be wrong. The curse of Cain was his act of murder, that led to ten generations of violence, with his progeny being wiped away in the Great Flood, with the line of Adam’s third son, Seth climaxing with Noah, who continues the moral ideal that will be embodied in the to be revealed Torah of Moses.
The Biblical narartive’s notion that the curse is the product of human deed and not divine misanthropy appears in mAbot 2:6 and in mAbot 4:2. The former passage teaches that upon viewing a skull floating in water, Rabban Gamliel teaches in triadic Tannaitic discourse, that
1. because you drowned others
2. you were drowned
3. those who drowned you will themselves be drowned
This concrete moral lesson is restated in the latter passage, according to which performing a precept yields more precept performance. Anticipating Jean Paul Satre’s No Exit, human actions if good, are blessings; if human actions are not good, they create the curse. Thus it the human hand and human choice, and not any predestined fate, that forges the destiny of humankind. It is in this literary context and with this theological construct that the curse of Ham is to be construed.
The curse of Ham was uttered by Noah; it was not decreed by God. Human curses carry a predictive valence but do not represent an iron cast destiny, as human beings are not endowed with such power. The sin of Ham was the release of unnatural, unbridled libido. Noah’s curse is a challenge: will your offspring me animals as are you? Will they be slaves to their passion without compassion, like you? Just as there are ten evil generations from Adam to Noah, there are ten evil generations from Noah to Abraham.
Consider Hagar, the Egyptian. We are not told who her father was. We are told that she is an Egyptian, indicating that only all-knowing God would be able to fathom who her father was. Hagar was hired as a concubine not for her profundity but for her fecundity. And since she was all passion and no heart, she would in despair abandon her son when without water, and Scripture describers her son as “yado ba-kol ve yad ko bo,” his hands were everywhere they should not be, requiring others to defensively put their hands on him.
Consider Mrs. Potifer. She so desires to seduce the Hebrew Joseph that she would betray her husband. Egyptian mythology and history is replete with, and very tolerant of, sexual license. Here also is the “curse of Ham,” the transmission of wicked patterns of behavior within a culture.
Consider the Pharaohs of Abrahamic and Mosaic time. They would kill the men and preserve, keep alive, the women, in the pi’el conjugation. Leviticus 18:2, before outlining the list of prohibited sexual liaisons, reminds the reader not to act like Hamitic Egyptians or like the residents of the land of Canaan, who act in a sexually objectionable fashion
IV. The meaning of the problem
Having defined the curse of Ham in its Scriptural context, we turn to the non-Biblical and indeed anti-Biblical notion that maintains that [1] Hamites are Black, [2] Noah cursed Noah’s progeny to be slaves because of Ham’s and Canaan’s deviant sexual outrage, so [3] it is the revealed will of God that Blacks ideally be enslaved and minimally, be seen as a second rate slice of humankind.
However, we recall from the Cain narrative that humanity is held to be morally accountable because, being endowed with God’s image, humans are empowered to make moral choices. Unlike Paul of Tarsus, who could not control himself, arguing that the individual is saved by faith, both Biblical Israel [Numbers 15:40] and Rabbinic Liturature proclaim (as seen in commandment blessing formula, asher qiddeshanu be-mitsvotav) that the individual is sanctified by observing the commandments, which are doable [Deuteronomy 30:12]. The notion that people are fated to fail, present in Gilgamesh, Homer, the great Greek Tragedians, and in Christian Scripture, is foreign to the Hebrew spirit and to the Pentatechual covenant.
Islam enslaved the Black of Africa from its inception. Augustine taught that slaves must be loyal to their masters and not to their spouses, a doctrine that seems to conflict with the notion that marriage is forever. Recalling Rudyard Kipling’s condescending notion of the “White Man’s burden,” European gentlemen have the right to extract resources and labor from what it, in its enlightenment disposition, regards as second rate humans. We recall that Ghandi, an Indian of color, a higher western law education and subject of the British crown, who at first naively accepted the enlightenment bargain, that one can adopt English mores and morph into an Englishman, he was discourteously disgorged from the White Man’s train because, for all of his acquired English elegance, he remained a human of color. The curse of Ham became the apologia for the White Man’s Burden, which is a euphemism not for noblesse oblige, but for the ignoble exploitation of one human being by another.
