Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 05:3 (Fall 2001)
Article: The Table of Nations: The “Also Peoples”
Author: Kenneth A. Mathews

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SBJT 5:3 (Fall 2001) p. 42

The Table of Nations:
The “Also Peoples”1

Kenneth A. Mathews

Kenneth A. Mathews is Professor of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School, Samford University. Dr. Mathews is also adjunct professor of Old Testament at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He has written numerous articles and two books, including volume one on Genesis in the New American Commentary series. He is now working on volume two.

Introduction

On November 7, 2000 Alabama’s citizens cast their votes for the forty-third President of the United States, electing George W. Bush the first president of the new century. That vote, however, was not the only significant ballot, and maybe not the most important, made by the people of Alabama. Although only symbolic in action, the passage of Amendment 2 to the Alabama Constitution of 1901 repealed the obsolete ban of interracial marriage, signaling the end of another vestige of legal racial segregation that had marked every aspect of life in the deep South for three centuries.2 The law was not enforceable, since it contradicted the fourteenth amendment of the United States Constitution, but the Alabama Constitution remained the last state constitution to have this prohibition on the books.

During the era of racial slavery, apologists for the status quo often appealed to the Bible, including Genesis, as their religious and cultural authority. Unfortunately, they misunderstand Genesis 10:1–32, popularly known as the “Table of Nations.” Also, the prelude to the Table of Nations (9:20–29), describing Noah’s curse against his grandson Canaan and his blessing on Shem, became a perverted commentary on the inferior status of the black African peoples, “the lowest of slaves shall he [Canaan] be” (9:25), and their descendants. That the curse meant Ham’s descendants were inferior as a race and forever stigmatized by dark skin color was an interpretation known as early as Jewish midrash: “Ham and a dog had sexual relations in the ark. Therefore Ham came forth dusky, and the dog, for his part, has sexual relations in public” (Gen. Rab. 36.5). F. A. Ross (1796–1883) argued in his Slavery Ordained of God (1857) that there was an inherent correlation between the geographical distribution of the races and their relative cultural standing (Gen 10:1–32). By coupling his interpretation of Genesis and A. H. Guyot’s Earth and Man (1849), in which Guyot sought to explain a people’s physical environment and their social and moral development, Ross contended that the peoples south of the equator were ethnically...

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