Why did God curse Ham's Son?

[Logostician]

Gen 9:1

And God blessed Noah, AND HIS SONS, and said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth.

Surely Ham deserved to be punished.  But God has already blessed him.  Therefore I beleive that God does not punish Ham directly because God cannot lie.  He cannot bless and curse at the same time.  This is not to say that there is anything God can't do.  But there are many things that he won't do.

The punishment of Canaan, as the son of Ham, is actually a punishment of Ham.  Descendents were seen to be a continuation of life during this time, and in many ways still are today.  Genealogies were carefully tracked.  Having sons who were blessed by God was a blessing for the father as well.  This is why Hannah desperately prays for God to give her a son for her husband Elkanah in 1 Samuel.

Later, as God gives the ten commandments to Moses, he says:

Deu 5:9

...for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.

Canaan is not revealed in to be hateful toward God at the time of Ham's sin, but he, and his descendants certainly demonstrate it later.  And Moses will be sent by God to take the Promised Land from the Canaanites who have defied God.

 

[glff]

I did a study once on Nimrod who was Ham's grandson.  Interesting to note that a curse is unto the third or forth generation, so Nimrod should have been a servant, but instead, he ruled over mankind hunting down anyone who left his kingdom and brought them back, probably dead.  It doesn't tell us how old Nimrod was, but Ham's brother, Shem had a grandson who lived 440 years.

So Nimrod probably kept mankind from fulfilling the Lord's directive to replenish the earth for hundreds of years.  When he built a tower into the heavens, the Lord took matters into his own hands and confounded their language so that they could no longer understand each other and off they went, en masse.

glf