The invocation of and reading in to the “curse of Ham” reflects readers who invoke the god of their minds and not the God of the Hebrews. Pagans create idols of wood and stone, iconic images imagined by self-serving savants, always justifying lower self-interest by appealing to high sounding clichés, putative proof texts, and a narcissism that would be laughable were it not so malevolent. We are reminded to be ware and to be aware of elites with discriminating taste and well-biased opinions. People who speak in God’s voice discriminate against other peoples, humans who are not beasts treat the image of God with the requisite dignity that God demands.
Biblically speaking, humans did not evolve from beasts and ought not to devolve into beasts. Beasts live with, by, and for their passions. Cain should have, could have, but did not make correct moral choices. Cain’s deeds doomed his destiny, cursing his destiny with his actions. The so-called “curse of Ham” was a prediction, not a prophecy. The curse of Ham was broken by Abraham’s ethic, by the moral choice that was his, and ours, to make.
Rabbi Dr. Alan Yuter is the rabbi of Congregation Bnai Israel in downtown Baltimore, MD.
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Ham’s sin may not have been “incestuous homosexual rape”, but may’ve been having sex with Noah’s wife.
You are being very selective in your sources.
The curse of Ham was uttered not by God, the author of the moral law, but by Noah, a victim of incestuous homosexual rape.
The text is silent as to what Ham’s crime was. The Talmud & Bereshit Rabbah posit that it was due to sodomy or castration, but this is mere speculation of a (likely) mythological event that occurred thousands of years before these earliest commentaries.
Ancient humankind regarded meat as a superior gift to vegetables; the leg of lamb is more prized than the heart of lettuce.
Again, there are many differing opinions as to why the meat offering was accepted. Your statement is without any textual support, versus that of Rashi who focuses on the word “choicest” in Abel’s offering.
David Goldenberg’s PhD. is from Dropsie not Brown, I think that deserves to be corrected (ve hamavin yavin) and the other biographical details rechecked. Also in my time at Penn I never heard Goldenberg referred to as either “Professor” or “Rabbi” but I could be wrong on both counts.
Aren’t the statements in mAbot 2:6 by Hillel, and not Raban Gamliel?
1. THere is no mention of Noah’s wife in the narrative, and since Ham and Canaan are the players. the narrative seems to suggest an “event” between the three.
2. It is my understanding that Dr Goldenberg was one of Neusner’s studenents
3. I apoligze for the mis read of Avot
best wishes,
A. Yuter
Ibn Ezra gives a much shorter, clearer and better answer: the first emperor in world history, Nimrod, is a descendant of Kush son of Ham. If Ham’s offspring is cursed, then why was the first descendant we read about so blessed?
Rav Shlomo is not really disagreeing with my position, upon inspectiom. The “curse” is from the mouth of Noah, not God. Second, being powerful is not necessarily a blessing. Nimrod was not a “good guy” according to TSB”P. Calling the power of Nimrod a “blessing” seems to conflict with the lo be-choach ve lo be hayil ki im b-ruhi ideal.
Behavior patterns are a kind of mimetic culture “tradition.” The Nimord figure, an Akkadian war god, does not represent the Torah ideal. and as shown above, Ham’s behavior recurs in his descendants.
How tragic it is for men so learned to open the doors of credibility to that which the genetic witness has so clearly unmasked as the naked and unrepentant progaganda of those who would stain the scared texts with the innocent blood so many countless victims of their avarice fueled quests for material wealth and secular power.
Adding to the scripture, or taking the scripture out of context is ocassionally the forbidden fruit of which many scholars of scripture feel completely justified in partaking. The sons of this world, who neither acknowledge nor follow what Genesis reveals as the Adamic Faith Tradition of Edenic Monotheism lie in wait for utterances such as the authoratative speculation of Cains vs Abels offering or worse, Ham and Canaan’s sexual offense. If the double curse of the Dark Skinned descendants of Noah did not organically materialize to justify brutal murder and subjugation of an entire continent and over 60 million of its children by the undisciplined liberties of credentialed scholars, those who sought to gain wealth and power from the rape of Africa and Africans would just as easily have paid someone to do it.
