Ham

AI summary: Ham matters because the cross references place him at a formative junction between the post-flood world and the table of nations. He is preserved through the ark, involved in the episode that leads to Noah's words over his family, and becomes the named ancestor of Cush, Mizraim, Put, and Canaan. His significance is therefore less about extended personal narrative and more about lineage, geography, and remembered family rupture. Taken together, the material presents Ham as a major ancestral figure in early Genesis whose descendants shape much of the Bible's surrounding-world map.¹

Warm, hot, and hence the south; also an Egyptian word meaning “black”, the youngest son of Noah (Gen. 5:32; comp. 9:22, 24). The curse pronounced by Noah against Ham, properly against Canaan his fourth son, was accomplished when the Jews subsequently exterminated the Canaanites. One of the most important facts recorded in Gen. 10 is the foundation of the earliest monarchy in Babylonia by Nimrod the grandson of Ham (6, 8, 10). The primitive Babylonian empire was thus Hamitic, and of a cognate race with the primitive inhabitants of Arabia and of Ethiopia. (See ACCAD.) The race of Ham were the most energetic of all the descendants of Noah in the early times of the post-diluvian world. ³