The Curse of Ham in the Early Modern Era: The Bible and the Justifications for Slavery (review)

Among the followers of the Abrahamic religions, the Curse of Ham has arguably been the most widespread justification for condemning dark-skinned peoples to slavery. Its purported proof-text is Genesis 9:18–27, the story of the responses of the sons of Noah to their father’s nakedness. Whatever Ham did—mockery, voyeurism, rape, castration?—and Shem and Japheth did not, it provoked a paternal curse, targeting Ham’s son Canaan with enslavement. On this as well as almost everything else, the twists of the text as well as its subsequent interpretations are endlessly confusing. Over recent decades, exactly when, where, how, and among whom these disturbing verses became the Curse have provoked studies by numerous scholars, notably David Aaron, John Bergsma, David Goldenberg, Scott Hahn, Steven Haynes, Ephraim Isaac, Sylvester Johnson, Abraham Melamed, Thomas Peterson, Jonathan Shorsch, and the present reviewer. To a degree, David Whitford engages this growing research.

Displaying much erudition, the author has exhaustively revealed new details from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries about the emergence and diffusion of the Curse. His painstaking examination of how Ham supplants Canaan as its target during the sixteenth century (pp. 77–104) is his most significant contribution. Unfortunately, he fails to explore the relationship of the medieval Latin manuscript confusion of Ham, Canaan, and Cain (which he acknowledges, p. 35n57) to this later transformation. By adding persuasive new details (pp. 105–22), his argument about the motive instigating the sixteenth-century George Best to introduce the blackened Ham to England reinforces the emerging consensus that it arose from the advocacy of expansion, not racism. Whitford attempts to sort out the degree of influence of two eighteenth-century divines in firmly establishing the Curse. He argues that Thomas Newton, the Anglican bishop of Bristol, played a greater role than the learned Benedictine Augustin Calmet (pp. 141–69). Since the earlier Calmet did play a part in the later Newton’s argument—albeit in misleading fashion, as revealed by Whitford—the question is still unresolved, but Whitford does present evidence that Newton was favored by Anglophones.

The book’s discussion of the ancient and medieval background to the development of the Curse is less secure. It seems to treat Genesis 9:25 as if that were Israelite Scripture’s only engagement with slavery. Repeatedly it claims that Genesis 9 and 10 as well as medieval texts consign Ham to Africa (e.g., pp. 39, 59, 60, 67, 77, 101). Continents do not exist in ancient Near Eastern literature and elsewhere did not even begin to acquire their current conception, identity, and significance until the late Renaissance. Biblical Hebrew is often mangled (e.g., pp. 5, 99n72, 146). The book mischaracterizes as Renaissance innovations claims—notably by the influential forger Annius of Viterbo—that had long-established Jewish and Christian precedent. However, whatever the origin, Annius’s hypersexualization of Ham did contribute to the nature of the Curse, as Whitford correctly argues (pp. 54–62). Whitford persuasively demonstrates the might of Ham in early-and mid-sixteenth-century royal genealogies (pp. 66–76), but he fails to explain satisfactorily how he moved so quickly from kingship to a slave-ship. Nor does he acknowledge that the myth of Ham’s majesty had been widespread in ancient and medieval thinking. The Bible and its exegetes made much of the empire-builders, Egypt and Nimrod, son and grandson of Ham. From the mid-fourteenth century onward, the well-known—and similarly fraudulent—Travels of Sir John Mandeville called Ham “the sovereign of all the world.”¹

Unfortunately, diligent scholarship alone cannot eliminate the Curse. Martin Marty once wrote “. . . you overcome story with story. You break the spell of myth with another myth.”² Whitford now adds his insights to the others who have exposed the fraud, distortion...