About Ham and His Wicked Siblings
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
ABOUT HAM AND HIS WICKED SIBLINGS Caroline Angenent 1. Genesis When the Catholic priest Frei Betto asked Fidel Castro what he remembered from the Bible teachings he received as a schoolboy, Castro recalled that one of Noah's sons was punished with black descendants. After some reflection, he added that somebody ought to investigate whether it is truly fitting to teach in religious education that being black is a punishment from God (Betto 1986:108, quoted in Linde 1993:10).' This anecdote about Fidel Castro must have inspired Van der Linde (vdL) to once again write a book about slavery. VdL has spent a long time as a Moravian missionary in Surinam, a former Dutch colony. Many of his earlier publications (e.g. Linde 1953, 1956, 1963, 1966) also dealt with the subject of slavery, mainly from the point of view of the history of the people of Surinam and the role the Society of the Moravian Brethren played in it. This time, however, vdL focuses on the history of the "curse of Ham", for centuries a legitimizing force behind slavery and slave trade. Even well into the 20th century the story is said to have been used to discriminate against coloured people, as can be read in Edgar Cairo's book Dit vuur der grote drama's. In this book Cairo tells about the children of Surinam who, a decade after the second World War, were still taught that they, being the "children of Ham", were inferior to the white people (Linde 1993:133, cf. Paasman 235:n.37). Genesis 9:18-27: The sons of Noah who went out from the ark were Shem, Ham and Japhet; Ham is the ancestor of the Canaanites. These three were Noah's sons, and from these the whole earth was populated. Noah, a tiller of the soil, was the first to plant the vine. He drank some of the wine, and while he was drunk he uncovered himself inside his tent. Ham, Canaan's ancestor, saw his father's nakedness; and told his two brothers outside. Shem and Japhet took a cloak and they both put it over their shoulders, and walking backwards, covered their father's nakedness; they kept their faces turned away, and did not see their father's nakedness. When Noah awoke from his stupor he learned what his youngest son had done to him. And he said: 1 Review article of: Linde, J.M. van der. 1993. Over Noach met zijn zonen; de Cham-ideologie en de leugens tegen Cham tot varidaag. [About Noah and his sons: the Ham-ideology and the lies about Ham till the present day]. (IIMO Research Publication 33). Utrecht-Leiden: Interuniversitair Instituut voor Missiologie en Oecumenica. "Accursed be Canaan. He shall be his brothers' meanest slave." He added: "Blessed be Yahweh, God of Shem, let Canaan be his slave! May God extend Japhet, may he live in the tents of Shem, and may Canaan be his slave!" This text from Genesis has been the source of the so called "curse of Ham". The text states clearly that Canaan, the son of Ham, was cursed by his grandfather Noah, and this fact has astonished many exegetes. How could it happen that a person was so severely punished for the wrong deed of his father - while Ham himself seemed to have gotten away with it. Almost since its coming into being this seemingly unfair deed of Noah has given rise to a persistent stream of exegeses and (folk) traditions in which the curse was extended to Ham and all of his offspring. The same part of the book of Genesis mentions two other stories that shaped the history of the curse: the flood and the tower of Babel. The near extinction of the human race by the flood (Gen. 7:17-24) which meant that all people in the world are the descendants of one of the three sons of Noah (Gen. 9:19) led to an idea about a divine-willed division of the world among three sons. And the story of the tower of Babel which brought misunderstanding and the dispersion of humankind all over the world (Gen. 11:1-9) added to the supposed wickedness of Ham. In Over Noach, vdL describes how these stories have changed and how the way they were interpreted was modified through the ages. The book Over Noach has a chronological set up. The distinctions made are: the period of the Old Testament; the Early Church (200-800); Middle Ages (800-1500); the period of 1500-1800 in which are distinguished in different chapters: Reformation, Enlightenment, the time of western missions and colonialism; and the period of 1800-1960, in which vdL has separate chapters on North-America and England, on Europe, and a last one on Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Judaism is treated in the chapter on the Old Testament and a chapter on "Ham in Islam" is placed in the period of 800-1400. Unfortunately, vdL does not really hold on to his own chronological order and in his enthusiasm he often puts much later developments into an earlier chapter, e.g. p. 46-7 where the opinions of Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889-1975) and Karl Barth (1886-1968) are put in a chapter about the Middle Ages, dated 800-1500. This makes the developments which are not always dated in vdL's description sometimes difficult to follow. In the following few pages I will first try to put vdL's ideas in their global historical context. In order to do this I separate two themes: 1) the three sons of Noah and the various perceptions about them, which are needed to understand 2) the interpretation of the curse that fell on one of them and the use that was made of this story to defend slavery. In the second half of the article I then describe some recent publications on the "Hamitic Hypothesis" .