Curse of Ham the ark and "was smitten in his skin"; according to another, Noah cursed him because he castrated his father. Although the Talmud refers only to Ham, the version brought in a midrash goes on further to say "Ham, that Cush came from him" in reference to the blackness, that the curse did not apply to all of Ham but only to his eldest son Cush, Cush being a sub-Saharan African. Thus, two distinct traditions existed, one explaining dark skin as the result of a curse on Ham, the other explaining slavery by the separate curse on Canaan. The concepts were
The Gospel According to the Son mixed. Jack Miles, writing for "Commonweal", found the book "a quiet, sweet, almost wan little book, a kindly offering from a New York Jew to his wife's Bible Belt family." He noted that there was "something undeniably impressive about the restraint" of the style that Mailer undertook in composing the novel. He concluded that the novel was neither one of Mailer's best works, nor would it stand out amongst the bibliography of books inspired by the life of Christ, but that it had received unfairly harsh reviews from other critics. Critics such as Reynolds Price, writing for "The New York