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Q.
Doesn’t the Bible condone slavery?
demonstrate the ongoing need for thorough research and commitment to
higher standards of biblical interpretation.
Rebecca Bowman Woods
A.
Unfortunately, the Bible has been used to justify slavery from
ancient to modern times. One example is the “Curse of Ham,”
based on Genesis 9:20–27. Noah gets drunk and falls asleep in his
tent, and Ham, one of Noah’s sons, sees his father naked. Ham tells his two
brothers, who go in and cover their father. When Noah fi nds out what hap-
pened, he curses Ham’s son Canaan, condemning Canaan to eternal slavery in
the service of Ham’s brothers.
Originally interpreted as an explanation for the Hebrew conquest of
Canaan, the story was later changed by clerics and others looking for religious
support for enslaving black Africans. They argued that Ham, who inherited
Africa in Genesis 10, was the one cursed by Noah, instead of Canaan. The
name “Ham” was also mistranslated as “black” or “burnt.” Legend developed
that Ham’s skin was darkened as part of the curse.
This story fl ourished during the transatlantic slave trade of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries and was the major rationale for slavery in the
antebellum-era United States, according to David M. Whitford, author of The
Curse of Ham in the Early Modern Era: The Bible and the Justi cations for Slavery.
Yet a study of the Bible fi nds no support for a link between slavery and
skin color, as another scholar, David Goldenberg, pointed out in a 2003 inter-
view with radio host Tavis Smiley. Moses had a Cushite (Ethiopian) wife, and
“no one cared, and everybody was fi ne with it,” Goldenberg said.
What can we learn from the Curse of Ham? The more familiar we are
with the Bible and other religious texts, the more diffi cult it is for cultures and
institutions to use holy scripture for unholy purposes.
Jarrod McKenna
A.
A preamble of context before my answer:Am I not a man and brother?
Ought I not then to be free?
Sell me not to another.
Take not thus my liberty.
Christ, our Savior,
Died for me as well as thee.^1- W. M. Swartly, Slavery, Sabbath, War, and Women (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1983), 58.