Cursing In The Church'S Early Days.

[helix]

Sorry, no J. Golden Kimball cursing here. I was involved in a discussion about how "The Pearl of Great Price teaches that all blacks today are descendents of a curse." I thought I'd share my thoughts on this.

The logic of the curse usually flows as follows:

• Cain was explicitly cursed. He was given a mark.
  
• These descendents of Cain (the Canaanites) were black.
  
• The descendents of Ham spawned a cursed race (specifically the Canaanites).
  
• The descendents of Ham were denied the priesthood.
  
• (And sometimes) The Book of Mormon mentions the unrighteous were cursed with a skin of blackness.
  

At quick glance, it seems simple. The curse relates to black skin, wickedness, and the priesthood. Thus the Mormon church taught or teaches some nefarious things about blacks today.

However, looking closer at each story, it is almost impossible to link all these curses together as being shared. Further, you run across at least four cursings, and they more different from each other than they are similar. Looking at those curses again with more detail:

Curse #1

• Cain offers an offering of the fruit of the ground. The Lord is displeased. Cain is displeased in return.
  
• The Lord warns Cain of a cursing he would get, unless he repents. He would be called Perdition unless he changes his ways.
  
• Cain does not change. He later murders Abel. He is now cursed. The Lord explains this cursing more. "When thou tillest the ground it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength. A fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth."
  
• Finally, a mark was put upon Cain. No mention is given what this mark is. It was enough to identify him to others. Further, this mark is not mentioned as given as part of the curse's punishment. It is only given as a means of identification.
  

Curse #2 (or curse 2a, 2b, and 2c)

• In Moses 7, the Lord shows to Enoch a vision. Enoch prophisied that the people of Canaan would be cursed after a battle with the people of Shum. In verse 8, the cursing happens. The land is cursed with heat, and the land would be barren. A skin of blackness "came upon them." The wording is interesting. The land is cursed. The skin "came upon them".
  
• Enoch is told to cry repentence to other lands (everyone now but the land of Canaan, as they were already cursed). If not, they will also be cursed in a way that "they die."
  
• Enemies gathered against Enoch and people of the church. In verse 15, another curse is given out to these enemies. It is not described.
  
• By verse 20: "Zion have I blessed, but the residue of the people have I cursed." It is not clear whether all curses here are the same curse the Canaanites got, or whether they are separate curses.
  
• Over time, Enoch is allowed to view the descents of Cain. By this time, they are black. No mention is given why they are black. We don't know if it was from the Canaanite's curse, or from the original curse of Cain.
  

Between curse #2 and curse #3, there is a flood. The story of Moses states that there would be a flood that besides those in the ark, it would destroy "all flesh from off the earth" (Moses 8:30)

Curse #3

• Noah's son Ham has a son, Canaan. In Genesis 9:25, Noah curses Canaan, but we are not told why or what the cursing is. We are only told Canaan would be a servant.
  
• Abraham 1:26 goes into this cursing more. "but cursed him as pertaining to the Priesthood." It was a priesthood lineage curse.
  
• Abraham 1:24 descries that Ham's descendent Canaan spawn a race which preserved this curse #3 in the land.
  
• It is important to note that Ham's son Canaan was given a curse by Noah. He didn't inherit it. This son Canaan also had no relation to the previous cursed Canaanites prior to the flood (as it appears they all died and could not have passed the curse on). Also, Canaan wasn't descendend from Cain. Canaan was a descendent of Ham, who was a descendent of Noah, who was a descendent of Seth (not Cain). Curse #3 seems to not be derived in any way from curse #1 or curse #2.
  

Curse #4

• The Lamanites are cursed. In 2 Nephi 5:20, they were cursed by being cut off from the presence of the Lord. This seems to be the only explicit punishment listed for the curse.
  
• As Tvetndes explained Alma recounts Nephi quoting the Lord saying "The Lamanites have I cursed", and the Lord "will" set a mark upon them. This mark again seems to be indentification. which comes after the cursing has already been doled out. Many times the mark and the curse are talked about separately. Once the skin color is treated as part of the curse.
  
• The justification of the skin color change is given to help prevent the Nephites from being involved with the Lamanites. In most instances, when descendents of Lamanites aligned with Nephites, their skin color is never mentioned as changing. When the Lamanites were righteous and the Nephites were not, skin color was not mentioned as changing. Only in 3 Nephi 2 did it mention an instance where Lamanites aligning with Nephites had this curse removed and the identification removed.
  
