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
Tower of Babel Tower of Babel account, in , it is said that everyone on Earth spoke the same language, but this is inconsistent with the Biblical description of the post-Noahic world described in , where it is said that the descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japheth gave rise to different nations, each with their own language. Some explain this discrepancy by saying that the order of the narrative is not the same as the order of events. There have also been a number of traditions around the world that describe a divine confusion of the one original language into several, albeit without