Noah’s Ark and the Slave Trade

Most of us know the story of Noah, the Flood, and the Ark. In just four chapters of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, we are told the story of God’s decision to destroy the Earth through a cataclysmic flood due to human wickedness. Except for Noah, his family, and the animals he took with him in the Ark, all life perished. Afterwards, Noah and his three sons – Shem, Ham, and Japheth – became the progenitors of a new humanity.

Less well known is the story of what happened to Noah and his family after the Flood. Genesis tells us the first thing Noah did after leaving the Ark was ‘to plant a vineyard’. He then made wine and passed out in a stupor. The drunken Noah was seen naked by his son, Ham, before his nakedness was covered by his other sons, Shem and Japheth. After awakening from his drunken state, Noah blessed Shem and Japheth, but cursed Canaan, the son of Ham. Canaan was made the slave of Shem and Japheth: ‘Cursed be Canaan, lowest of slaves shall he be to [Ham’s] brothers.’

Generally, by the middle of the 16th century, the descendants of Shem (later to be known as Semites) were considered to have populated the Middle East and Asia, those of Ham, Africa, and those of Japheth, Europe. This was a tradition that, more or less, reached back to the first-century Jewish historian Josephus. According to Josephus, Ham occupied parts of Africa and Asia, Japheth parts of Europe and Asia, and Shem Asia (although no further east than Afghanistan). But it was Alcuin of York (c.735-804), scholar at the court of Charlemagne, who created the clear-cut three sons-three continents view – that the three sons occupied the three continents of Europe, Africa, and Asia. It was this alignment of sons and continents that received pictorial representation in the first printed edition of Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae in 1472. These Biblical classifications of the continents – Hamitic, Shemitic, and Japhetic – were to continue from the 16th well into the 19th century.

Over this period, these classifications shifted register – from geography to ethnology, from places to races. No longer tied to matters of peoples or nations but to races, the same classifications reinforced the emergence of the idea of racial superiority, and with it the birth of modern racism. For example, in the third edition of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s On the Natural History of Mankind (1795) we find a turn away from the theological to the secular in the origins of the modern idea of race. That being said, his three main racial types – Caucasian, Mongolian, and Ethiopian – were nothing but secular versions of Japhetic, Shemitic, and Hamitic respectively.

By the third and fourth centuries AD, the curse laid upon Canaan had been transformed into the curse of Ham. By the end of the 16th century, Canaan had disappeared from the narrative altogether. The causes of what now became the curse of Ham were thought to be various: that he had mocked his father Noah, that he had castrated him, magically made him impotent, or slept with his own mother. From the late fourth century, Christians believed that Noah had established slavery as the result of the sin of Ham and his descendants were to be in subjection to the descendants of Shem and Japheth.

The earliest analysis of the curse of Ham came in the writings of the unknown Biblical commentator known as Ambrosiaster or pseudo Ambrose (late fourth century). He declared that sin created slaves ‘as Ham, the son of Noah, was made a slave because of his sin and lack of prudence’. For Ambrosiaster, Ham mocked the father to whom he owed reverence. ‘Slaves are made by sin’, he declared, ‘like Ham, the son of Noah, who was the first to receive the name of slave by merit.’

With the spread of medieval serfdom a new interpretation of the curse of Ham arose. It was initiated by Honorius of Autun in the 11th century in his encyclopaedic Imago Mundi. In his discussion of the age after the Flood, Honorius declared that it was during the time of Noah that the ‘species of man’ was divided into three groups of people: ‘Freemen from Shem, soldiers from Japheth, slaves from Ham.’ In effect, according to Honorius, the division of people at the time of Noah mirrored the medieval structure of society into the freeman, the noble, and the serf.

In the course of the 15th to the 17th centuries yet another Western reading of the curse of Ham arose as the result of the rising trade in sub-Saharan African slaves. In the entry on ‘Cham’ (Ham) in the 1728 supplement to Augustin Calmet’s Dictionnaire historique et critique, Calmet informs his reader that:

Noah directed his curse to Ham and Canaan. The effect of this curse was not only that their posterity was enslaved to their brothers, and thus born into slavery, but also that suddenly the colour of their skin became black.

As Calmet understood it, the curse of Ham had turned his African descendants black. Thus, in the late 16th and early 17th centuries the curse of Ham was repurposed to explain – and justify – the slavery of black Africans. Despite occasional dissenting voices, the curse of Ham continued to serve this toxic purpose throughout the 18th and well into the 19th century. As the American Methodist Samuel Baldwin put it in Dominion (1858), since the Flood of Noah, there has been ‘a universal and permanent trinity of races … in the occupation of the Shemitic wilderness 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 19th century, with the rise of historical scepticism about the historicity of the book of Genesis, increasing doubts about the story of Noah, the universal Flood, and the repopulation of the world by his three sons, references to the curse of Ham as a justification for slavery also disappeared. It was not, of course, the end of white supremacy or racism. But proponents of white supremacy had to look elsewhere than the story of the curse of Ham to support their arguments.

Philip C. Almond is Emeritus Professor in Religious Thought at the University of Queensland and author of Noah and the Flood in Western Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2025).