The idea that the Bible curses Black people does not come from the Bible. Genesis 9 records Noah cursing Canaan, one of Ham’s sons, and says nothing about skin, hair or Africa. Dr. Jamal-Dominique Hopkins, who did his doctoral work on the Dead Sea Scrolls at the University of Manchester, traces the racial version to rabbinic writings he dates to the third through eighth centuries of the common era. The oldest Jewish readings of Genesis 9 preserved among the Scrolls contain no such curse.
What exactly is the claim?
The curse-of-Ham argument has three steps. First, God cursed Ham, the son of Noah. Second, Ham is the ancestor of Black African peoples. Third, the curse involved servitude, so the enslavement of Black people carries divine approval. Each step has to hold for the conclusion to stand.
Lisa Fields names why this matters now. Among the students and young adults Jude 3 Project engages, she hears the charge that Christianity was used to oppress Black people, with the curse of Ham as a leading example. The claim is a live reason some people walk away from the faith.
So what would count as evidence? If the claim were true to the Bible, we would expect Genesis to name Ham as the one cursed and to connect him to physical traits or to Africa. We would also expect the earliest Jewish readers of Genesis, the people closest to the text in time, to read it that way. If the claim is a later invention, we would expect the earliest witnesses to be silent on race and the racial details to show up only in later writings. That sets the order of investigation: the text first, then its oldest interpreters, then the later sources.
What does Genesis 9 actually say?
The story is short. Noah plants a vineyard, drinks, and lies uncovered in his tent. Genesis 9:22 reads: “And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.” Shem and Japheth cover their father without looking. When Noah wakes and learns what happened, he speaks.
Genesis 9:25 records his words: “And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.”
Three observations follow from the text itself.
The first is about the name. The curse falls on Canaan. Ham is the one who saw, but Ham is not the one named. Hopkins summarizes the passage the same way: Ham went in and saw his father’s nakedness, and Noah cursed Ham’s son. He adds, honestly, that what Ham’s act involved is not fully clear. Interpreters have debated it for a long time, and the passage does not settle it.
The second is about the speaker. The words come from Noah, a man waking from drunkenness. Genesis narrates his curse. It does not present God speaking it, and it does not issue a command for later generations to enforce. Reading narrative as description rather than automatic command removes the claim’s most dangerous step: the jump from what a character says in a story to what God endorses for all time.
The third is about geography. Genesis 10:6 lists the sons of Ham: “Cush, and Mizraim, and Phut, and Canaan.” Canaan is one of four. Mizraim is the Hebrew name the Bible uses for Egypt, and Cush is a land the Bible places to the south. Neither is cursed. Genesis 10:15-19 then traces Canaan’s descendants and sets their border along the coast from Sidon toward Gaza, the land later called Canaan. The one figure the text does curse is connected to that eastern Mediterranean territory, not to sub-Saharan Africa.
For the curse-of-Ham reading to work, it has to move the curse from Canaan to Ham, then extend it to every son of Ham, then attach physical features the text never mentions. None of those moves is in Genesis. Hopkins puts the conclusion plainly: the so-called curse on blackness, he says, “it’s not supported by Genesis nine in the biblical text in the Hebrew Bible”.
Why the Dead Sea Scrolls are the right place to look
A defender of the old reading might answer that the text has changed over the centuries, or that the earliest readers knew something we have lost. The Dead Sea Scrolls let us test both suggestions.
Hopkins describes the Scrolls as a body of Jewish literature recovered from caves in the Judean hills between 1947 and 1956, dating from roughly two centuries before Christ into the first century. The collection holds three kinds of writing: copies of the books of the Hebrew Bible, writings of the priestly community that preserved them, and pseudepigraphal works, which are Second Temple writings attributed to much earlier figures such as Enoch or Moses.
On whether the text has drifted, Hopkins explains that the manuscripts behind our modern translations of the Hebrew Bible date to around 900 or 1000 of the common era, and that the Scrolls preserve fragments almost a thousand years older. The comparison, he says, shows that “the manuscripts that were used to translate our modern Bibles today, they’re fairly accurate.” The differences he describes are mostly spelling conventions, such as whether a scribe used certain consonants to mark vowels. So the problem with the curse-of-Ham reading is not a corrupted Genesis. The Genesis we read names Canaan, and there is no sign it ever said otherwise.
On what the earliest readers thought, the Scrolls give us something rarer than a biblical manuscript: Jewish interpreters commenting on Genesis 9 centuries before the rabbinic writings Hopkins examines.
What did the earliest readers of Genesis 9 say?
Hopkins points to two witnesses found among the Scrolls. The first is a commentary on Genesis from the Qumran collection that addresses the Genesis 9 episode. The second is the Book of Jubilees, a pseudepigraphal retelling of Genesis and early Exodus. According to Hopkins, both are consistent with the biblical account: the curse lands on Ham’s son, not on Ham, and neither says anything about blackness.
