Black and Slave

David M. Goldenberg

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783110521672
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Storia delle religioni

Studies of the Curse of Ham, the belief that the Bible consigned blacks to everlasting servitude, confuse and conflate two separate origins stories (etiologies), one of black skin and the other of black slavery. This work unravels the etiologies and shows how the Curse, an etiology of black slavery, evolved from an earlier etiology explaining the existence of dark-skinned people. We see when, where, why, and how an original mythic tale of black origins morphed into a story of the origins of black slavery, and how, in turn, the second then supplanted the first as an explanation for black skin. In the process we see how formulations of the Curse changed over time, depending on the historical and social contexts, reflecting and refashioning the way blackness and blacks were perceived. In particular, two significant developments are uncovered. First, a curse of slavery, originally said to affect various dark-skinned peoples, was eventually applied most commonly to black Africans. Second, blackness, originally incidental to the curse, in time became part of the curse itself. Dark skin now became an intentional marker of servitude, the visible sign of the blacks' degradation, and in the process deprecating black skin itself.

Chapter One
Black and/or Slave: Confusion, Conflation, Chaos

The book of Genesis tells the story of Ham in chapter 9, verses 18–25:

The sons of Noah who went out of the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Ham was the father of Canaan. These three were the sons of Noah; and from these the whole earth was peopled. Noah, a man of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard. He drank some of the wine and became drunk, and lay uncovered in his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers outside. Then Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it upon both their shoulders, and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father; their faces were turned away, and they did not see their father’s nakedness. When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, he said, “Cursed be Canaan; lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers.”27

Now, look how this story is transformed in Fidel Castro’s retelling:

Noah cultivated a vineyard, grapes, produced wine and drank a little too much. One of his sons mocked him, and Noah cursed him and condemned him to be black [negro]. It is one of the things in the Bible that I think someday the Church should change, because it seems that being black is a punishment from God.28

This was how Castro recalled the biblical story as taught to him as a youth. Castro’s version is not by any means exceptional. The introduction of black skin color into Noah’s curse has a long history. Since, according to the Bible, the curse was one of slavery, the joining of skin color to Noah’s curse of slavery had a profound effect, for it served to justify black slavery for many centuries. In 1848, the American anti-slavery minister John G. Fee succinctly described that effect, which was commonly believed in his time: “God designed the Negroes to be slaves.”29

The idea that blackness and slavery were joined by God served as an ideological foundation stone of the South’s peculiar institution. The influential African-American minister and abolitionist Alexander Crummell stated in 1850 that “no argument has been so much relied upon, and none more frequently adduced.”30 Although some scholars have questioned how widely accepted the argument was, it was certainly among the most popular arguments in defense of slavery.31 The degree of its popularity is seen in this stark description by the Massachusetts pastor Increase Tarbox made in 1864:

There has come down to us, by inheritance from our fathers, a set of ideas and opinions, which in the unquestioning period of childhood we were easily made to believe and which have been and are still firmly held by multitudes as undoubted truths…. [which] became matters of common talk, having as their groundwork ‘everybody says so.’ Passing thus from mouth to mouth, and having acquired such respectability as age can give, they stalk abroad with this halo of antiquity about them. There are thousands of men in our land, who, if you venture to disturb their faith in these old traditions, will start back instinctively as if you were trying to unsettle the foundations of everlasting truth.32

This interpretation of the biblical verse obviously has no basis in Scripture. Many pointed out that Ham, considered to be the forefather of blacks, was not the one cursed. Albert Barnes, a Presbyterian minister in Philadelphia, with alliterative bluntness put it this way in 1846: “This passage, by a singular perverseness of interpretation, and a singular perseverance in that perverseness notwithstanding the plainest rules of exegesis, is often employed to justify the reduction of the African to slavery.”33

Not only didn’t the biblical text support the belief in black slavery, but the circularity of the argument for the belief was obvious. Edward Wilmot Blyden, the Liberian educator and diplomat, is most famous for advocating a return to Africa, a position later embraced by Marcus Garvey. At the age of 25, Blyden wrote a learned pamphlet, A Vindication of the African Race: being a Brief Examination of the Arguments in Favor of African Inferiority. The first argument he took up and refuted was the Curse of Ham. Those arguing for it, said Blyden,

take the ground that the curse was denounced against Ham, the progenitor of the African race, and all his posterity; affirming that the general condition, character and capabilities of Africans point them out as the subjects of the malediction. Thus, by an argument a posteriori, notwithstanding the reading of the passage and other circumstances, plainly indicate the the curse was uttered against Canaan, the youngest son of Ham, they infer that it was uttered against Ham and all his posterity, simply because, on other grounds they cannot, or will not, account for the condition of the African race. They prove the application of the curse from the condition of the race, and then argue the necessity of that condition from the application of the curse. Does not such reasoning marvelously involve what logicians call the argumentum in orbem?“34

Nevertheless, these arguments, and others as well, didn’t have much influence among pro-slavery advocates because the biblical story with its interpretation of black servitude undergirded the social order in the American South.

