noah's curse the biblical justification of american slavery

[...]... is the content of these chapters that conclude the primeval history of Genesis? Chapter 9 completes the biblical flood narrative by relating the Lord’s instructions to the human survivors, the establishment of a covenant with their leader, and the tale of Noah’s drunkenness (vv 20–27) Genesis 10 offers a detailed genealogy of Noah’s offspring, framed by the statements “These are the descendants of Noah’s... The chapters that follow indicate how the perceived unity of Genesis 9–11 has affected both the history of biblical interpretation and the logic of American racial discourse Noah’s Curse The evolution of the so-called curse of Ham as a biblical justification for racial slavery is, of course, an essential part of our story The tale itself—related in Genesis 9:20–27—most likely reflects conditions in the. .. a staple of biblical thinking on the racist right In 1986, Thom Robb, national director of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, applied the causal link between race mixing and apocalypse to America’s near future: The Bible talks about the return of Christ Jesus said, “As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it become in the days of the Son of Man.” And in the 18       days of Noah there was... in some of the earliest readings of Genesis 9 8      among Jews, Christians, and Muslims Yet the application of the curse to racial slavery was the product of centuries of development in ethnic and racial stereotyping, biblical interpretation, and the history of servitude Nevertheless, by the early colonial period a racialized version of Noah’s curse had arrived in America In fact, the writings... clear when to date the fateful conjunction of slavery and race in Western readings of Noah’s prophecy The constitutive elements in the application of Genesis 9 to New World servitude the conviction that the story narrated the origins of slavery, association of Ham’s offspring with the continent of Africa and with dark skin, and the notion that Noah’s words represented a prophetic outline of subsequent human... to them after the flood” (v 1), and “These are the families of Noah’s sons, according to their genealogies, in their nations; and from these the nations spread abroad on the earth after the flood” (v 32) Genesis 11 relates the cautionary tale of the tower before extending the postdiluvian genealogy to Abram These folktales and genealogical lists may be viewed as literary stage props for the entrance of. .. make the dubious identification of Africans with Ham (or Canaan) But as white servitude declined and racial slavery came under attack, the curse s role in the American defense of slavery was increasingly formalized By the 1830s—when the American antislavery movement became organized, vocal, and aggressive the scriptural defense of slavery had evolved into the “most elaborate and systematic statement” of. .. proslavery theory,25 Noah’s curse had become a stock weapon in the arsenal of slavery s apologists, and references to Genesis 9 appeared prominently in their publications Honor, Order, and the American Biblical Imagination This study devotes particular attention to the American legacy of Noah’s curse, beginning with a careful examination of its role in the antebellum proslavery argument By locating American. .. more distinctly than on the institution of slavery. ” Because part II considers the place of honor in proslavery readings of Genesis 9, it will be useful to review the evolving scholarly understanding of honor’s place in the Southern mind Among the first to hazard an explanation of the distinctive Southern character was Mark Twain In Life on the Mississippi, Twain employed the sort of insightful hyperbole... consciously combined in readings of Genesis 9 by Muslim exegetes during the ninth and tenth centuries, though these authors claim to draw on rabbinic literature.21 In western Europe prior to the modern period, the curse was invoked to explain the origins of slavery, the provenance of black skin, and the exile of Hamites to the less wholesome regions of the earth But these aspects of malediction were not integrated . Righteousness: The Public Christianity of the Southern New England Clergy, 1783–1833 Jonathan D. Sassi Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery Stephen R. Haynes NOAH’S CURSE The Biblical. role as the patriarch of the first postdiluvian family. 4 The second work is Thomas V. Peterson’s Ham and Japheth in America, which traces the contours of the curse in the collective mind of the Old. journals. A version of chapter 4 appeared in the January 2000 issue of The Journal of Southern Religion, and a version of chap- ter 7 appeared in the Summer 2000 issue of The Journal of Presbyterian