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Japanese Ham saw his father Noah lying drunk and uncovered in his tent, and he went out and told his two brothers. That is all Genesis says he did. Shem and Japheth walked in backward and covered their father, and when Noah woke he cursed not Ham but Ham’s son Canaan.
So short a story leaves hard questions. Why should looking be a sin? Why does Noah, on waking, know “what his younger son had done unto him,” as if something had been done to him? Why curse a grandson? The biblical scholars John Bergsma and Scott Hahn call the passage “an exegetical puzzle since antiquity,” and Jewish and Christian readers have answered it in different ways. Over the centuries it was also twisted into a “curse of Ham” and used to defend slavery.
The story in Genesis 9
The flood is over and God has set his bow in the cloud when Genesis turns to Noah’s household: “And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard: And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent” (Genesis 9:20–21). Ham’s part takes a single verse: “And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without” (Genesis 9:22).
His brothers answer with a care the text spells out twice: “Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness” (Genesis 9:23). Then: “And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him. And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren” (Genesis 9:24–25).
“A servant of servants” is a Hebrew way of saying the lowest servant of all. John Calvin, in his commentary on Genesis (1554), explained that the phrase “signifies that Canaan shall be the last, even among servants,” and the Catholic New American Bible translates the line “The lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers.” Noah goes on to bless “the Lord God of Shem” and to say that “God shall enlarge Japheth,” with Canaan servant to both (Genesis 9:26–27). Then Genesis closes his story: “And Noah lived after the flood three hundred and fifty years” (Genesis 9:28). We follow those years in how Noah lived to 950.
Was Ham’s sin only that he looked?
Read as it stands, the story turns on what Ham did with what he saw: he left his father exposed and went out to tell, where his brothers would not even look. Augustine, in The City of God (begun in 413 and finished in 426), described Ham as the son “who, so far from covering his sleeping father’s nakedness, had divulged it.” Calvin wrote that Ham “not only took pleasure in his father’s shame, but wished to expose him to his brethren.” The notes of the Catholic New American Bible put the fault on Ham, “who shames his father by looking on his nakedness, and then tells the other sons.”
Modern commentators such as Gordon Wenham, Victor Hamilton, Umberto Cassuto and Claus Westermann read it the same way. Bergsma and Hahn, who list them and disagree with them, grant this reading its strength: “it refuses to see anything in the text that is not explicit.” Its weakness, they argue, is that it explains neither “the gravity of Ham’s offense” nor “the reason for the curse of Canaan.” Calvin, centuries earlier, found the gravity in the honour owed to parents. “Piety towards parents is the mother of all virtues,” he wrote, and the curse shows “how abominable in the sight of God is the impious contempt of parents.”
Was Noah to blame for getting drunk? The traditions differ here too. The New American Bible’s note says the fault “is not Noah’s (for he could not be expected to know about the intoxicating effect of wine).” Calvin judged that Noah’s “fault was not a light one.” In the Babylonian Talmud, compiled in Babylonia between about 450 and 550, God asks Noah why he did not learn “from Adam the first man, whose banishment from the Garden of Eden was caused only by wine,” following one rabbinic view that the tree Adam ate from was a grapevine.
Did Ham do more than look?
The story is so terse that, in Bergsma and Hahn’s words, it has left “generations of readers and scholars feeling that there is more to the story than the narrator has made explicit.” Readers who find more point to two details. Noah “knew what his younger son had done unto him,” which sounds like a deed rather than a look. And “the nakedness of his father” is the language the Law of Moses uses for forbidden sexual relations. Leviticus forbids a man to “uncover” the nakedness of close kin and explains the phrase: “The nakedness of thy father’s wife shalt thou not uncover: it is thy father’s nakedness” (Leviticus 18:8). It uses “see” in the same sense, of a brother and sister who “see her nakedness, and she see his nakedness” (Leviticus 20:17).
The rabbis of the Talmud already read the verse as a deed. In Sanhedrin 70a two teachers, Rav and Shmuel, disagreed about it: one said Ham castrated his father, the other that he abused him sexually.
