No child I teach is ever going to have an excuse for believing that the Bible supports any form of racism.
Sometimes, grownups come up with some pretty zany ideas that they think come from the Bible but instead, we can use the Bible to show that they are nonsense. As we did with the Mark of Cain, which was actually a blessing and not a curse, this week we’re going to talk about the claim that all of the descendants of Ham were cursed by God—when what really happened is that one of Ham’s sons was cursed by Noah. We’re also going to discuss how this wrong belief has been used to hurt people all over the world.
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel.
Parents, all Scripture this week comes from the CSB, the Christian Standard Bible.
Well, this is the kind of thing I don’t really like to teach but it is important for you guys to know that sometimes grownups do some bad things with the Bible to hurt other people and last week’s lesson talked about one of those things. And so, this week’s episode is called “The Curse of Ham” and the problem with that is that Ham was never cursed but people in the past have used that phrase and that idea so that they could say the Bible was giving them permission to do terrible things. Of course, there are many things in the Bible that have been taken out of context in order to hurt people, but this is one of the worst. Parents, we will be talking about enslavement, apartheid, segregation, and oppression that has gone on in the world by people who have used Genesis 9 and 10 in order to argue that some people were born to be slaves and some people were born to own them, and that there are people who are made to be conquered, which means that someone else thought it was okay to invade their countries with soldiers and take over, and people who are allowed to conquer them. Doesn’t sound much like something Jesus would say, does it? We’ll get to that too, because when people don’t understand that we all come from the same place in the beginning, and that we are all equally made in God’s image to show the world how good He is, they will twist the Bible into an excuse to act more like the devil.
We will be starting in Genesis 10 very soon—it’s called the Table of Nations because when Moses wrote it, he listed all of the people groups in the world that he knew and told the Israelites in the wilderness which son of Noah each came from—Shem, Ham, or Japheth. Shem’s descendants—meaning his kids and grandkids and great-grandkids and so on, settled in what we call the Near East—Arabia and modern-day Iran and Iraq. Japheth’s descendants went north and west into modern-day Turkey and Europe. Ham’s descendants went to Africa and his son Canaan’s descendants went to Israel. And despite Noah cursing his grandson, we can see that God blessed all the sons of Noah and their children with good soil for growing crops and big families. Let’s look at that curse in Genesis 9 again-–Canaan is cursed. He will be the lowest of slaves to his brothers… Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem; Let Canaan be Shem’s slave. Let God extend Japheth; let Japheth dwell in the tents of Shem; let Canaan be Shem’s slave. (Gen 9:25-28, edited)
Because Noah was the patriarch of the family, the head honcho, the man in charge with all the power over everyone—because that’s how it was in the ancient world (even his sons who were all over a hundred years old had to obey him until he died!)—Noah had the power to make life just terrible for Canaan as revenge against Ham for humiliating him by telling everyone what his father did when he was drunk—laying passed out in his tent naked. I mean, no one would want anyone to know about that or see it, right? And last week we talked about how sometimes people take out their anger on the wrong person when they don’t feel like they can confront and deal with the person who was actually wrong. If Noah cursed Canaan, then everyone in the family would likely treat him badly. It seems strange to us, but that was the culture in those days. The patriarch had the power over everyone. And so, it is likely that Canaan left the family as soon as he could and moved west to what we now know of as the Land of Israel. When he left, he would have left behind his ability to hear about God too—but let me tell you something, when archaeologists found cuneiform tablets in ancient Israel that were written by the Canaanites, they found that they called their chief god El, which is actually the same thing we find in the Bible and in a lot of the Psalms—it is short for Elohim, one of the many titles of our God. Cool, eh? Things may have gotten messed up, but some things were remembered. And they also remembered the word ba’al, which is a title God uses for Himself in the Bible, meaning master or lord or husband. And because they left the family so early, they didn’t get the teachings from Noah that the others got and they became very wicked after many hundreds of years. But the land they settled in was the best in all the world, and eleven nations descended from Canaan. What Canaan got from God was good land and many children, and in the ancient world, that was how people saw themselves as blessed.
