Obviously, institutionalized slavery and racism has always used all forms of intellectual arguments to support the “natural reality’ that is slavery and racism. However, I was trying to address the underlying assumption in the article’s statement that Moses married a black woman and as Jeremy alluded to this was because she was a descendant of Ham (Can someone please explain how given linguistic and archeological evidence to support that their skins tone were not that different there are those who still think Moses was white and Mariam was black?). The logic goes Mariam is black descended from Canaan son of Ham who was cursed by Noah, cursed with “blackness” and “servitude”. Some of the earliest Christian argument were published in the late 19th to early 20th century to counter the growing Christian movement against slavery. As I stated these arguments were outlined in the doctrines of Mormons and JW (almost all the other christian denominations subscribed to this perspective but few were as well documented as part of doctrine). These articles are

Bruce McConkie, Apostle of the Mormon Council of 12, Mormon Doctrine, p. 554, 1958.

The Golden Age, The Watchtower (now called Awake!), p. 702, 24 July 1929

A lot of similar misrepresentations are well documented in Fred Price’s Race, Religion and Racism. You can also do a google search for similar slavery-supporting Christian apologetics.

Lastly, that folks understand that I am equally beef against the other two Abrahamic religions - Islam and Judaism- and their condoning slavery in one fashion of the other… but that is another argument for another day.

And of course modern racial views have no bearing on the peopling of the Fertile Crescent. Linguistics, archaeology, and population genetics show that lots of very important interaction and intermarriage was going on between the populations of northeast Africa and southwest Asia from prehistory into the modern era.

The only reason Ham was used to refer to Africans is because Ham was cursed; and the Europeans perceived black skin as a curse, allowing them to enslave, demean, and brutalize Africans and their mixed-race descendants. However, the whole Ham story is a load of crap.

That said, the people in the Bible were not blond and blue-eyed. Come on, anyone who thinks that Moses was the first Jew to marry a black-skinned African is either naive or purposefully ignorant. The Jews were in Egypt, a land where people from all over the Ancient world gathered, for centuries.

Moreover, people continued to move around the world and intermarry afterward. As genetic tests have shown, one of Moses’ brothers made his way to South Africa where he and other Jewish merchant travelers married local women creating the Lemba tribe.

Finally, I do love the young author’s sister perplexing her racist Sunday school teacher. It would have been nice if the author told her would-be date to go frack himself.