M ost people recognize the tale of Noah, the Flood, and the Ark. In just four phases of Genesis, the initial publication of the Scriptures, we are told the story of God’s decision to damage the Earth via a catastrophic flood because of human wickedness. Besides Noah, his household, and the pets he took with him in the Ark, all life perished. After that, Noah and his 3 boys– Shem, Pork, and Japheth– became the progenitors of a new humankind.
Less well known is the tale of what occurred to Noah and his family members after the Flooding. Genesis informs us the initial point Noah did after leaving the Ark was ‘to plant a winery’. He after that made white wine and passed out in a stupor. The intoxicated Noah was seen nude by his boy, Pork, prior to his nudity was covered by his other kids, Shem and Japheth. After stiring up from his drunken state, Noah honored Shem and Japheth, but cursed Canaan, the child of Pork. Canaan was made the slave of Shem and Japheth: ‘Cursed be Canaan, least expensive of slaves shall he be to [Ham’s] siblings.’
Normally, by the center of the 16 th century, the offspring of Shem (later to be called Semites) were taken into consideration to have actually populated the Middle East and Asia, those of Ham, Africa, and those of Japheth, Europe. This was a tradition that, basically, reached back to the first-century Jewish historian Josephus. According to Josephus, Ham occupied parts of Africa and Asia, Japheth components of Europe and Asia, and Shem Asia (although no further eastern than Afghanistan). But it was Alcuin of York (c. 735 – 804, scholar at the court of Charlemagne, that produced the clear-cut three sons-three continents watch– that the 3 kids occupied the three continents of Europe, Africa, and Asia. It was this alignment of sons and continents that obtained pictorial depiction in the first published version of Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae in 1472 These Scriptural categories of the continents– Hamitic, Shemitic, and Japhetic– were to proceed from the 16 th well right into the 19 th century.
Over this duration, these categories moved register– from location to ethnology, from locations to races. No longer connected to matters of peoples or countries yet to races, the same categories reinforced the appearance of the idea of racial prevalence, and with it the birth of contemporary racism. For example, in the 3rd edition of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s On the Natural History of Mankind (1795 we find a turn away from the doctrinal to the secular in the origins of the modern-day idea of race. That being stated, his 3 primary racial types– Caucasian, Mongolian, and Ethiopian– were only secular variations of Japhetic, Shemitic, and Hamitic specifically.
By the third and 4th centuries A D, menstruation laid upon Canaan had been changed right into menstruation of Ham. By the end of the 16 th century, Canaan had gone away from the narrative altogether. The root causes of what currently became the curse of Ham were believed to be various: that he had buffooned his dad Noah, that he had sterilized him, amazingly made him impotent, or slept with his very own mommy. From the late 4th century, Christians believed that Noah had established enslavement as the outcome of the transgression of Pork and his descendants were to be in subjection to the offspring of Shem and Japheth.
The earliest analysis of the curse of Ham was available in the works of the unidentified Biblical analyst known as Ambrosiaster or pseudo Ambrose (late 4th century). He proclaimed that transgression developed servants ‘as Ham, the kid of Noah, was made a slave as a result of his wrong and absence of vigilance’. For Ambrosiaster, Ham buffooned the daddy to whom he owed respect. ‘Servants are made by wrong’, he proclaimed, ‘like Ham, the kid of Noah, who was the very first to receive the name of servant by quality.’
With the spread of medieval serfdom a new analysis of menstruation of Pork occurred. It was initiated by Honorius of Autun in the 11 th century in his encyclopaedic Imago Mundi In his discussion of the age after the Flood, Honorius proclaimed that it was during the time of Noah that the ‘types of male’ was separated into three teams of individuals: ‘Freemen from Shem, soldiers from Japheth, servants from Ham.’ In effect, according to Honorius, the department of individuals at the time of Noah mirrored the middle ages framework of society right into the freeman, the worthy, and the serf.
During the 15 th to the 17 th centuries yet another Western analysis of menstruation of Pork emerged as the outcome of the climbing trade in sub-Saharan African servants. In the access on ‘Cham’ (Ham) in the 1728 supplement to Augustin Calmet’s Dictionnaire historique et review , Calmet educates his viewers that:
Noah directed his curse to Pork and Canaan. The impact of this curse was not only that their posterity was confined to their bros, and thus birthed into enslavement, but likewise that suddenly the colour of their skin became black.
As Calmet recognized it, the curse of Ham had actually transformed his African descendants black. Thus, in the late 16 th and very early 17 th centuries the curse of Pork was repurposed to describe– and warrant– the enslavement of black Africans. Regardless of occasional dissenting voices, menstruation of Pork continued to serve this hazardous purpose throughout the 18 th and well into the 19 th century. As the American Methodist Samuel Baldwin put it in Dominance (1858, because the Flooding of Noah, there has been ‘a global and long-term trinity of races … in the occupation of the Shemitic wild of America by Japheth; and in the service of Ham to Japheth in the Southern States, in the islands, and in south America’.
By the later decades of the 19 th century, with the increase of historic scepticism about the historicity of guide of Genesis, increasing uncertainties concerning the tale of Noah, the universal Flood, and the repopulation of the world by his 3 kids, referrals to menstruation of Pork as a validation for enslavement also disappeared. It was not, certainly, the end of white supremacy or bigotry. Yet supporters of white superiority needed to look somewhere else than the story of menstruation of Ham to sustain their arguments.
Philip C. Almond is Emeritus Teacher in Religious Idea at the College of Queensland and author of Noah and the Flooding in Western Thought (Cambridge University Press,2025