Hagar had no say in her own life, yet the Jude 3 Project curriculum Through Eyes of Color calls her the first person in the Bible to give God a name. Her story sits at the center of the question this guide takes up: who are the Black people in the Bible, and what does their presence reveal about God? Scripture places African peoples in its story from the family tree of Genesis 10 onward. Through figures like Hagar, it shows a God who sees the people others overlook and who shows no partiality.
Most confusion about this topic comes from skipping steps. People hear a list of Black biblical figures and either accept it without knowing why or dismiss it for the same reason. So this guide moves in an order where each step supplies what the next one needs. You cannot call a biblical person Black until you know how an ancient name becomes evidence. You cannot weigh that evidence until you know where the peoples came from. And you cannot draw a conclusion about God until you have met the people in their stories. Work through it alone in about an hour, or across two group sessions: steps one to three in the first, steps four and five in the second. Keep a Bible open throughout.
Step one: start with the family tree
The first missing piece is the starting point. Many readers treat Black presence in Scripture as a few exceptions scattered through the story. Through Eyes of Color starts earlier: “Brothers and sisters, our history doesn’t start with shackles, slave ships, and unjust labor. Our history finds its origins in the very first pages of the Bible.”
The passage it points to is Genesis 10, which scholars call the Table of Nations. After the flood, the chapter lists the descendants of Noah’s sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, and the peoples that came from them. The curriculum puts it plainly: “Genesis 10 may just seem like a list of names that are hard to pronounce, but this is the world’s family tree.”
Read Genesis 10:6: “And the sons of Ham; Cush, and Mizraim, and Phut, and Canaan.” Two names matter here. Cush is the name later linked with the land south of Egypt. Mizraim is the ordinary Hebrew word for Egypt. The Bible’s own map places Egypt and Cush in the line of Ham, inside the one human family descended from Noah.
The curriculum goes further, tracing Jewish and Arab peoples to Shem, European peoples to Japheth, and African, Asian and Indian peoples to Ham. Hold that as the curriculum’s summary of the sources it cites, not as something Genesis 10 states word for word. The chapter names peoples and places. Matching them to modern groups takes historical work, which is why step two exists.
Observation task. Read Genesis 10 once straight through. On a second reading, write down every name in Ham’s line that you recognize as a place. Then notice what the chapter does not do. It ranks no son above another and sorts no nation by skin. Every people listed belongs to the same family.
Step two: how a name becomes evidence
Genesis 10 tells us Cush and Egypt belong to Ham’s line. It says nothing about complexion. The curriculum offers three kinds of evidence for reading these as dark-skinned African peoples, and they are not equally strong.
The first is the meaning of names. The curriculum reports that the Hebrew name Ham means hot or warm, and that many scholars take this as a hint of sun-darkened skin. It admits this alone “might seem like a stretch.” A name’s meaning cannot by itself tell us what anyone looked like.
The second is the history of the name Cush. The curriculum notes that the land of Cush came to be called Ethiopia, a name of Greek origin that some interpreters take to mean burnt-faced. The King James Version shows the link in Numbers 12:1: “And Miriam and Aaron spake against Moses because of the Ethiopian woman whom he had married: for he had married an Ethiopian woman.” Where the KJV says Ethiopian, the Hebrew says Cushite, and many translations render it that way. The 1611 translators treated Cush and Ethiopia as the same region. Notice too what follows in the chapter: the LORD rebukes Miriam and Aaron for speaking against Moses, though the rebuke centers on Moses’ standing as a prophet rather than on the marriage itself.
The third is ancient description and art. Drawing on the scholar Charles B. Copher, the curriculum notes that the Greek historian Herodotus described people of an Egyptian colony as having black skin and tightly curled hair, and that ancient Egyptian paintings show people with reddish brown to black skin. An outside observer like Herodotus counts as independent evidence because he had no stake in Israel’s story, but he also saw through Greek eyes, in particular places, at a particular time.
Here is the strongest objection. Ancient writers did not use Black as a modern racial category. Herodotus described what people looked like; he was not assigning anyone to a race in the modern sense. So it is fair to ask whether calling Hagar or the Cushite wife Black reads our categories back into the text. The honest answer has two parts. The evidence can establish that Egypt and Cush were African peoples, and that ancient observers described many of them as dark-skinned. It cannot tell us exactly what any one person looked like, and it cannot make ancient peoples answer modern identity questions. What it does rule out is the picture of a Bible populated only by Europeans.
Practice: sort the evidence. Draw three columns: name meaning, place and language, eyewitness and art. Put each piece of evidence above in its column. Rank the columns from weakest to strongest and write one sentence defending your ranking, including what the strongest column still cannot prove. In a group, compare rankings before discussing them. Disagreement shows people are weighing evidence rather than repeating a conclusion.
