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by Stephen R. Haynes Oxford Univ. Press, 2002 384 pp.; $29.95 |
In Noah's Curse, Stephen Haynes provides an in-depth look at how the oft-cited biblical "curse of Ham" or "curse of Canaan" was used in the American South to defend the enslavement of people of African descent. That Scripture was used in this way is not news, but Haynes deepens our understanding of this telling episode in the tangled history of biblical interpretation, responding to the challenge posed by some scholars—most notably Eugene Genovese—who contend that the role of the curse in proslavery thought has been exaggerated. Moreover, Haynes shows how the curse was also employed to justify the displacement of Native Americans and, more recently, to attack the Civil Rights movement.
In Genesis 9:20-27, Noah's youngest son, Ham, "the father of Canaan," sees his father drunk and asleep in his tent. Ham tells his older brothers, Shem and Japheth, about their father's state, and these two brothers cover Noah's "nakedness" without looking directly at him. When Noah awakes from his stupor and realizes "what his youngest son had done to him," Noah utters the famous curse: "Cursed be Canaan, lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers." In contrast, Ham's older brothers receive a blessing for their discretion.
These verses have been the source of centuries of debate. What exactly did Ham observe that infuriated Noah? And if Noah were angry with Ham, why did he curse Ham's son Canaan rather than Ham himself? What was the nature and extent of Noah's curse? Was only Canaan to be a slave, or did the curse extend to perpetuity?
The last major work to tackle Genesis 9 was Thomas Peterson's Ham and Japheth in America: The Mythic World of Whites in the Antebellum South. Haynes builds on Peterson's valuable study. In the early chapters of Noah's Curse, he surveys a wide variety of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish responses to the text from a more than 500-year period and shows how extrabiblical assumptions have shaped interpretations of the text. Sometimes Ham receives the curse; sometimes Canaan is the recipient of Noah's malediction. Sometimes Noah hurls the curse because he feels he has been mocked, and sometimes the curse is attributed to sexual misconduct. Indeed, by the time of the Reformation, Haynes shows, many Christian theologians had concluded that the curse was the result of a sexual transgression (according to one theory, Ham had raped his mother).
At the same time, the curse became strongly associated with Africa. "Although Hamites had long been linked with southern regions of the inhabited world," Haynes notes, "Ham himself was rarely racialized before Europeans explored West Africa in the fifteenth century." With the beginnings of European involvement in the slave trade, Noah's curse began to be reinterpreted. While Haynes acknowledges that "the fateful conjunction of slavery and race in Western readings of Noah's prophecy" cannot be precisely dated, he writes that "by the early colonial period a racialized version of Noah's curse had arrived in America," founded on the conviction that Africans were the descendants of Ham.
Haynes' central argument is that Genesis 9 must be seen as working within the Southern mind as a text about honor and only honor. Of all the interpretations of Noah's curse available in Christian theology by the mid-19th century, Haynes contends that Southern divines settled on the one in which Noah invoked the curse because Ham had "mocked" Noah or "laughed at" him, thus dishonoring him as the family's patriarch.
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