What about the rest of Ham’s descendants? Were they cursed? Not at all! Ham had a son named Mitsraim, which was the ancient name for Egypt—and Egypt was known as the “breadbasket of the world” for thousands of years. That’s because they settled along the Nile river, and every year when it floods, it brings new and fertile soil that is perfect for growing crops. Egypt fed almost the entire Roman Empire, and in the days of Joseph, people were coming from all over the known world in order to get food from Egypt’s storehouses. Whenever there is trouble or famine in the Bible, they would go to Egypt for help! Egypt was also the world’s first superpower. They had a lot of what we would call modern medicine—they could even remove cataracts (that’s eye surgery). They had the most beautiful art and architecture in the world–the pyramids and the temples and a written language. There was no culture like Egypt on earth until the first millennium (1000 years) before Jesus was born. They were blessed and even the Bible talks about Egypt being specially blessed in the last days in Isaiah 19:
19 On that day there will be an altar to the Lord in the center of the land of Egypt and a pillar to the Lord near her border. 20 It will be a sign and witness to the Lord of Armies in the land of Egypt. When they cry out to the Lord because of their oppressors, he will send them a savior and leader, and he will rescue them. 21 The Lord will make himself known to Egypt, and Egypt will know the Lord on that day. They will offer sacrifices and offerings; they will make vows to the Lord and fulfill them. 22 The Lord will strike Egypt, striking and healing. Then they will turn to the Lord, and he will be receptive to their prayers and heal them. 23 On that day there will be a highway from Egypt to Assyria. Assyria will go to Egypt, Egypt to Assyria, and Egypt will worship with Assyria. 24 On that day Israel will form a triple alliance with Egypt and Assyria—a blessing within the land. 25 The Lord of Armies will bless them, saying, “Egypt my people, Assyria my handiwork, and Israel my inheritance are blessed.”
And there really was an altar to the Lord in Alexandria, Egypt! And when the Gospel of Jesus went out into the world, some of the greatest Church Fathers—which is what they call the great thinkers about the Bible during the first five hundred years, were African! That’s right, they came not only from Egypt, like Clement, Origen, and Athanasius, but also from other areas of North Africa, like Augustine. I know that when you see pictures of them they usually show them as white guys, but they were Africans and those pictures were drawn much later by people who probably thought all the church fathers were white. Again, this sounds like the descendants of Ham were really blessed not only before but after Jesus. Unfortunately, the African Christians were conquered by Muslims hundreds of years later but now the fastest growing churches in the world are in Africa and Asia! And they are seeing amazing miracles!
Africa and Africans were never cursed by God, but unfortunately, people read the Bible in such a way that they thought they had permission to do terrible things, as though it was the fate of Africa to be stepped on by everyone else. And this is very sad, and it is okay to be sad because it is terrible, and it is okay to be angry. I am sad and angry about this. We’re going to talk about what happened and what the Prophets had to say and also what Jesus said as well, about how we are supposed to behave when we have the Spirit of God living in us. Everything changed when Jesus came, and He allowed us to keep the commandments not only on the outside, but also to do it with love that comes from the inside so that we want to keep the commandments. If we are doing something to harm someone else, then we are not acting like Christians. And that’s what happened with the myth of the Curse of Ham. There were people who read the Bible and saw that Canaan was cursed to be Shem’s slave by Noah, and in those days to be a slave meant that you were very, very dishonored, not even really considered an actual human being. We will talk a lot more about slavery as we go through the Bible. And because Canaan was descended from Ham, and Ham was the one who sinned against his father, people got the idea that it was okay to have slaves as long as they got them from the continent of Africa—because they believed it was their right and that Africans were cursed. But that’s not what the Bible even says. Only Canaan was cursed, and even if the descendants of Canaan were doomed to be slaves forever, that would only apply to the people who moved to what is now the Land of Israel—let’s look at Genesis 10:15-19.
Canaan fathered Sidon his firstborn and Heth, as well as the Jebusites, the Amorites, the Girgashites, the Hivites, the Arkites, the Sinites, the Arvadites, the Zemarites, and the Hamathites. Afterward the Canaanite clans scattered. The Canaanite border went from Sidon going toward Gerar as far as Gaza, and going toward Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboiim as far as Lasha.