• (As a side remark if this curse were meant to have been the cause of the darker skin in Native Americans today, it would seem that a 19th century Joseph Smith would use the word "redness" or "red skin" rather than blackness.)
  

Of these four curses, #3 is the most unique. It is the only one that relates to the priesthood. No mention of skin color, a mark, dying, being a vagabond, a hot land, or unable to grow food is listed as part of this curse. Canaan and his descendents directly are cursed from the priesthood. It seems people may link Canaan here of #3 Canaanites of #2, but that cannot be done, the person was born post flood, and the city existed pre flood. They only share a name, nothing more. It has been said that curse #3 relates to Cain's curse (#1), but that cannot be done either due to Canaan's lineage.

Curses #1 and #2 share the most similarities, but still some differences. Curse #1 was targetted at a person, curse #2 was targetted at the land. Both involved being able to not grow food. One curse resulted in a mark being placed in Cain. The other resulted in skin of blackness which "came upon them". The mark in #1 was done for indentification. For #2, it does not described as being used for indentification.

Curse #4 is similar to #2 in that skin color changed. It is similar to #1 in that it was done for identification purposes. And it is similar to #3 in that a group of people and descendents were involved. It is different form #1 and #2 by the target of the curse (not a person, not a land). The purpose of curse #4 is unique, to cut off people from the presence of God.

Overall, each curse shares at least one similarity with the other three. But they all have more differences than similarities. Further, curse #3 is the most unique of the curses. It can't scripturally be maintained that the priesthood curse of Ham's descendents were in any way involved with the Canaanite's actions or Cain's actions. There is no link tying them together. It also cannot be said of curse #3 involved a skin color, as that wasn't mentioned. And of course, in none of these curses is it ever mentioned that they would last until the current day.

Edited September 2, 2012 by helix

[Whiskeypete]

I'm missing where you are making this link:

These descendents of Cain (the Canaanites) were black.

Are you saying that Cain and Canaan are the same?

[rpn]

blacksinthescriptures.com has a whole cd analyizing the curses (or rather showing how the 1850's and earlier interpretations aren't really what it says).

[helix]

I'm missing where you are making this link:

These descendents of Cain (the Canaanites) were black.

Are you saying that Cain and Canaan are the same?

I'm not making the claim. I'm saying that's what I've heard claimed. I've seen it argued that black Canaanites who were cursed were descendents of Cain. It comes as part of conflating all curses and people involved into one.

[Whiskeypete]

thats what was confusing me - in the paragraphs that follow, you lay out very clearly that there are a number of separate curses,(Cain, Canaanites, Canaan, etc) but in that one line you name the descendants of Cain as Canaanites.

It wasn't clear to me what you were refuting and what you were claiming...

Thanks for the explanation

[Bill “Papa” Lee]

Sorry, no J. Golden Kimball cursing here. I was involved in a discussion about how "The Pearl of Great Price teaches that all blacks today are descendents of a curse."

According to the Bible we all are as a result of Adam and Eve...forget the PoGP...these things were taught in every church at one time. This issue cannot be lain solely at the feet of Mormonism.

[helix]

Pa Pa, correct.

This wasn't an LDS phenomenon. At the time, there were strong traditions about Cain's mark being black with it being passed onto his descendents. His lineage being introduced through Ham's wife into Canaan (somehow this lineage surived the Flood.) And a tradition of how Noah then cursed Canaan (Ham's son) with the same curse Cain got. This was frequently used to justify slavery (as Canaan was cursed to be a servant/slave). None of these concepts were in the Bible (or the Book of Abraham or Book of Moses), but they persisted.

This article gets into it well: http://bycommonconse...m-foiled-again/

Edited September 4, 2012 by helix

[divinenature]

re: Curse #3. The LDS Institute Manual for the Old Testament links the curse to Ham marrying Egyptus.

Therefore, although Ham himself had the right to the priesthood, Canaan, his son, did not. Ham had married Egyptus, a descendant of Cain (Abraham 1:21–24), and so his sons were denied the priesthood.

Just to complicate matters.

I find it interesting that typically a curse in the scriptures is limited to "four or five generations OR until someone repents."

[helix]

Yes, and the Institute Manual has no basis for making this claim. The Book of Abraham doesn't say Ham married Egyptus, and it doesn't say Egyptus was a descendent of Cain. This echoes those sentiments.

Edited September 4, 2012 by helix

[Bill “Papa” Lee]

Pa Pa, correct.

