Mark of Cain and Curse of Ham

It's just from some people trying to give credibility to their false beliefs.

Noah cursed Ham, saying "a servant of servants he shall be to his brothers".

The descendents of Ham went Southward, and are credited for establishing areas as South and Central Arabia, Egypt, and the East Coast of Africa. Egypt was called the “Land of Ham.” “Khen”, an Egyptian god, was the Egyptian equivalent of the Hebrew name “Ham”, and many feel Ham himself may have led settlers to Egypt. (Egypt was called “Mizraim”, the name of Ham’s son.

So, while the African people may have been among Ham’s descendents, it’s not biblical to say that they have inherited Ham’s curse. People do not inherit the sins of their fathers.

When I was younger I lived in Atlanta, and the KKK was big during that time. They’d demonstrate on the square in Marietta GA. This was some of the sources they used to promote their racist beliefs. These people were twisted, their beliefs were twisted, and they twisted the truth to meet their needs.

 

Yep, it was Cannaan. I don't know why I went with the curse being on Ham. Guess it just stuck in my mind, which didn't catch up with my fingers.

Not sure I go with his sons being of different color. I think of it as seperation at Babel. But that isn't scripture, either. In fact, the only references I've found about the cause of different color of skin is in the Song of Solomon, and I take that figuratively.

 

No, Blackbird, it's much older than that.

In 1757, Quaker John Woolman recorded this tidbit in his journal:

"Soon after, a Friend in company began to talk in support of the slave-trade, and said the Negroes were understood to be the offspring of Cain, their blackness being the mark which God set upon him after he murdered Abel his brother; that it was the design of Providence they should be slaves, as a condition proper to the race of so wicked a man as Cain was. Then another spake in support of what had been said."

The Canaan/Ham/Cain justification for black slavery was well-entrenched in arguments in favor of black slavery and is mentioned in several books published before and during the Civil War.

And it apparently goes back much further than that:

"Through a very thorough, often highly technical linguistic analysis, G [David M. Goldenberg] administers a telling blow to traditional derivations of the name Ham from a semantic field of heat, darkness, or blackness, and demonstrates that these all turn on a misunderstanding of ancient Hebrew linguistics that can be traced back to no earlier than the first century. Contrary to the assumptions of Islamic, Christian, and Jewish exegesis, G[oldenberg] argues persuasively that the biblical name Ham bears no relationship at all to the notion of blackness and as of now is of unknown etymology. Chapter 11, "Ham Sinned and Canaan Was Cursed", explores the question of why, despite the Bible's explicit statement, various biblical exegetes from the second century on insist that the curse affected not just Canaan but Ham and/or all of Ham's children. It comes as no surprise to learn that growing insistence on the chimerical curse coincides with increasing numbers of black Africans taken as slaves, first in the Islamic East, then in the Christian West, and most perniciously in America. According to G[oldenberg], from the seventh century on the theme is common in Near Eastern sources (Arabic Muslim and Christian Syriac), surfacing in Western (Christian) writers in the fifteenth century and appearing in Jewish sources from the Islamic world a century earlier than in Jewish sources from the Christian west (fourteenth/ fifteenth century). Another peculiar exegetical elaboration (American, but with earlier European roots) is the notion of a curse of Cain, as recorded by Phyllis Wheatley (1773) in her verse: "Remember Christians, Negroes black as Cain/May be refined and joined the angelic train" (quoted, 178). According to this narrative, Cain became the ancestor of black Africans who were destined for enslavement in fulfillment of his curse for the crime of fratricide. G[oldenberg]'s Chapter 13, "The Curse of Cain", argues that the roots of this tradition must go back to Syriac Christian interpretations. These misunderstood rabbinic exegesis to Genesis 4:5, "And Cain was greatly saddened [or distressed] and his face fell," and introduced the idea of Cain's permanent change of skin color (180). Finally, Chapter 14 ("The New World Order") offers a detailed philological analysis of a Jewish commentary to Genesis 9:22-23, the medieval text of Midrash Tanhuma, Noah 13 ... demonstrating that the passage encodes the then prevailing Arabic-Islamic division of the world's peoples by physiognomic markers including but not limited to color."

-- Molly Myerowitz Levine, review in Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2004.02.53