Noah's Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery.

By Stephen R. Haynes. Religion in America Series. (New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv, 322. $29.95, ISBN 0-19-514279-9.)

Stephen R. Haynes's new study admirably expands on Thomas V. Peterson's Ham and Japheth: The Mythic World of Whites in the Antebellum South (Metuchen, N.J., 1978). Peterson chronicled the myths surrounding Genesis 9, in which Noah curses his son Ham for mocking Noah's drunkenness, a curse that falls on Ham's son Canaan, who is to be the "lowest of slaves" to Ham's brothers, Shem and Japheth. Especially latching onto Noah's prophecy that God would "make space for Japheth, and let him live in the tents of Shem; and let Canaan be his slave" (Genesis 9, quoted on p. 23), antebellum white southerners saw their own sacred history revealed in Genesis 9. Whites (Japheth) had enslaved Africans (Ham) and occupied the "tents" of Native Americans (Shem). Furthermore, even though Genesis 9 does not mention race, most white Americans assumed that Noah's sons and their offspring had served as progenitors of the "three races" derived from Asia, Europe, and Africa (p. 5).

Haynes, a religious studies scholar, seeks to deepen our understanding of this myth both as a prop for the defense of slavery as well as a powerful source of national identity. His most original contribution is his elaboration of how white Americans linked their racial reading of Noah's curse with the stories of Nimrod (Genesis 10:8-12) and the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9). Proslavery ministers identified Nimrod as black (since he descended from Ham) and the builder of Babel, and further assumed that Nimrod's sinful nature brought on the disaster of Babel that separated humanity. Haynes shows how this antebellum reading of Genesis 9-11, which supposedly showed God segregating humanity into different groups, smoothed the transition to the prosegregation thought of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Other aspects of Haynes's arguments are more problematic. He is quick to dismiss works by historians Eugene D. Genovese and Mitchell Snay, but without devoting adequate attention to either. However, while the scholarship of both Genovese and Snay has drawn on a wide range of proslavery religious sources, Haynes, by contrast, rests his analysis almost entirely on the example of Presbyterian minister Benjamin Morgan Palmer, the renowned slavery advocate and later prosegregation spokesman. Palmer makes an excellent subject for case study, but his status as an exemplar of Old South thought on Genesis 9 is questionable. For example, in Palmer's epochal "Thanksgiving Sermon" of 1860, which occupies center stage in Haynes's discussion of secession, Genesis 9 is never mentioned at all; indeed, Palmer never discussed the passage in any of his antebellum writings. Although Haynes is well aware of this fact, in defense he can only point to the many pro-southern justifications based on Genesis 9-11 that Palmer made after 1860.

Haynes also believes that Palmer and other proslavery ministers relied heavily on the notion of "honor" prior to the war. On this subject Haynes's arguments may be somewhat more credible, but the evidence remains thin. Furthermore, his embrace of Bertram Wyatt-Brown's Southern Honor (New York, 1982)--another unconventional, sprawling, interdisciplinary work that occasionally soared from its evidentiary grounds to make lofty generalizations--is as uncritical as his rejection of Genovese and Snay is hasty.

Haynes's detailed biblical scholarship, analysis of Nimrod, and attention to the prosegregation uses of "Noah's curse" make this a fascinating and valuable study. It is not, however, a conventional academic history. In a concluding chapter on "redeeming the curse," Haynes attempts to devise a positive Christian reading of Genesis 9 and boldly declares that "Noah's curse requires a cure" (p. 201). Such a prescription, however admirable, may be misplaced in a work that hopes to woo historians into increased interdisciplinary dialogue with religious scholars.

JOHN P. DALY 

State University of New York at Brockport