Those who embraced this interpretation of Noah’s curse do not often explain how blackness came about. Sometimes it is just assumed that the one cursed was black. But the more common, and nefarious, interpretation found in antebellum America and continuing well into the 20th century, understood that both slavery and blackness were simultaneously generated by Noah’s curse. It was, as Crummell described it, that “foolish notion that the curse of Canaan carried with it the sable dye which marks the Negro races of the world.”35 This is no doubt the meaning of what James Henry Hammond, the pro-slavery governor and U. S. congressman of South Carolina, said in a speech to the House of Representatives in 1836: “The doom of Ham has been branded on the form and features of his African descendants. The hand of fate has united his color and destiny. Man cannot separate what God hath joined.”36

Belief in the dual form of the curse continued well into the 20th century. In 1929, a publication of Jehovah’s Witnesses declared that the curse which Noah pronounced upon Canaan was the origin of the black race, and in 1954 a sermon by the Baptist minister Carey Daniel commented on the biblical curse of slavery: “The Bible clearly implies that the Negroes’ black skin is the result of Ham’s immorality at the time of his father Noah’s drunkenness.”37 Acceptance of the belief in a dual curse can be seen in a popular Bible commentary, which was reprinted many times and, at least as late as 1966, declared: “The descendants of Canaan became the black races who for long centuries furnished the world’s supply of slaves.”38

If there is no mention of skin color in Noah’s curse of slavery, where, when, and how did blackness enter the picture? In a 1928 article, a Jesuit missiologist Pierre Charles suggested that the answer could be traced to an ancient rabbinic legend.39 A couple of years later Raoul Allier, a Protestant minister and theologian, was more specific. He thought that the 17th-century Lutheran Johann Ludwig Hannemann learned the legend from Jews whom he knew in Amsterdam. Allier speculated that Hannemann, a doctor of medicine, met with Jewish doctors, for “a good many Jews there practiced medicine.” In this way he must have learned the rabbinic legend, which was “born in the ghetto, of the feverish and sadistic imagination of some rabbis.”40

Then, in 1968, the American historian Winthrop Jordan, without the specifics or bias of Allier, independently suggested that the idea of a curse of black skin was learned by Christian Hebraists in the Middle Ages from Jewish sources. The idea was then transmitted through the ages until it made its harmful appearance in the New World.41 Jordan admits that his evidence for Jewish dependency is weak (“the measure of [such] influence … is problematical”), but this has not prevented others from accepting it as proven fact, although several recent studies have challenged Jordan’s claim of rabbinic dependency.42

The rabbinic source that Jordan cited tells that during the flood, all those in the ark were prohibited from engaging in sexual intercourse. Noah’s son Ham transgressed, having sex with his wife, and as a consequence God punished him by blackening his skin. This story, which I will discuss in the next chapter, is an etiology accounting for the darker skin of some of the descendants of Ham. We will see that there are also other tales of origins found in a range of literature that explain the anomaly of black skin in lighter-skinned societies, as there are of white skin in darker-skinned societies, as punishment for some ancestral misdeed.

It is important to note that this rabbinic story says nothing of slavery. The etiology of slavery as depicted in the biblical account of Noah’s curse of Canaan is a separate story. This is an important point, noted by others.43 In the scholarship on this topic, however, this distinction is often not observed, and the two stories – the biblical one of slavery and the rabbinic of dark skin – are often conflated. For example, in his recent work, David Whitford quotes the church father Chrysostom (d. 407), who tells the story of Ham’s indiscretion in the ark (not citing any source, rabbinic or otherwise). “In his Homily 28 on Genesis,” says Whitford, “Chrysostom writes that Ham ‘indulged himself in incontinence [incontentiae] at a time when the world was in the grip of such awful distress and disaster, and gave himself up to intercourse.’ Because of Ham’s incontinence, ‘his son Canaan received the curse.’”44 Whitford thus suggests that the church father considered Canaan’s curse of servitude to be the punishment for Ham’s incontinence in the ark. Whitford then reinforces this sin-punishment connection by immediately adding: “The nature of Canaan’s curse is not described in Homily 28, though in Homily 29 Chrysostom does link Canaan’s curse to servanthood.” But it is not the case that Chrysostom connects Ham’s incontinence in the ark to Canaan’s punishment of servitude, and this is clear from the full text of Chrysostom:

[Ham] indulged himself in incontinence at a time when the world was in the grip of such awful distress and disaster, and gave himself up to intercourse; far from putting a check on the impulse of desire, already from the very outset the depravity of his attitude had become clear. So, when a little later his son Canaan is due to receive the curse for the disrespect towards the father of the family, Sacred Scripture had already anticipated its announcement on that account and revealed to us the name of the child at the same time as the intemperance of its father….45

Chrysostom was explaining why Scripture twice added the detail that Ham was the father of Canaan when telling the story of the curse of slavery in Genesis. The reason, he says, was to hint at Ham’s intemperance in the ark, so that when we are told later that Ham looked at Noah’s nakedness, we are already aware of Ham’s evil nature. “When you later see [Ham] giving evidence of ingratitude towards his father, you would be in a position to know that right from the very beginning he was the kind of person not to be restrained even by the disaster,” and that “with the same inclination with which he [i. e., Ham] gave himself to procreation in such a terrible situation [i. e., in the ark], he now vented his insolence on his father [i. e., Noah].”46 Chrysostom does not say that, “Because of Ham’s incontinence, ‘his son Canaan received the curse,’” as Whitford claims. Chrysostom does not say that Canaan was cursed with slavery because his father...