Curse of Ham
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Curse of Ham is a misnomer for the curse upon Canaan that was imposed by the biblical patriarch Noah.
Ham's transgression
The majority of commentators, both ancient and modern, have felt that Ham's seeing his father naked was not a sufficiently serious crime to explain the punishment that follows. Nevertheless, Genesis 9:23, in which Shem and Japheth cover Noah with a cloak while averting their eyes, suggests that the words are to be taken literally, and it has recently been pointed out that in 1st millennium Babylonia, looking at another person's genitals was indeed regarded as a serious matter.
Other ancient commentators suggested that Ham was guilty of more than what the Bible says. The Targum Onqelos (an Aramaic translation of the Bible dating from the first few centuries AD) and several other sources had Ham gossiping about his father's drunken disgrace "in the street" (a reading which has a basis in the original Hebrew), so that being held up to public mockery was what had angered Noah; as the Cave of Treasures (4th century) puts it, "Ham laughed at his father's shame and did not cover it, but laughed aloud and mocked."
Ancient commentaries have also debated that "seeing" someone's nakedness meant to have sex with that person (e.g. Leviticus 20:17). The same idea was raised by 3rd-century rabbis, in the Babylonian Talmud (c. 500 AD), who argue that Ham either castrated his father, or sodomised him. The same explanations are found in three Greek translations of the Bible, which replace the word "see" in verse 22 with another word denoting homosexual relations. The castration theory has its modern counterpart in suggested parallels found in the castration of Uranus by Cronus and a Hittite myth of the supreme god Anu whose genitals were "bitten off by his rebel son and cup-bearer Kumarbi, who afterwards rejoiced and laughed ... until Anu cursed him".
Modern scholars have suggested that to "uncover the nakedness" of a man means to have sex with that man's wife (e.g. Leviticus 20:11). If Ham had sex with his mother, and Canaan was the product of this forbidden union, it could explain why the curse falls on his son; the weakness, however, is that Genesis 9:21 has Ham "seeing" his father's nakedness, not "uncovering" it.
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