Curse of Ham Curse of Ham The Curse of Ham is the curse upon Canaan, Ham's son, that was imposed by the biblical patriarch Noah. The curse occurs in the Book of Genesis and concerns Noah's drunkenness and the accompanying shameful act perpetrated by his son Ham, the father of Canaan (). The controversies raised by this story regarding the nature of Ham's transgression, and the question of why Noah cursed Canaan when Ham had sinned, have been debated for over 2,000 years. The story's original purpose may have been to justify the subjection of the Canaanite people to the Israelites, but in
Ethics in the Bible and a good God, are examples of criticisms of ethics in the Bible. According to traditional Jewish enumeration, the Hebrew canon is composed of 24 books which came into being over a span of almost a millennium. The Bible's earliest texts reflect a Late Bronze Age Near Eastern civilization, while its last text, usually thought to be Daniel, comes from a second century BCE Hellenistic world. This historical development has to be taken into consideration in any account of ethics in the Bible. Ethicist Eryl W. Davies writes that many scholars question whether the biblical account can be regarded as