The story of Noah’s offspring is preceded by a peculiar anecdote that would seem rather whimsical. One day the patriarch got so drunk on wine that he ended up lying half naked in his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, found him like this and went to his brothers, Shem and Japheth, who took a blanket to cover his father walking backwards and looking in another direction. Upon waking, Noah realized what had happened and uttered the following curse against Canaan, son of Ham:

And he said, Cursed be Canaan

a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.

And he said,

Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

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

Eliot Weinberger interprets this story in socio-political key: “the Hebrews believe that they are Semites, the descendants of Shem. The Canaanites—all the conquered native peoples—descend from Canaan. As it is apparent that the Hebrews will be unable to defeat the Philistines, and must share the land with them, the Philistines become the heirs of Japheth, dwelling, however, in the tents of Shem.” ¹The book of Genesis presents one of the first accounts of power and supremacy which, as as matter of fact, creates one of the first castes of scapegoats to justify the predominance of an ethnic group and its culture over a territory. In his essay "The Falls" Weinberger examines the association between slavery and the offspring of Ham and Canaan well into the nineteenth century.

In the meantime, given the difficulty of fitting all the peoples of the world into the three categories offered by Noah’s offspring, there was extensive speculation about the fate of the lost tribes of Israel which, according to the Mormons, would have migrated to the American continent. All speculations aside, other races had already wanted to assume the mantle of chosen people of the Hebrews. The English, for example, maintained a tradition (which more than that is a sublime fit of ethnocentrism) that put Shem at the head of their genealogy:

Proposed by Venerable Bede, continued by Geoffrey of Monmouth and the medieval copyists, and later subscribed to by Milton, Cromwell, Blake and Queen Victoria, among many others, the English saw themselves as either the directs descendants of the Israelites—having, in ancient times, taken refuge on the island, and therefore of purer blood than the present day Jews—or, thanks to a reinterpretation of certain Scriptural passages, as their replacement of God’s chosen people. England, as in Blake’s poem and the subsequent hymn, was the New Jerusalem. Thus the continuing insistence that England is different from, and not part of, Europe; a greater relative tolerance, historically, for Jews; and the rumor that royal males have always been circumcised²

This mantle of chosen people, carefully cultivated by Puritans such as Richard Mather and John Cotton, passed to our side of the Atlantic with the English settlers, who moved the location of the Promised Land and of garden of Eden from the Levant to the colonies of New England. The Spanish conquistadores, of course, were the first to declare America an “earthly paradise,” a paradeisos that demanded the extermination of millions of the original inhabitants of this continent (0.3). Empires have always felt chosen and divinely ordained.

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1. Eliot Weinberger, Karmic Traces, 159. ↩︎
2. Ibid., 165. ↩︎