Beyond the Curse: The Danger of Human Interpretation

Building Theology around Our Words

Juneteenth which commemorates June 19th, the day enslaved African Americans in Galveston recieved WORD of their emancipation. This is a testament to the fact that documents can be written, and things can be true, but words matter in every essence of life.

Have you ever taken someone’s words as truth? Truth that guides your actions, truth that guides how you build relationships and truth that guides the way you live. Even if words sound acceptable, we must never take the words of humans with the same authority as we do the word of God. Our words have the power to have generational impact, our words have the power to change the trajectory of someone’s life. However our words will never carry the same power as the word of God.

Even considering the word of God, for centuries people have taken the word of God out of context. Used it to create a narrative of power to subject people to oppression, trauma, misogyny and have created a patriarchal order in society that has damaged communities as early as the 5th century.

In Genesis 9:24–25 “So Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done to him. Then he said: “Cursed be Canaan; A servant of servants He shall be to his brethren.”” We are introduced to the youngest son and his actions which raise a number of questions. Why didn’t Ham cover his father up? What made him go into his father’s tent in the first place? Where was Noah’s wife? Nonetheless we are also introduced to a curse, not a curse from God, not even a curse on behalf of God but a curse from Noah to his son that would impact that lineage for years to come. It’s no different that our families. How many times have we accepted the words of family members as truth that still impact us, impact our marriages, impact the way we raise our kids. The problem that persist is when we take words of man and implement them as truth rather than relying on the words of God that sustain our truth and can change our lives.

This curse of Ham as early as documented in the 5th century has been used to oppress, enslave and viciously harm people of African descent. More recently Frederick Douglass was cited to have stated “[The] church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. It has made itself the bulwark of American slavery, and the shield of American slave-hunters… They have taught that man may, properly, be a slave; that the relation of master and slave is ordained of God…”

The moral obscenity of slavery was the root cause of the American Civil War (1861–1865). Both sides enrolled God’s authority in their cause. In the south this involved a literal reading of the Curse of Ham. Sulphuric southern preachers thundered that Noah’s condemnation of Canaan had condemned all Africans to slavery. An “almost universal opinion in the Christian world” held that “the sufferings and the slavery of the Negro race were the consequence of the curse of Noah”, asserted Alexander Crummell (1819–1898), an African-American minister and Cambridge-educated academic, in 1862.

This curse has caused oral tradition to morph into stereotypes that plague Black people until this day. According to James Sweet and his essay entitled the Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought,

Despite the absence of any characterization of Canaan's children according to color, race, or ethnicity in the biblical version, in Genesis Rabbah the ethnic identification of the Sons of Ham had begun to shift toward the peoples of African descent. Noah says to Ham: "You prevented me from doing that which is done in the dark [i.e., coitus]; accordingly, your seed will be ugly and black." The eighth-century Tanhuma version gives the story as follows: as for Ham, because he saw with his eyes the nakedness of his father, his eyes became red: and because he spoke with his mouth, his lips became crooked and because he turned his face the hair of his head and his beard became singed and because he did not cover his [father's] nakedness, he went naked and his prepuce became stretched, [all this] because all of God's retributions are commensurate to a transgression. Although the passage makes no reference to slavery or blackness, it presents a number of the negative stereotypes that were later applied to African slaves-deformed lips, crinkled hair, and stereotypes surrounding sexual organs. Even though rabbinic interpretations never explicitly associated Africans with the sons of Ham, they certainly suggested future racial imagery.

These historical references who us that how we interpret the bible impacts how we treat people.

My Words have Generational Consequences

What happens when we build theology around trauma? When we meet shame with a curse, the implications can have a generation impact. When we use the words of man in a way that promote a sense of devotion, we create heresy. Here we are thousands of years later still dealing with the impact of poor interpretation of scripture.

He positions Ham lower than his brothers through his words. We have to be mindful of how our words impact our family, and can have detrimental impact for generations. Ham, Shem and Japeth have a different outlook than us, but that’s the challenge of our words, sometimes we are not in control to how they will be interpreted. It’s unfortunate that we live in a country that has built a theology of oppression around words that God didn’t emit but man.

Even when curses push us to act in a manner of ways we have to allow history to speak for itself. See this shows the different between the promises of God and the words of man. Yes, there were some of Canaan’s descendants that lived in captivity, at the same token there were great nations and mighty empires within this family tree as well. Similarly to the descendants of Shem, Israelites would thrive in some regard, but we also know they participated in their fair share of slavery as well.

Bad Theology Doesn’t Just Create Bad Doctrine it Creates Suffering

Based on this curse, the trans-atlantic slave trade, the sub-saharan slave trade, lynchings, false convictions, mass murders and the destruction of cities happened in our world. Humans can make differences.

Genesis 9:25 “Then he said: “Cursed be Canaan; A servant of servants He shall be to his brethren.””

Genesis 9:26 “And he said: “Blessed be the Lord, The God of Shem, And may Canaan be his servant.”

Genesis 9:27 “May God enlarge Japheth, And may he dwell in the tents of Shem; And may Canaan be his servant.””

Noah can make a difference but God makes no differences. The world can make stereotypes but God created us all in His image. The news can paint people a certain way, the leader of the free world can stand on a stage and say disparaging things about people because of the color of their skin, but thank God that I’m not justified by the words of others, I’m justified by the words of God.

Proverbs 22:2 “The rich and the poor have this in common, The Lord is the maker of them all.”

Galatians 3:28 “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Romans 2:10-11 But there will be glory and honor and peace from God for all who do good, for the Jew first and also for the Gentile. For God does not show favoritism.

No matter what anyone has said over your life you matter to God. Man can say anything to me, but I am not validated by the words of man, I’m validated by the words of God. This same doctrine of slavery that was built off these scriptures belonged to the same oppressors that removed scriptures of liberation from the bible. The devil’s goal is to pollute scripture from a place of heresy in effort to evoke confusion!

Humankind might create a hierarchy, but Jesus died for all mankind. The sacrifice of Jesus on the cross doesn’t matter what color, gender, height, or geographical location that you are from! He died to save the world from Sin. At one point in time God said that Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time and walked faithfully with God. As beautiful as that was, there’s a Jesus that walked this earth and healed people despite their physical make-up and endured the cross so that all mankind could rejoice at the chance of being a part of God’s family in eternity.