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
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