A modern reading points elsewhere. In the Journal of Biblical Literature in 2005, Bergsma and Hahn, both then at Franciscan University of Steubenville, argued that in the Law “the nakedness of the father” means the nakedness of the father’s wife, so that Ham’s sin was incest with his mother. That would explain the curse on Canaan, “who is the fruit of the illicit union,” and why Genesis calls Ham “the father of Canaan” at the very moment it tells the deed. They meet the obvious objection, that Noah curses Canaan as soon as he wakes, months before any child of that night could be born, by granting that “the text has been elided or compressed.”
Every reading that finds more than a look has to deal with verse 23. The brothers cover a real nakedness with a real garment, and they “saw not their father’s nakedness” because they turned their faces away. Bergsma and Hahn answer that the brothers’ act “plays on the broader sense of the phrase.” So did Ham sleep with his mother? Genesis does not say so. It is one scholarly reading of an idiom, and Augustine, Calvin and the New American Bible’s notes all take the plain one: Ham looked and told. Did Canaan himself take part? None of these sources says that Canaan slept with Noah’s wife. The one old tradition that brings Canaan into the deed, in Genesis Rabbah, makes him the one who saw first and told, as the next section shows.
Why did Noah curse Canaan instead of Ham?
Ham did the deed, and his son bears the curse. The rabbis felt the strangeness too. “Ḥam committed the sin and Canaan was cursed? This is astonishing,” says Genesis Rabbah, the classic collection of rabbinic teaching on Genesis, edited in the Land of Israel around the year 400, and it records several answers (36:7). Rabbi Yehuda pointed back to Genesis 9:1, “And God blessed Noah and his sons”: since “a curse cannot be in a place where there is blessing,” Noah could not curse a son whom God had blessed. Rabbi Neḥemya held that Canaan was there first: “Canaan saw and told Ḥam.” The teacher in the Talmud who said Ham castrated Noah reasoned that Ham had cost Noah a fourth son, so Noah cursed Ham’s fourth son, and Genesis 10:6 does list Canaan fourth.
Augustine and Calvin found the answer in Ham himself. Noah, Augustine wrote, “cursed him not in his own person, but in his son’s.” Calvin agreed that Ham “is so far from being exempt, that God, by involving his son with him, aggravates his own condemnation.” Both took Noah’s words as prophecy, not a father’s temper: Augustine says Noah spoke “by this prophetic spirit,” and Calvin that Moses “introduces him speaking in the spirit of prophecy.” Asked why Canaan alone among Ham’s sons, Calvin answered, “let not our curiosity here indulge itself too freely.”
Others read the curse through Israel’s later history, since Canaan’s sons in Genesis 10 are the peoples of the land Israel would enter. The notes of the New American Bible say that “Ham’s conduct is meant to prefigure the later shameful sexual practices of the Canaanites, which are alleged in numerous biblical passages,” and that “the point of the story is revealed in Noah’s curse of Ham’s son Canaan.”
Who were Ham’s sons?
Genesis 10, the chapter often called the Table of Nations, names four: “And the sons of Ham; Cush, and Mizraim, and Phut, and Canaan” (Genesis 10:6).
| Son | Usually identified as | What else Genesis and the Psalms say |
|---|---|---|
| Cush | “biblical Ethiopia, modern Nubia” | Father of Nimrod, “a mighty hunter before the Lord” (Genesis 10:8–9) |
| Mizraim | Egypt (Lower, or northern, Egypt) | The Psalms call Egypt “the land of Ham” (Psalm 105:23) |
| Phut (Put) | “either Punt in East Africa or Libya” | Nothing more in Genesis |
| Canaan | The peoples of Canaan | Father of Sidon, Heth, the Jebusite, the Amorite and others, whose border ran “from Sidon, as thou comest to Gerar, unto Gaza” (Genesis 10:15–19) |
The identifications come from the New American Bible’s notes, which observe that the Canaanites spoke a Semitic language yet are counted among Ham’s sons “because at one time they were subject to Hamitic Egypt.” The same notes call the chapter “theologically important as stressing the basic family unity of all peoples on earth.” Every nation in it descends from the three sons who came out of the ark, and it says nothing about the colour of anyone’s skin.
Who was Ham’s wife, and who was Canaan’s mother?
