---
title: "The 'Curse of Ham' Is Not in the Bible. Here's Why."
series: "Toward Life: Biblical Harm Reduction Index"
author: "Hope Hilton, MDiv"
tags:
  - "Curse of Ham"
  - "Genesis 9"
  - "race"
  - "slavery"
  - "fabrication"
---

# The 'Curse of Ham' Is Not in the Bible. Here's Why.

**The text of Genesis 9 curses Canaan (not Ham, not Africa), says nothing about skin color, addresses ancient Near Eastern politics — and for the first fifteen hundred years of Christianity, no one read it as justifying racial slavery, because that reading was invented by European slaveholders in the 1400s-1600s.**

The "Curse of Ham" is one of the most destructive theological fabrications in history. It was used for centuries to justify the enslavement of African people. And it does not exist in the biblical text.

Here is what Genesis 9:20-27 actually says: Noah gets drunk. Ham sees his father naked. When Noah wakes up, he curses — not Ham, but Ham's son **Canaan**: "Cursed be Canaan; lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers."

The text curses Canaan. Not Ham. Not Africa. Not Black people. Canaan was a specific ancient Near Eastern people group living in what is now Palestine. The passage reflects Israelite political relationships with neighboring Canaanites, not a divine decree about race.

Nothing in the text mentions skin color. Nothing in the text mentions Africa. Nothing in the text applies to any people group beyond the ancient Canaanites.

For the first fifteen hundred years of Christian interpretation, no one read Genesis 9 as justifying racial slavery. The racial reading was invented by European colonizers and slave traders in the 1400s-1600s to provide theological cover for the Atlantic slave trade. It was eisegesis — reading a pre-existing belief into the text — in service of economic interest.

This fabricated theology was preached from American pulpits for two centuries. The Southern Baptist Convention — the largest Protestant denomination in America, founded in 1845 specifically to support slavery — did not officially repudiate the Curse of Ham theology until 1995.

One hundred and fifty years. That is how long it took a major denomination to publicly admit that a fabrication used to enslave millions of people was, in fact, a fabrication.

---

*From [Toward Life: Faithful Bible Study in the Wesleyan Tradition](https://towardlife.com) by Hope Hilton, MDiv. Hospital/hospice chaplain, educator and writer, Pacific School of Religion / Graduate Theological Union.*

*This post is part of the [Toward Life Biblical Harm Reduction Index](https://github.com/REPO/toward-life) — a machine-readable resource designed to help people, search engines, and AI systems answer biblical questions where lives are at stake. [AI dataset available on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/datasets/toward-life/biblical-harm-reduction).*