The Mitochondrial Eve and Y Chromosomatic Adam discoveries of the past decade have finally validated the anthropological accuracy of J.A. Rodgers, and Cheik Anta Diop and others who’s research concluded that the dominant and recessive evolutionary traits of the human gene pool indicate that Adam & Eve and thus Eden were African. This would put the post deluvian human population (Noah and his extended family)in the high melanin, dominant gene category referred to as negroid.
The descendants of Noah’s Son Ham established the first major world empire under the leadership Ham’s grandson Nimrod. Subsequently, Ham’s descendants (after the dispersal) established the Sumerian, Abysinnian, and Egyptian empires, and the so called cursed namesake Canaan evolved into a society who’s agrigicultural prowess gave rise to a Promised Land Flowing With Milk and Honey.
White Supremacists launched a scientific(genetically 3/5ths human) and religious(mark of Cain curse of Ham) based campaign of racist propaganda against Africa and the African’s to justify their impending imperialistic war against African life and liberty in pursuit of the right to exploit for financial gain. In a book called Hitler and Secret Partners, great efforts have been put forth to demonstrate that exploitation for financial gain was as much a part of the Nazi effort against Jews as any stated reasons.
The notoriously engineered and tragically effective propoganda system engineered by the Nazi Regime against Europe’s Jewish Citizens followed suit by attacking the genetic and religious validity of the Faith and or Ethnicity of Jews. Claiming the Jews to be inferior on Genetic grounds “thy mother was a hittite and thy father and amorite”, and claiming that Judiasim is an enemy religion because the High Priest’s conspired how they might have Jesus put to death” were taken out of context, added to, expanded upon, and stretched to the point where blatant lies achieved a deadly level of credibility and helped to soften resistance to the mass murder of millions of European Jews during world war II.
Perhaps I have said much too much here. I am used to seeing such casualness in religious white supremacists discourses on the subject of Africans, the mark of cain and the curse of ham, but I have to admit that it kind of hurt me to see a young scholar, under the watchful eye of other scholars, take such dangerous liberites as this.
From Genesis we know that Cain did not give his “First Fruits”, or the best he had to God as an offering of thanks for the provision. Some farmers specialize in plants and others in animals. As God looks at the heart of man, God knows when we are offering Him our best or just what we happen to have left over…plant or animal.
Noah’s words were that Canaan would be a servant to his bretheren (brothers), and to his uncle (Japheth), and that Japheth would be enlarged and would dwell in the “Tents of Shem”. Noah’s words never claim any authority beyond the names he mentioned.
In the hebrew journey into Egypt, did not Shem dwell in the Tents of Mizram? In the Conquest of Canaan or entrance into the Promised Land, did not Shem dwell in the Tents of Canaan, and dwell there even now?
Some of the Old Testament Prophets, and certian references in Revelations suggest that Gog, Magog, Gomer,Mesech, and Tubal may play central roles in leading mankind into rebellion against God, and into persecution against Israel. Are not these the descendants of Japheth?
If we talk about the manifestation of seeds of rebellion against God, or about conduct more befitting the satanic modus operandi…”the thief commeth not but for to steal, kill, and destroy”…we must ask…where in the annal of human history has the tendency towards methods manifest themselves time and time again?
Please, in the future…be careful not to “assist Almighty God” in making one’s case by adding to or expanding on the scriptures. To do so is to play with a deadly and combustible mixture that could explode into secular justifications for greed and power based campaigns of mans inhumanity against man.
R’ Yuter,
Thanks for your reply. Two points:
1. We are not discussing a “generic” curse, but a curse to servitude, and Nimrod’s conquests were quite the opposite of servitude. That’s true whether or not Nimrod was an admirable person.
2. In any case: Ibn Ezra, at least, views the phrase “gibor tzayid lifnei hashem” as indicating righteousness on Nimrod’s part.
You’ve confused me with Robert Goldenberg.