There a zero Africans listed under the sons of Canaan, ZERO! These guys all lived in and around Israel. And these people don’t even exist anymore. So, if they were ever cursed with being slaves, they aren’t anymore. And the Bible tells us that they scattered away from Shem and Japheth—I can see why, if they were being treated badly. No Egyptians, no Ethiopians, no Libyans, no Africans came from Canaan. But people who want to hurt other people will always be looking through the Bible to find some reason why it is okay to do it. That’s why it is so important for all of you to know the whole story of the Bible, from front to back, so that we can be the kinds of people that Adam and Eve were supposed to be from the beginning, and their children and their children’s children. It is the trick of the Serpent to get us to think it is okay to harm one another. Moses and Jesus both said that we are to love our neighbors as ourselves—and Jesus said that everyone is our neighbor. Well, actually He said that we are supposed to be everyone else’s neighbor, which means that we need to love them and treat them as we would want to be treated. The ancient world was a wicked and cruel place, and we are going to see God doing a lot of things to change them little by little.
So anyway, in the 16th Century, which was five hundred years ago, people began to steal people from Africa to sell to the Middle East and to America and Europe. Before that, we see slavery in all of North Africa during the Roman Empire and all the way back to ancient Egypt, but slavery used to be practiced in all cultures. The Bible even has rules for how to treat slaves since in all other countries, there were no rules at all and you could treat enslaved people any way you wanted to. Now that Jesus has set us all free from sin, slavery is now illegal in a lot of the world and especially in nations with a lot of Christians but even 200 years ago that wasn’t true. And people used the Bible to say it was okay. Isn’t that awful? God gave Moses rules that would keep people from doing whatever they wanted to slaves and people made the mistake of thinking that God approves of slavery! But we see in Exodus that our God is known all over the world as the God of the Exodus, the God who frees slaves. It is impossible to love someone and make them be your slave or mistreat them in any way or steal from them or steal them from their homes. All of these things are evil but in the ancient world, they thought it was normal.
God was the first one in history to tell people that slaves are people too. He wanted to change their way of thinking so that in the future they wouldn’t keep slaves at all, but they got it all wrong. People in the Bible and all of us, we get a lot of things wrong. Fortunately, now we know that slavery is a horrible and evil thing. We don’t think it is okay anymore. And we are learning more every day that God doesn’t create some people to own slaves and other people to be enslaved. We are all image-bearers of God, put in the world to show it who God is and how wise and loving He is—and enslaving another human being is like making a slave out of God!
But white Christians in Europe and America looked at their Bibles and decided that Noah was telling them that all of the descendants of Ham deserved to be slaves forever and that they were cursed and so not really entirely humans. In fact, in America, they even said that if someone was black, they were only ¾ human. It is hard to be evil to someone you think is your equal, and so to make people into slaves you have to try and make it so that they deserve it. But no one deserves to be enslaved. Not the children of Israel in Egypt, not Esther in the palace of King Xerxes, not Joseph who was sold by his brothers, not anyone. Now that Jesus died for the sins of the world, to set us free from sin and death, we are also free from the evils that led to slavery. When we read the Bible to learn how to love people, it is a whole lot different than when we read the Bible to see how mean we can get away with being. Jesus told us to live by the laws of love, to be meek and not violent, to serve others instead of being served.
But slavery isn’t the only terrible thing that came out of Noah’s curse. It also contained a blessing on Japheth saying that he would “expand.” That means his descendants would spread out and so we don’t see them mentioned hardly at all in the Hebrew part of the Bible because they moved so far away. Most of the Bible is about the descendants of Shem and Ham because the Israelites came from Shem, and so did the Babylonians and Assyrians, and the descendants of Ham included the Canaanites and the Egyptians. When some European Bible scholars looked at what the Bible said about Japheth, they decided that it was telling them that it would be okay for them to conquer other people in order to “spread out.” And so, they went out in ships and moved into places like India, Africa, South America, and North America and when they got there, they did some terrible things that are a sad part of my own history. One thing they did was to treat everyone who was not white like they were inferior, meaning not as good. Think of if someone came and moved to where you lived, brought a lot of soldiers with them, and began treating you and your neighbors like you were nothing? That would be pretty awful, right? And what if they made you work for very little money in mines and factories and as servants and then took what you made away from you back to their own country where they sold it for a lot more money?
That’s called Colonialism. And when people were doing that, they really messed a lot of places up very badly. They messed people up very badly. They would go into a country and take their gold, silver, diamonds, and their spices for themselves and give little or nothing in exchange for them. And they treated people better if they had lighter skin and worse if they had darker skin. It was so bad that even today, in countries where they left, the people there still do that to each other. If you are in a store and have really dark skin, and someone with lighter skin comes up, you have to let them in line in front of you in some places in Africa. They learned that from Colonialism, which taught them that the lighter your skin is, the better you are. Now, isn’t that just the most ridiculous thing you ever heard?
