The Dead Sea Scrolls are Jewish manuscripts found in caves near the Dead Sea in the middle of the twentieth century. Some of them are copies of the Hebrew Bible about a thousand years older than the copies scholars relied on before. For Black Christians they matter in two ways. They show that the text of Genesis was handed down with care. They also preserve early Jewish readings of Genesis 9 that place Noah’s curse on Canaan and say nothing about Black people.
This guide builds that conclusion one piece at a time, so you can explain it yourself and test it against the sources. You can work through it alone in four or five short sittings, or with a group in one long session. You will need a King James Bible, paper, and a pen. Each section ends with a small task. Do the tasks before you move on, because each one prepares the next.
The guide draws on a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation between Lisa Fields and Dr. Jamal-Dominique Hopkins, the incoming dean of the Dickerson Green Theological Seminary at Allen University. Hopkins did his doctoral work at the University of Manchester, where he studied the Scrolls.
First, what was actually found
Hopkins describes the Scrolls as a body of Jewish literature preserved in caves in the Judean Hills outside Jerusalem. He dates the material from roughly two hundred years before Christ into the first century, the time when Jesus and his disciples lived. The community that kept the scrolls described itself as priestly, the sons of Zadok, and lived apart in the Judean desert.
The collection holds three kinds of writing, and keeping them apart is the first skill this guide teaches.
- Biblical manuscripts. Copies of books in the Hebrew Bible.
- Community writings. Texts that reflect the beliefs and practices of the group that preserved the scrolls.
- Pseudepigrapha. Writings from the Second Temple period presented as if written by much older figures, such as Enoch or Moses. The Book of Jubilees and the Enoch literature belong here.
A common mistake is to treat the third group as hidden Scripture. Hopkins rejects that idea. Of these writings he says, “they’re not authoritative, nor are they lost.” They are, in his words, “just not part of the canon.” Their value is historical. They show how Jewish writers of that era thought.
Task: Without looking back, write one sentence defining each of the three kinds of writing. Then write which kind you would need if you wanted to know what an ancient reader thought a passage meant, and which kind you would need if you wanted to know whether the biblical text had changed.
Second, what an older copy can prove
Hopkins explains that the Hebrew manuscripts behind our modern translations date to around 900 or 1000 of the common era. The Scrolls preserve fragments almost a thousand years earlier. Comparing them is a direct test of how carefully scribes copied. Hopkins reports the result: the Scrolls “actually help us to know that the manuscripts that were used to translate our modern Bibles today, they’re fairly accurate.”
He is specific about the differences. “Discrepancies might be maybe some word spellings or some things like that,” Hopkins says, such as whether a scribe used certain consonants to mark vowels. He adds that “that doesn’t necessarily change the content, if you will.” He also notes that the Scrolls contain Hebrew source material behind the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, which shows that translation had Jewish roots rather than being a Greek distortion.
Now the limit. An accurate copy proves that the words were passed down faithfully. It does not tell you what those words mean. For that, you need two more layers. Hopkins draws the line himself when he separates transcribing from translating, using Song of Solomon 1:5. The KJV reads: “I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.” Hopkins explains that the Hebrew conjunction can legitimately be rendered “and” or “but,” and most English versions choose “but.” The copy is the same either way. The choice, he says, “just depends on who the translator is.”
So keep three words apart for the rest of this guide:
- Copying: Were the words handed down accurately?
- Translating: Which faithful English words carry the original?
- Interpreting: What does the passage mean, and what do readers add to it?
Task: Read Song of Solomon 1:5 aloud twice, once with “but” and once with “and.” Write down which of the three layers changed and which stayed the same.
Third, read Genesis 9 for yourself
Before hearing any ancient interpreter, read the passage. Open to Genesis 9:18-27 and read it slowly. Then read Genesis 10:6.
Observation task: Answer each of these on paper from the text alone.
- Who are the sons of Noah, and what does verse 18 add about Ham?
- What does Ham do in verse 22?
- Who speaks the curse, and is he presented as speaking for God?
- Whose name appears in the curse itself?
- Does the passage say anything about skin, hair, or any part of Africa?
Here is what careful readers find. Genesis 9:18 introduces Ham with a detail that matters later: “and Ham is the father of Canaan.” Genesis 9:22 reads: “And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.” Genesis 9:24 says Noah “awoke from his wine,” and verse 25 gives his words: “And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.”
The curse names Canaan. Genesis 10:6 lists four sons of Ham: “Cush, and Mizraim, and Phut, and Canaan.” Only one of them is cursed. And the passage is narrative. It reports what Noah said after waking from drunkenness. Describing a character’s words is different from commanding readers to enforce them.
Notice too what the text leaves unclear. Hopkins summarizes the episode honestly: Ham saw his father’s nakedness, “whatever that means.” Interpreters have long debated what Ham’s act involved, and the passage does not settle it. A good reader can admit an open question without letting it become a door for content the text never supplies.
For groups: Have people answer the observation questions before anyone discusses what they were taught. If someone says the passage curses Ham, ask the group to find the verse together. Let the text correct the claim, not a person.