This wasn't an LDS phenomenon. At the time, there were strong traditions about Cain's mark being black with it being passed onto his descendents. His lineage being introduced through Ham's wife into Canaan (somehow this lineage surived the Flood.) And a tradition of how Noah then cursed Canaan (Ham's son) with the same curse Cain got. This was frequently used to justify slavery (as Canaan was cursed to be a servant/slave). None of these concepts were in the Bible (or the Book of Abraham or Book of Moses), but they persisted.

This article gets into it well: http://bycommonconse...m-foiled-again/

I know, I grew up in a small Baptist Church in GA, in latter 50's, 60's and 70's.

[divinenature]

Yes, and the Institute Manual has no basis for making this claim. The Book of Abraham doesn't say Ham married Egyptus, and it doesn't say Egyptus was a descendent of Cain. This echoes those sentiments.

Argh! I am unable to access the document.

The manual seems to have a lot of speculation in it, I noticed.

[Cobalt-70]

I think the real question is which of these "curses," if any, have not been disavowed by the LDS Church. The church has said that all the racist justifications for the 1978 priesthood ban are wrong. But to what extent does this nullify or scale back the four "curses" listed in the OP? Personally, I think all talk of generational "curses" in Mormon scripture of them is bunk. We believe (don't we?) that man will punished for his own sins, not for the bad behavior of some ancestor.

I think there are basically two questions to ask: (1) how did Joseph Smith understand these curses?, and (2) how can we "retcon" or reinterpret the text to avoid racist readings, without actually changing the text?

To me, it is pretty clear that Joseph Smith understood that curses #2 and #4 (and possibly #3) were racial curses. He believed that God curses people for wickedness by increasing the amount of melanin in their skin. It appears that the reference to the "skin of blackness" in Moses 7 is not the same as the "mark of Cain." That would make sense, even in a 19th century racist worldview, because the mark of Cain was only set upon Cain, not his descendants. But I don't think that Smith believed that curse #2 survived the flood. I think he thought, like lots of people in the 19th century, that today's black people descended from Canaan, and I think the whole "wife of Ham" mechanism (where the wife of Ham was a descendant of Cain) was not contemplated by Smith. As to the "Lamanite" curse, Smith clearly believed this was a racial curse, but it seems that there is at least a slight chance that he had second thoughts on that issue when he edited the 1840 edition of the Book of Mormon.

Also, I do not think that Joseph Smith linked any of these racial curses to any priesthood ban. If you read the book of Abraham carefully, the "curse as to the priesthood" was a curse, not upon Canaan, but upon Pharaoh (the grandson of Ham). Ham had the "curse of Canaan," as well, because he was on a patrilineal line from Canaan (Ab. 1:21). However, Ab. 1:26 says that Noah cursed Pharaoh "as pertaining to the Priesthood," but "blessed him with the blessings of the earth." This is a separate curse, different from the curse on Canaan, Pharaoh's ancestor.

In any event, the "priesthood" they are talking about here is the Patriarchal Priesthood, which was passed down patrilineally, from the father to the (usually, but not always) oldest son. It represents the office of Presiding Patriarch in the modern church. That line went through Shem, and Pharaoh was "cursed," perhaps, only because he was not in that patrilineal line, and did not have the birthright. But Japheth didn't get that birthright, either. It was not so much a matter of who couldn't have the patriarchal priesthood birthright, it was a matter of what one person in the world could be the presiding patriarch.

All of this has nothing whatsoever to do with the Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthoods, and especially the latter, which is a priesthood "without father or mother, without genealogy." Joseph Smith's actions bore that out, since he had no problem with the ordination of Elijah Abel to the Melchizedek priesthood. Whether Elijah Abel could have been the presiding patriarch, was perhaps a different question.

So, if the above is correct, how do we, as modern Mormons seeking to implement the LDS Church's disavowal of racist readings of the scriptures, go about doing so? Here are a few ideas:

1. The curse on Cain was limited to Cain himself. It has no applicability to any of his (mythological or real) descendants, whatever their race.
   
2. Although it does a certain amount of violence to the text, we can read references to "skins of blackness" as being a loss of enlightenment, or darkness of mind. There has already been some precedent for this, in that in the 1840 edition of the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith changed a passage from "white and delightsome" to "pure and delightsome." Unfortunately, he did not remove the reference to a "skin of blackness" from 2 Ne. 5:21, and anybody who reads this passage for the first time is naturally going to interpret this as racist. We need somebody to edit the Book of Mormon, because this creative reinterpretation of the text feels like putting lipstick on a pig.
   
