Curse of Ham unsupported by the text of the Bible, emphatically pointing out that Noah's curse fell not upon all descendants of Ham, but only on the descendants of Canaan, and asserting that it was fulfilled when Canaan was occupied by both Semites (Israel) and Japhetites. The commentary further notes that Canaanites ceased to exist politically after the Third Punic War (149 BC), and that their current descendants are thus unknown and scattered among all peoples. Robert Boyle—a seventeenth-century scientist who also was a theologian and a devout Christian—refuted the idea that blackness was a Curse of Ham, in his book "Experiments and
Books of the Bible called the "Tanakh" or Hebrew Bible, as authoritative. There is no scholarly consensus as to when the Hebrew Bible canon was fixed: some scholars argue that it was fixed by the Hasmonean dynasty (140-40 BCE), while others argue it was not fixed until the second century CE or even later. Most conservative scholars believe that the Torah was canonized c. 400 BCE, the Prophets c. 200 BCE, and the Writings c. 100 CE, perhaps at a Council of Jamnia as concluded by Heinrich Graetz in 1871. The Council of Jamnia theory is increasingly rejected by most liberal scholars. Protestants and