Fourth, meet the oldest readers of the passage
The Scrolls give us something rarer than a biblical manuscript: ancient Jewish interpreters commenting on Genesis 9. Hopkins points to two. One is a commentary on Genesis found among the Scrolls. The other is the Book of Jubilees, a pseudepigraphal retelling of Genesis that was also found there.
Both, according to Hopkins, are consistent with Genesis. In his summary of these texts, there is no curse on Ham, but “there’s a curse on Ham’s son.” Neither curses blackness.
Here the first section pays off. Jubilees is not Scripture, so why should its reading count? Because the question at this stage is not whether a source is authoritative. It is what early readers thought the passage meant. A Second Temple retelling is exactly the kind of source that would carry a racial curse if one had been part of early Jewish reading. According to Hopkins, it carries none.
Fifth, find where the racial reading enters
Hopkins locates the racial version in rabbinic writings he dates from the third to the eighth centuries of the common era. He describes texts in this literature that curse Ham and curse blackness, and some that describe Ham’s punishment as a change in his body: protruding lips, kinked hair, and elongated genitals. These are caricatures attached to a story that contains none of them.
Lisa Fields asked him to confirm the timeline: were these writings found with the Scrolls? Hopkins answered, “They were not discovered with the Dead Sea Scrolls.” They belong to a later layer. Hopkins frames them as attempts to fill gaps in the biblical story, and then asks the question every reader should ask: “where do these writings come from? What informs them?”
He also traces how this later layer was used. He points to historian Mark Noll’s The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, which discusses a rabbi in the antebellum United States who appealed to these interpretations to argue that blackness was cursed and slavery had biblical support.
Two of Hopkins’s distinctions keep this history accurate. First, he observes that “although racism didn’t exist during this time,” meaning the modern racial system of American slavery, readers should still ask what degree of ethnocentrism shaped those ancient texts. Second, his suspicion is aimed at these specific writings, not at Judaism. He calls Judaism and Christianity “two ancient African religious traditions, Judaism and Christianity.” The earliest Jewish readers in this guide, at Qumran and in Jubilees, are the ones who read Genesis 9 correctly.
For groups: Some participants may have been taught this curse by people they trusted. Read the description of the caricatures once, plainly, and move on. The point is to see where they came from, not to dwell on them. Give room for anyone who wants to say what it means to learn this, and do not require anyone to speak.
A misunderstanding to avoid
It is tempting to say the Scrolls “disproved” the curse of Ham. That overstates the case. Much of the collection is fragmentary, and no scroll addresses the racial idea directly. The stronger claim is cumulative: Genesis names Canaan, the oldest surviving commentary and retelling agree with Genesis, and the racial details appear only in later writings. That pattern is hard to explain if the racial reading came from the text.
Also remember whose description you are relying on. The dates, contents, and wording of the rabbinic texts in this guide come from Hopkins’s account in conversation, without line-by-line citations. They are his scholarly claims. A careful student treats them as claims worth checking in the sources, not as facts to repeat beyond what he said.
Practice: build a source ladder
This exercise turns the guide into something you can explain to someone else.
- Draw a ladder with four rungs on a sheet of paper. Label them from bottom to top: Genesis 9, Qumran commentary and Jubilees, rabbinic writings, antebellum use.
- Beside each rung, write three things: its rough date as Hopkins gives it, who it says is cursed, and whether it mentions physical traits.
- Mark each rung as Scripture or not Scripture.
- Circle the first rung where racial content appears.
- Next to the ladder, write which of the three layers (copying, translating, interpreting) the curse of Ham belongs to.
Then choose one other teaching you were given about a Bible passage, any topic. Try to place it on the same three layers. Is it a claim about the words, the translation, or the interpretation? What source would you need to check it?
For groups: Split into pairs and assign each pair one rung. Each pair reports its findings in order, bottom to top, so the group watches the reading change over time.
Questions for discussion
- Before this study, what did you assume the Dead Sea Scrolls were? Which of the three kinds of writing surprised you most?
- Why does an accurate copy of Genesis not settle what Genesis 9 means? Explain the difference in your own words.
- Hopkins admits the meaning of Ham’s act is unclear. How does honesty about one open question in a passage affect how you weigh claims made about the rest of it?
- Jubilees is not Scripture, yet it is useful evidence here. When is a non-biblical source helpful, and when would leaning on it become a mistake?
- Why do you think a later reading added details that Genesis lacks? What does Hopkins’s question about what informs those writings ask of us today?
- How would you explain the difference between rejecting particular rabbinic interpretations and rejecting Judaism? Why does that difference matter in this conversation?
- If someone told you the Bible curses Black people, what would you say first, and which source on your ladder would you point to?
Something to carry
Lisa Fields describes the aim of this kind of work as an effort to “push people further back to look at the whole picture.” In this case, going back did not weaken the Bible’s standing. The older the evidence, the closer it stayed to what Genesis says, and Genesis never cursed Black people.
Keep the three layers with you. The next time someone tells you a teaching comes from the Bible, ask which layer they mean: the words that were copied, the way they were translated, or a reading someone added later. Then go find the oldest rung you can.