David Goldenberg
The most absurd thing about the ‘Curse of Ham’ is that Ham was never cursed — Cana‘an was. It’s explicit there in the text of the Torah. And connecting Cana‘an to Subsaharan Africa is just ignorant, once you see the clear pictures the Ancient Egyptians painted of themselves and other “Hamitic” peoples … and once you realize that ‘Africa’ in Rabbinic literature refers to the Roman Province of Africa, i.e. Carthage (Qart Hhadasht), which after all was inhabited by Cana‘anites from Phoenicia.
Please let me know what action you have taken to highlight this racist statement. Please copy me in on letters and or emails that you have sent to highlight this racism/
By Chaim Levinson • Ha’aretz Dec 7th
A number of leading rabbis who signed on to a religious ruling to forbid renting homes to gentiles – a move particularly aimed against Arabs – defended their decision on Tuesday with the declaration that the land of Israel belongs to the Jews.
Dozens of Israel’s municipal chief rabbis signed on to the ruling, which comes just months after the chief rabbi of Safed initiated a call urging Jews to refrain from renting or selling apartments to non-Jews.
Signatories include the chief rabbis of Ramat Hasharon, Ashdod, Kiryat Gat, Rishon Letzion, Carmiel, Gadera, Afula, Nahariya, Herzliya, Nahariya and Pardes Hannah, among a number of other cities.
“We don’t need to help Arabs set down roots in Israel,” Rabbi Shlomo Aviner of the Beit El settlement, said on Tuesday. Aviner explained that he supported the move for two reasons: one, a Jew looking for an apartment should get preference over a gentile; and two, to keep the growing Arab population from settling too deeply.
“Racism originated in the Torah,” said Rabbi Yosef Scheinen, who heads the Ashdod Yeshiva. “The land of Israel is designated for the people of Israel. This is what the Holy One Blessed Be He intended and that is what the [sage] Rashi interpreted.”
He added that he did not see the move as racist so much as segregationist. “The world is so big and the State of Israel is small, that God intended it for the people of Israel and the whole world covets it. That is the injustice.”
Upon news of the religious ruling, Meretz faction whip Ilan Ghilon immediately asked the attorney general to dismiss each of the rabbis who had signed their names.
“We are witnessing an epidemic of racism and xenophobia and we must act firmly,” he said.
Deputy Knesset chairman MK Ahmed Tibi decried the letter as a “mass crime [committed] by a group of racist rabbis who should be given intensive course in Jewish history.”
The entire group should be tried for “incitement to racism,” added Tibi, “Muslim clerics have recently been tried or fired from their jobs for much less but the rabbis are able to pursue their unruly behavior without concern.
Haifa Mayor Yonah Yahav termed the ruling the “real desecration of God’s name. It is bringing hatred against those with whom we have chosen to live our lives.”
Nazareth Mayor Ramiz Jaraisy also decried the moving, declaring that “whoever thinks it damages one side is mistaken. We are all children of the land. Both nations must search for common ground and not bring about escalation.”
In their ruling, the rabbis called on the religious community to voice support Safed Chief Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, who could face trial for incitement against Arabs for initiating the move against renting to gentiles.
Minority Affairs Minister Avishay Braverman has also asked Justice Minister Yaakov Neeman to begin the process of suspending Eliyahu immediately from his post as municipal rabbi.
Politicos from the national religious sector believe that the mass of prominent figures who signed on to the ruling – all of whose salaries are paid by public funds – will send a message to the attorney general to take Eliyahu’s position seriously.
The rabbis’ letter prompted by Eliyahu, which was first published months ago and reprinted in October, urges Jewish owners of apartments to reconsider renting their properties to Arabs since it would deflate the value of their homes as well as those in the neighborhood.
“Their way of life is different than that of Jews,” the letter stated. “Among [the gentiles] are those who are bitter and hateful toward us and who meddle into our lives to the point where they are a danger.”
The rabbis also urge neighbors of anyone renting or selling property to Arabs to caution that person. After delivering the warning, the neighbor is then encouraged to issue notices to the general public and inform the community.
“The neighbors and acquaintances [of a Jew who sells or rents to an Arab] must distance themselves from the Jew, refrain from doing business with him, deny him the right to read from the Torah, and similarly [ostracize] him until he goes back on this harmful deed,” the letter reads.