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Lord my God of Shem; and let Canaan be his slave. May God
make space for Japheth, and let him live in the tents of Shem; and
let Canaan be his slave.”
What starts off a story of a family, spirals to cover nations and the
identity or origins of all people: “from these the whole earth was
peopled.” The story makes no pretence about giving equal power
to all members of the earth, who all originate from Noah, the
survivor of the flood. Rather, the story openly legitimates the
oppression of one nation by the other. Ham is named as the father
of Canaan and cursed to be a slave of Shem. The descendants of
Ham are further identified as ‘Cush, Egypt and, Put and Canaan,”
10:6. The descendants of Shem are outlined in Gen. 11:10-26,
which ends by saying he became the Father of Abram (Abraham),
the husband of Sarah.
What ideology is propounded here? As Bailey’s article notes “Israel
is totally to be identified with Shem, the one who took the lead in
covering up Noah, the one whom Canaan is to be a slave, the one
whose God YHWH is to be blessed” (p.137). Not only does this
story legitimate the dispossession, annihilation and sub-ordination
of Canaanites in the biblical text, when the Israelites were promised
and given their land by God, it was also used in the apartheid
regime to legitimize the oppression of black people by white South
Africans.
Lot and his two Daughters
The story of Lot and his daughters is found in Gen. 12-19 and it is
closely linked with Abraham’s story. When God first called Abraham
to leave his country and to go to a land that will be shown to him,
(12:10), he took with him his bother’s son, Lot. They became
wondering pastoralists together until they parted ways. This
brought Lot to Sodom and Gomorrah, where the Lord ordered him
to leave these two cities as they would be destroyed. On the night
of the destruction, Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt, while
Lot fled to Zoar with his two daughters. The story continues to say:
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