3. As a matter of history, the myth of the "curse of Canaan" was just a political statement by the writers of Genesis as a means to justify the genocide and enslavement by Hebrews of their Canaanite neighbors. But even if you buy into the whole "the Canaanites deserved it" thing, the Canaanites are long dead. They have nothing to do with any living culture on the earth today. For that matter, if you take literally the idea that the members of the Pharaonic line were "cursed as to the priesthood" through Pharaoh, and were also subject to the curse of Canaan, the Pharaonic line is long dead too.
   
4. Despite the racist 19th century American rhetoric, in the bible's own terms, the curse of Canaan did not extend to sub-Saharan Africa. Canaan was only one of Ham's sons, and the two of them were, according to the biblical myth, the settlers of southern Africa (Cush), and Libya (Mizraim). There was no curse on Cush. It was just the Canaanites (the Hittites, Jebusites, Amorites, etc.) who got the mythical curse which justified their genocide.
   

Edited September 5, 2012 by Cobalt-70

[MormonMason]

There is another problem to throw into the mix pertaining to this subject. How many are familiar with the Documentary Hypothesis of the Bible? According to this the oldest source (E, if I recall correctly) had Noah's youngest son named Canaan or both Canaan and Ham (recall that some other biblical characters also have two names), and that when the sources (E, J, P, and D, if I recall correctly) were combined into the current Pentateuch version of chapter 9 of Genesis, the words "the father of" were added to verse 18 and "Ham the father of" were added to verse 22 by a later scribe. James Moffet in his translation of the Bible actually enclosed the phrases mentioned above in double-brackets and the New Jerusalem Bible called attention to the putative earlier tradition in footnotes.

According to a view based upon this hypothesis, however, the paragraph concerning the curse originally read something like what follows:

18 ¶And the sons of Noah, that went forth of the ark, were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth: and Ham is also Canaan.

19 These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole earth overspread.

20 And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard:

21 And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.

22 And Canaan saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.

23 And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness.

24 And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.

25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.

26 And he said, Blessed be the God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

27 God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

If this actually is true (and it could be but Joseph Smith likely would not have known that except by revelation--if he asked for it and got it), it means that every son descended from Ham also would be a partaker of the blood of Canaan, including those who were in Africa.

As to the passage in the Book of Abraham, it reads easiest if we regard Egyptus as the wife of Ham, and that there were two people named Egyptus. Egyptus is identified by the Book of Abraham as the daughter of Ham and the daughter of Egyptus, and the first person considered Pharaoh was the son of the second Egyptus. At least, that is the way I see it, as well as did the writer of the Institute manual in question.

Just a little more to stir up the pot with for the moment...

[Cobalt-70]

As to the passage in the Book of Abraham, it reads easiest if we regard Egyptus as the wife of Ham, and that there were two people named Egyptus. Egyptus is identified by the Book of Abraham as the daughter of Ham and the daughter of Egyptus, and the first person considered Pharaoh was the son of the second Egyptus. At least, that is the way I see it, as well as did the writer of the Institute manual in question.

Another possibility is that Egyptus was both the wife and daughter of Ham--inbreeding would have to have been a necessity in those mythical times when there were supposedly only eight people left on the planet. It seems even more likely to me that Joseph Smith simply forgot the relationship of Egyptus to Ham between verses 24 and 25. Maybe they took a break in translation there. Otherwise, it doesn't make a lot of sense why the text is vague about Ham's daughter's name in verses 23-24.

[MormonMason]

Another possibility is that Egyptus was both the wife and daughter of Ham--inbreeding would have to have been a necessity in those mythical times when there were supposedly only eight people left on the planet. It seems even more likely to me that Joseph Smith simply forgot the relationship of Egyptus to Ham between verses 24 and 25. Maybe they took a break in translation there. Otherwise, it doesn't make a lot of sense why the text is vague about Ham's daughter's name in verses 23-24.

I suppose that is one reading that could be made of the text. The Egyptians certainly did a lot of that, particularly among the ruling families. This makes things all the more interesting with the Book of Abraham, if true.

I don't think they took a translation break there and see no evidence of this in the manuscripts that contain that text. But, then again, all we have left are fragmented and incomplete copies of an earlier English manuscript text. So, who knows?

I think it will be impossible to know either way in light of the putative, original text and tradition of Ham also being Canaan. Who knows what next discovery in the Middle East might bring in relation to this? But, is the Book of Abraham text under discussion above really as vague as one might think?

Ignore the punctuation in the printed text, examine the overall structure of the text, and see if you see something different than what you now do.

Edited September 6, 2012 by MormonMason