Genesis never names Ham’s wife. She went into the ark with him, among “Noah’s wife, and the three wives of his sons with them” (Genesis 7:13), and she was one of the “eight souls” who, Peter writes, “were saved by water” (1 Peter 3:20). Genesis does not name Canaan’s mother either. It calls Ham his father and says no more, and the natural assumption is that Ham’s wife bore all four of his sons; only Bergsma and Hahn’s reading would make Canaan the child of Ham and Noah’s own wife.
Later tradition gave her a name. The Book of Jubilees, a retelling of Genesis written in the second century before Christ, says that Ham “was displeased that he had cursed his son” and left his father with his four sons, “and he built for himself a city and called its name after the name of his wife Ne’elatama’uk” (Jubilees 7:13–14). The same chapter names the wives of Shem and Japheth. What the Bible says of Noah’s own wife, and the names tradition gives her, are set out in how many wives Noah had.
How was the “curse of Ham” used to justify slavery?
Genesis curses Canaan, not Ham, and it says nothing about skin. The “curse of Ham” was a misreading, and the people it was turned against paid for it with their freedom. For centuries Noah’s words were retold as a curse on Ham, laid on Africans as his supposed descendants and used to call black people fit for slavery. The scholar David Goldenberg traced how it happened in The Curse of Ham (Princeton University Press, 2003). Desmond Tutu, the former Archbishop of Cape Town, reviewing the book in 2004, put its question this way: how a story “that describes Noah cursing Canaan, the son of Ham, metamorphosed into the story of the cursing of Ham,” and how that “became the justification for the enslavement of blacks for more than 1,000 years.” In the biblical and early post-biblical sources, Tutu reported, Goldenberg found that “colour and race were of no particular significance.”
Goldenberg’s answer, in Tutu’s summary, lies in four words: “explanation, error, etymology and environment.” Some writers explained why Ham must have shared the punishment; others simply erred and said Ham was cursed; a mistaken etymology tied Ham’s name to “black”; and once black was identified with slave, “slavery then spawned the curse of Ham.” All four, Tutu wrote, “worked more or less simultaneously.” A second misreading ran beside it: the “mark upon Cain” (Genesis 4:15), which God set to protect Cain, “lest any finding him should kill him,” was also read as dark skin, a view promulgated in the United States “from at least the 1730s,” according to an essay of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Augustine and John Chrysostom (about 347 to 407) drew a different lesson from Noah’s words. Augustine traced slavery itself to sin: “we do not find the word slave in any part of Scripture until righteous Noah branded the sin of his son with this name,” and “by nature, as God first created us, no one is the slave either of man or of sin.” Chrysostom told his hearers that slavery was “the fruit of sin, of rebellion against parents.” Both still accepted slavery as part of a fallen world, and neither says a word about skin.
In the United States the argument was pressed into the defence of slavery. Frederick Douglass, born into slavery in Talbot County, Maryland, answered it in the first chapter of his Narrative in 1845. The growing number of enslaved people of mixed descent, he wrote, would “do away the force of the argument, that God cursed Ham, and therefore American slavery is right,” for thousands of them, “like myself, owe their existence to white fathers, and those fathers most frequently their own masters.”
Churches have since renounced it in their own words. In 2018 the Southern Baptist Convention acknowledged that “many churches in the Southern Baptist Convention once openly endorsed the false teaching of the so-called ‘curse of Ham’ narrative,” a doctrine that “has been used to enslave and continues to be used by white supremacists as a cloak to invoke God’s holy name in unholy acts of demeaning, dishonoring, and dehumanizing certain people who bear His image.” Its messengers resolved to “maintain and renew our public renunciation of racism in all its forms, including our disavowal of the ‘curse of Ham’ doctrine and any other attempt to distort or misappropriate the Bible to justify this evil,” and to “remain vigilant to bring about the healing and restoration of individuals affected by this sort of doctrine.” The Latter-day Saints’ essay, which addresses the years when the Church “did not ordain men of black African descent to its priesthood” (1852 to 1978), says that the Church now “disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse.”
Near the end of his review Tutu wrote, “I am relieved to find that there is no rational or scriptural basis for something as irrational as this curse of Ham.” Scripture had said as much. The chapter that names Ham’s sons sets every people on earth in one family, and Paul, standing on Mars’ hill, told the men of Athens that God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26).
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