Step three: from evidence to people
Now the evidence can be applied. The curriculum identifies figures that include Hagar the Egyptian (Genesis 16), Joseph’s Egyptian wife Asenath and her sons (Genesis 41:50-52), Moses’ Cushite wife (Numbers 12:1), the Shulamite woman (Song of Solomon 1:5-6), the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:26-40) and Simeon called Niger (Acts 13:1). It is careful to say there is debate about the Queen of Sheba, Simon of Cyrene (Mark 15:21) and Lucius of Cyrene (Acts 13:1), noting for the last two only that Cyrene had a significant Black population.
Those figures do not rest on the same kind of evidence, and the skill here is telling them apart.
Comparison task. Sort every figure named above into one of three groups:
- The text itself describes the person’s color. The Shulamite says, “I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem” (Song of Solomon 1:5), and the curriculum notes that Simeon’s nickname Niger literally means black.
- The text names an African people, and step two supplies the link. Hagar is called an Egyptian; Moses’ wife is called a Cushite.
- The identification is an inference from a place or a debated origin.
Then answer two questions. Which group would you cite first to someone skeptical, and why? Which identifications would you hold more loosely? One detail is worth noticing as you sort: Acts 13:1 lists Simeon among the prophets and teachers of the church at Antioch, the church that sent out Barnabas and Saul. He is not a background character.
Step four: Hagar and the God who sees
With the people identified, the question shifts from who is present to what their presence shows. Read Genesis 16 in full. It opens with a plain description: “Now Sarai Abram’s wife bare him no children: and she had an handmaid, an Egyptian, whose name was Hagar” (Genesis 16:1).
Pay attention to how little power Hagar has. Through Eyes of Color observes, “Hagar is a passive participant in this story. She gets no say as to whether she’s on board with Abram and Sarah’s plan, yet she bears all the consequences of their decision.” She is given to Abram, mistreated, and driven into the wilderness.
There the angel of the LORD finds her. Genesis 16:13 records her response: “And she called the name of the LORD that spake unto her, Thou God seest me: for she said, Have I also here looked after him that seeth me?” The name is often written El Roi, rendered “the God who sees.” The curriculum sums up the turn this way: “In this story, Hagar goes from not being seen by her slave owners to being seen by the living God!”
Keep one distinction in view. This is narrative, so it describes rather than approves. The text reports Sarai’s plan and Hagar’s treatment without endorsing either. What it shows is God’s attention reaching the person with the least standing in the household. The people around her used her. God speaks to her and is named by her.
Observation task. Mark every place someone speaks to Hagar in Genesis 16, and every place she speaks. Who addresses her before verse 7? Who addresses her after? What changes once God enters the story?
Step five: a God who is no respecter of persons
The steps now arrive at their conclusion. Through Eyes of Color states it directly: “The presence of black people in the Bible matters because it reveals that God doesn’t play favorites.” Peter reaches the same conclusion at the house of Cornelius: “Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons” (Acts 10:34). In older English, a respecter of persons is someone who shows favoritism.
The Ethiopian eunuch shows that impartiality at work. God sends Philip from a fruitful ministry in Samaria to a desert road to meet a royal official from a distant African kingdom. In a Jude 3 Project podcast episode cited by the curriculum, Marcus Jerkins suggests that as a Black man and a eunuch, this official would have known real humiliation. Acts 8 does not describe how he was treated, so hold that as an inference about his likely circumstances, not a statement of the text. What the text does show is that he was reading Isaiah 53, about a servant despised and rejected, and that Philip began there and told him about Jesus.
Romans 3:21-31 gives the reason underneath both stories: “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Everyone needs the same rescue and receives it the same way, through faith in Christ. The promise to Abraham pointed here from the start: “in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed” (Genesis 12:3).
A misreading to avoid
Having found Black people in Scripture, a reader can turn the discovery into a claim about status, as if the Bible ranked one people above another. That repeats the old error with the roles swapped. The curriculum heads this off: “We don’t contend for the presence of black people in the Bible because of what it says about us, but because of what is says about God.” The same impartiality also undoes a common distortion of Genesis 9. Read verse 25 and notice who is actually named in the curse: Canaan, not Cush or Mizraim.
For groups: if the conversation drifts toward ranking peoples, or toward waving the evidence away, return to the columns from step two and the groups from step three. Ask what each piece shows and what it cannot show.
Questions for discussion
- Before this study, who did you picture when you read Genesis, Exodus or Acts? Where do you think that picture came from?
- Which kind of evidence from step two persuaded you most, and which least? What would strengthen the weaker kind?
- How would you answer someone who says calling biblical figures Black is reading modern categories into an ancient text?
- Why might it matter that Genesis 10 places all the nations in one family before Israel’s story begins?
- Hagar names God at a moment when she has no power at all. What does that suggest about where God’s attention goes?
- What goes wrong if the discovery becomes a claim about us rather than about God?
- If a friend told you Christianity is a white man’s religion, which passage from this study would you open first, and why?
Carry this forward
Choose one figure from step three whose story you have never read in full. Read the whole passage this week, not only the verse that mentions them. Then write two sentences. In the first, say what the text clearly states about this person. In the second, say what it shows about how God treats them. If the two sentences keep blurring together, read the passage again. Keeping them apart is the skill this study has been building.