Violence is not limited to the destruction of life and property. If one
destroys love, truth, and understanding, or any virtue or value, that is
emotional, social or intellectual violence. As Christian we would certainly
agree to deprive men of the Gospel is to do violence to their souls. To pervert
God's Word is to do violence to their minds. This is a far more subtle violence,
and seldom does it get into the news, but this is the kind of violence that is
really the most serious. The truth shall set you free Jesus said, and so it is
error and falsehood that enslaves men. To be a slave to any false idea or
prejudice, and to be a propagator of it is to be one guilty for a greater violence
than to be one who burns down a building.
One of the greatest conspiracies for violence against the souls of men was
the use of the Bible to support the right of white men to enslave black men.
Men became so convinced that God willed slavery that Baptist ministers in the
South denounced the speaking against slavery as a sin against the Holy Spirit.
The battle against slavery is now over, but these same people use all of the
same verses to justify prejudice. E. Q. Campbell said it was blasphemy to use
Scripture to justify desegregation.
The race issue does not divide at the line separating believer and
unbeliever. There were Christians and non-Christians on both the pro-slavery
and anti-slavery sides. Men appeal to the Bible to support both sides. In the
battle against slavery the Bible was the basic battleground. For it was the
resource for the principles both sides were defending. Albert Barns the great
Bible commentator and anti-slavery promoter, said he had to appeal solely to
the Bible in fighting slavery. The Constitution of the United States was not
sufficient, for slave holding Christians said the Bible is of higher authority and
it supported slavery. We can agree with their principle of obeying God rather
than man, but the issue is, were they obeying God or just their own
interpretation of God's Word?
Every system of oppression seeks to justify itself, and Kelly Miller wrote
in 1909, "The institution of slavery ransacked science, history, literature and
religion in quest of fact and argument to uphold the iniquitous system." One
of their richest fines was this passage in Gen. 9 about the curse of Noah on his
grandson Canaan. If they could connect the curse of white man's oppression
of the Negro to this curse then they were not only not wrong, but they were
fulfilling the will of God by making life miserable for the blacks. If God wills
the Negro to be the white man's slave, who are we to fight the will of God?
This was their attitude. The Negro is all right in his place, but according to
Scripture that place is subordination to the white man. White racism had a
basis in this biblical text, and it is still used to support the right of whites to
segregate the Negro. We want to examine this passage to see who is really
blaspheming the Bible.
The story begins with the folly of Noah drinking wine until he was drunk.
All of the trouble began with alcohol. This was not much of a start for the new
world. The old one had just been destroyed because of its wickedness, and
here is righteous Noah, who stood his ground for God against all of the
mocking, but now in a time of peace he falls. We need to beware of the
dangers of peace. We see that the flood did not really change human nature.
Those who tried and defend Noah by saying he didn't know of the effects of
wine have a weak case, for in the wicked world of eating and drinking before
the flood he certainty saw the effects of alcohol.
In verse 22 we see Noah ending up naked in his tent and his son Ham saw
him in that condition. He told his two brothers who were outside the tent.
That is all this verse tells us. He saw his father naked and told his brothers.
Commentators go wild here in their speculation. Ham is denounced as a God
hater who is defying the law of God and reverence for his father. He is
pictured as a cruel inhuman beast who mocked his father and made a big joke
of his nakedness. When the commentators get done with this verse you would
swear it is a condensed biography of the devil himself. They do have some
reason for this, but that does not justify writing foolish and excessive
speculation as if it was fact. The reason they have to make Ham look bad here
is that it makes Noah look terribly bad if he curses his son's son over an
incident that only happened because of his own sin. In other words, if Ham is
not made out to be a real rat here, Noah looks bad, and so they give Ham the
works. Moses, however, only tells us that he happened to see Noah naked and
told his two brothers. Moses does not appear to be painting a vicious beast of
a man, but of a son who stumbled into a situation of shame.
It is obvious there must be some basis for Noah's wrath. Verse 23 shows
us the contrasting action of the two brothers Shem and Japeth. They made
sure they did not see their father's nakedness. They take all precautions to
avoid this as they cover them with their heads turned away. It is clear from
this that the evil was in the seeing of his father naked, even though it was
Noah's own fault that he was so exposed. Cassuto, the Jewish commentator,
says, "If the covering was an adequate remedy, it follows that the
misdemeanor was confined to seeing." If this be so, then we are dealing here
with a specific culture matter of the Jews who considered it a deep disgrace to
be seen naked. When God was going to judge Israel, and let His wrath fall, He
would threaten them with exposure. Isa. 3:17 says, "The Lord will smite with
a scab the heads of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will lay bear their
secret parts." Ezek. 16:37 says, "I will gather them against you from every
side, and will uncover your nakedness to them, that they may see all your
nakedness." The most shameful experience for Jews would be to have their
nakedness exposed. This is why Noah was so angry at Ham.
