Quonekuia Day

Who she is

Quonekuia Day teaches Old Testament and Biblical Hebrew at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, on the Boston campus and in its Hispanic Ministries Program. She holds an MDiv and a ThM from Gordon-Conwell, an MSW from Boston University, and has pursued doctoral work at the London School of Theology. She has sat on a Jude 3 Project panel before.

Seventeen minutes of her interview sit in this archive, and none of it is used anywhere else in the learning path. She is one of two people here who works primarily in the Old Testament, and the only one who reads it with an eye on who is being overlooked in the text.

What you are getting in this dossier

The cleanest available answer to the curse of Ham, from someone who teaches the Hebrew. A second argument against it that most people have never heard. What she says the doctrine was actually for. A challenge to how Black Christians read themselves into Scripture that will not be comfortable. And a series of passages where she says God turns up for people the text was supposedly not written for.

Ham is not cursed

She does not build to it. She opens with it.

"Well, that's an incorrect way of even thinking of it, right? Because in the text, Ham is not cursed. In the text, actually, Canaan is cursed. It's not Ham at all. And so when we say the curse of Ham, it's really a way of people saying all Black people have been cursed. It's a way of them sort of giving justification for dehumanizing a whole group of people who were created in God's image."