Noah about to be baptised. In medieval Christianity, Noah's three sons were generally considered as the founders of the populations of the three known continents, Japheth/Europe, Shem/Asia, and Ham/Africa, although a rarer variation held that they represented the three classes of medieval society – the priests (Shem), the warriors (Japheth), and the peasants (Ham). In medieval Christian thought, Ham was considered to be the ancestor of the people of black Africa. So, in racialist arguments, the curse of Ham became a justification for the slavery of the black races. Isaac Newton, in his religious works on the development of religion, wrote
Curse of Ham whether "seeing" someone's nakedness meant to have sex with that person (e.g. Leviticus 20:17). The same idea was raised by 3rd-century rabbis, in the "Babylonian Talmud" (c. 500 AD), who argue that Ham either castrated his father, or sodomised him. The same explanations are found in three Greek translations of the Bible, which replace the word "see" in verse 22 with another word denoting homosexual relations. The castration theory has its modern counterpart in suggested parallels found in the castration of Uranus by Cronus in Greek mythology and a Hittite myth of the supreme god Anu whose genitals were "bitten