In verse 24 Noah wakes up and discovers what had happened, and he was
very angry. A man waking up with a hang over is not in the best of moods
anyway, and then to find out he was exposed, made things all the worse. In
Psa. 78 where the wrath of God is vividly portrayed we read in verse 65,
"Then the Lord awoke as from sleep like a strong man shouting because of
wine." In other words, the best picture of wrath the Psalmist could use to
illustrate God's wrath was a man in Noah's condition waking up with a hang
over. It was in this state that Noah cursed Canaan. Now why men are so
eager to take this curse as a curse of God is a mystery. They do not take
Noah's act of drunkenness as inspired of God, yet they take this angry curse as
the word of the Lord. Men use the words of a man in sin shouting in a
hangover to support their views of segregation, and they call it divine
providence.
In verse 25 we see that Noah does not curse the man who did the evil act
of looking at his naked body, but he curses his grandson who had nothing to
do with it as far as the text goes. Canaan was the son of Ham, but there is no
reason to believe that Canaan must have gone into the tent with Ham and seen
Noah. Even if that were so, why would he curse him and not the father, or
why curse anyone at all? It sounds like Noah is still greatly under the
influence of his wine. This must have some meaning, however, and cannot be
merely the mutterings of an angry man who does not know what he is doing.
Figuring it out, however, could drive men to drink. They have tried a number
of approaches to make sense out of this cursing of Canaan for the sin of his
father, which is not even a sin by our standards.
The Jews had 3 possible solutions:
1. Ham had already been blest back in 9:1, and so his son was cursed in his
place, for a man cannot be blest and cursed at the same time. This is a very
weak argument.
2. Canaan is used, but it means the father of Canaan. This was the solution
Luther chose. He wrote, "The Holy Spirit speaking by Noah was so greatly
angered by disobedient and disrespectful Ham that he did not even care to
mention his name but called him by his son's name, Canaan." This is clever
but totally subjective.
3. Canaan was himself the real transgressor. This throws the rest of the
account into chaos, for it clearly says Ham was the guilty one. None of these
are convincing solutions.
Calvin says he cursed Canaan to emphasize the severity of the curse. He
wrote, "Yet, the thunder of this severe and dreadful prophecy seems weak and
illusory, since the Canaanites excelled in strength and in riches, and were
possessed of extensive dominion. Chapter 10:6 and following tells us who the
descendants of Canaan were. They were the great peoples of the ancient world
such as the Egyptians and Babylonians. Both of these peoples held the Jews in
bondage as slaves, but the Jews never held them in bondage.
Hams descendants were the first pioneers of world civilization. We read
in 10:8-9 that Nimord, one of the seeds of Ham, was a mighty man in the earth
and a mighty hunter before the Lord, and he began a great kingdom. Lange
the German scholar wrote, "Instead of being servants to Japheth, the
descendants of Ham were founding empires, and building immense and
populous cities, whilst the sons of the younger brother were roaming the dense
wilds of Middle and Northern Europe, or the steppes of Central Asia, ever
sinking lower and lower into barbarism..." Luther knew the facts of history
do not support the curse, and so he said you have to take it by faith and
recognize their spiritual slavery to sin and corruption. He wrote, "So Ham,
though cursed by his father, secured for himself the greater part of the world
and established mighty kingdoms, while Shem and Japheth, though blest, were
properly no more than beggars compared with him."
Are we to conclude then that Noah in a drunken stupor cursed Canaan
and the whole thing backfired? Most evangelical scholars feel it must be taken
as a serious prophecy, but they are uncertain as to how or when it was
fulfilled. Cassuto comes to the rescue with a solution right in the context of
Genesis. In chapter 14 Chedorlaomer king of Elam was a descendent of Shem
and the descendants of Canaan were servants of his. The descendants of
Japheth were also his allies, and so he feels the prophecy was fulfilled in the
immediate context. It sounds good but it is difficult to know for sure.
The question is: Is there any support for slavery or segregation of blacks?
Since the Negro has no connection at all with the descendants of the
Canaanites it is hard to believe anyone could so misapply a passage like this.
The Canaanites were white and of the Caucasian race. This curse has nothing
to do with the racial problem at all, and to use it to support any racial
prejudice is certainly folly and possibly blasphemy.