Jubilees is not Scripture, and Hopkins does not treat it as authoritative. He describes pseudepigraphal works as a preservation of history and of how people thought at the time, not as lost books of the Bible. That is why it is useful here. Its value is not that it is correct. Its value is that it shows how a Jewish writer of the Second Temple period understood Genesis 9. If an early tradition linking Ham to dark skin had been widely held, a retelling of Genesis from that era would be a natural place for it to appear. It does not.
How much weight two witnesses carry depends on whether they are independent. One is a commentary and the other a retelling, but the conversation does not establish that they arose separately. They could share an interpretive tradition, or one could draw on the other. What can be said is narrower: both stay close to the Hebrew text, and neither adds the racial material.
Where does the racial version first appear?
Hopkins locates it later. He describes rabbinic writings from the third to the eighth centuries of the common era, including material connected with the Talmuds, that curse Ham and curse blackness. In some of these texts, as he reads them, Ham’s punishment is described in terms of physical features: protruding lips, tightly curled hair and elongated genitals. These are caricatures of Black bodies attached to a biblical story that contains none of them.
Lisa Fields asked Hopkins to confirm the chronology: were these writings found with the Dead Sea Scrolls? He answered: “They were not discovered with the Dead Sea Scrolls”. The racial material belongs to a later layer of interpretation.
Hopkins frames these rabbinic sources as attempts to fill in the gaps of the biblical narrative, a common practice in ancient interpretation. Then he asks the obvious question: “where do these writings come from? What informs them?” The conversation does not answer it. Hopkins shows what the racial details are not drawn from: Genesis, the Qumran commentary or Jubilees. He does not trace what they are drawn from. Settling that would take the specific rabbinic passages with their dates, any earlier texts in which the same details appear, and a wider survey of ancient Jewish and Christian readings of Genesis 9 than this interview covers. Until then, the origin of the racial details remains an open historical question.
Hopkins does follow the line forward. He describes a rabbi in the antebellum United States, discussed in historian Mark Noll’s study of the Civil War as a theological crisis, who used these kinds of interpretations to argue that blackness was cursed and that the enslavement of Black people had biblical support. The chain is now visible: a narrative about Canaan, a later expansion that reassigns the curse and racializes it, and a modern appeal to that expansion to defend slavery as if it were the Bible’s own teaching.
What the evidence does not show
The Scrolls do not refute the racial curse by direct statement. The case rests partly on silence: the earliest surviving readings of Genesis 9 do not contain it. An argument from silence is weaker than a positive refutation, and the Scrolls are a large but partial and often fragmentary collection. The stronger part of the case is positive. Genesis itself names Canaan, and the early readings Hopkins cites follow the text. The silence adds weight to that; it does not carry the argument alone.
The specific rabbinic texts, their dates and their wording also come from Hopkins’s account. He names the kinds of literature but does not give chapter-and-verse citations, so his claims about those sources remain his scholarly assertions until a reader checks them in the texts. The same applies to the antebellum rabbi. The conversation names one example of how the reading was used in American slavery. It does not survey the many others who appealed to the curse of Ham, and this article will not invent that survey.
Hopkins is careful about what to call the prejudice in those later writings. He notes that racism as it existed in the era of American slavery did not exist in the third through eighth centuries, and asks instead what degree of ethnocentrism was at work. That avoids reading modern racial categories back into ancient texts while still naming the contempt in them.
Nor is this a charge against Judaism. Hopkins describes his response as “a heavy hermeneutic of suspicion with regard to these Jewish rabbinic writings”, meaning these particular texts on this particular passage. The same scholar calls Judaism and Christianity “two ancient African religious traditions, Judaism and Christianity.” The earliest Jewish interpreters in this investigation, at Qumran and in Jubilees, read Genesis 9 in line with the Hebrew text. The problem is a specific later expansion, not a people or a faith.
Hopkins also points to Song of Solomon 1:5, which the KJV renders: “I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.” The Hebrew conjunction there can be translated as either “and” or “but.” Hopkins notes that most English versions choose the second, and only a few render the line with the first. Both are legitimate translations, yet the choice still shapes what a reader hears. The curse of Ham is a far more serious case, because it does not choose between valid renderings. It adds content the text does not contain.
What follows
For anyone told that the Bible condemned their ancestors, the finding is concrete. The accusation depends on moving a curse from Canaan to Ham and attaching features Genesis never mentions. The text does not make those moves, and the oldest readings Hopkins cites from the Dead Sea Scrolls do not make them either. Where the racial details first came from is still unsettled. That they did not come from Genesis is not.