God gave us our skin and eye and hair color, and the different shapes of our eyes and noses, so that we wouldn’t all look exactly alike. Imagine a life where everyone looks and sounds exactly the same. “Hey Bob!” “Dude, I am not Bob, I am Eric.” “Dang, we all look the same—I wish someone would invent name tags.” When we look at each other, we can see that we all look very different—when you look at someone you love, think about what other people look like compared to them. Do they have freckles, or moles, or big bushy eyebrows or thin ones, tiny noses or big noses, or noses with a bump in the middle—or maybe kinda crooked because it got broken once? What color are their eyes? If their eyes are brown, are they exactly the same shade of brown as other people with brown eyes? Are their teeth straight, or a bit crooked, or are some missing? Can you recognize the sound of their voice with your eyes closed? And what color is their skin? People who are “white” actually have a lot of different skin colors from really pale to a light red. People who are “black” can also be many colors from a very light, light tan to the color of milk chocolate to very dark. Now, just imagine all of our outside stuff—what does all that have to say about the inside? Nothing at all, of course. On the inside, in our brains and hearts and bones, we look the same. How we look on the outside is wonderful and beautiful. But it is who we are on the inside that is most important. We all have different gifts and talents from God that have nothing to do with how we look on the outside. You can’t look at a person who is sleeping peacefully in their bed and have any idea how smart they are, if they are mean or nice, if they love or hate God, how much money they have, if they can sing or play musical instruments, what their voice sounds like, if they are safe or dangerous—you just can’t know anything about them.
In the Bible, only God and Jesus know who people are on the inside, past all the stuff that we can see when we look at them. But because of the imaginary “curse of Ham,” a lot of people for a long time and still today think that some people are better than others just because of what they look like on the outside or where they came from. And the reason I am teaching you all this is because it is important to know that all through your lives you will come across people who talk a lot about the Bible but most of them don’t really know very much about the whole Bible. They may know this verse or that verse and they may read the Psalms a lot, but they might not really have a good bead on what God wants or what He has been trying to accomplish with people because they only know the bits and pieces that they like or that their teachers focus on. A lot of people believed in the curse of Ham, and the curse of Cain, and other myths that made them think it was okay to think that some people are better than others and that some people were made to be slaves. But no one was ever created to be a slave—remember that the first thing that our God ever did to dazzle the world was to free the slaves from Egypt—not only the children of Israel but also all the other people who were enslaved who trusted in God more than Pharaoh. God wanted his first impression on the ancient world to be unmistakable. He wanted everyone to know that He was on the side of the people who other folks are hurting. And so, racism, which is hating people who are a different color, and every other way that people hate one another just for who they are and not for the choices they make, is against everything that God stands for.
When we get to Exodus, we will see that everyone who escaped Egypt—people of all colors who had been slaves in Egypt and even the Egyptians who wanted to follow God—would be gathered at the Red Sea and would cross safely over when God parted the waters, and they would be there at Mt Sinai when Moses received the commandments, and their children would be there when they finally crossed over into the Promised Land. God’s people have never been any one color, they’ve been all colors and all shapes and sizes. Because it takes us all to show who God is. God is too big to only be seen through white people or brown people or black people or whatever other kind of people. In the Creation story, we saw how creative God is and we can also see it in the world around us. Creation is a reflection of God’s goodness and His love for beauty. Think of the flowers and butterflies and birds and kittens and puppies and how beautiful we think they are. And they are only plants and animals. They are amazing but they weren’t created in God’s image. If the world around us is that beautiful, and we are far more amazing than plants and animals, just think of how beautiful all of us are, in all the different ways we appear and none more wonderful than any other. Did you know that Jesus isn’t white? Did you ever think of how weird it is that a man who lived in the Middle East, where everyone else has light brown skin, always looks like someone who lives in a basement and never even sees the sun? I bet if you took every person who ever lived and averaged out their skin color, it would be pretty close to what Jesus looked like. So, there is no good skin and bad skin, good hair and bad hair. God created it all and so it is beautiful.
I love you. I am praying for you. And I pray that you have a wonderful time studying the Bible with the people who love you.