Black People In The Bible

What The Biblical Texts Actually Say About Black People

The question of Black people in the Bible comes up constantly in my inbox and in comment sections. Most of the time the person asking has been fed a version of scripture that completely whitewashes the ancient Near East and East Africa. That's not an accident. It's been happening for centuries through translation choices, artistic tradition, and colonial-era publishing. There are several direct references. The most cited is the Cushite woman Moses married in Numbers 12:1. Cush refers to what we now call Nubia, roughly modern Sudan and South Sudan. The text says she was Cushite, which at the time meant someone from a dark-skinned African kingdom south of Egypt. Another one is the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8, who was a court official of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians. He was baptized by Philip. Then there's the Song of Solomon 1:5 where the speaker says "I am dark but lovely." The Hebrew word for dark there is negah, which also relates to skin darkness. Scholars debate whether this is self-description or a term of endearment, but either way it's a Black woman speaking positively about her complexion. Shimon bar Yochai in Leviticus Rabbah makes a point about Cushites and how God loves them specifically. That's midrashic literature, not scripture, but it shows how early Jewish thinkers grappled with the presence of Black Africans in their sacred texts.

And then there's Ham and the curse of Canaan. This is the one people get wrong all the time. Genesis 9 has Noah cursing Canaan, son of Ham, after Ham sees his father naked. For centuries white supremacists used this passage to justify slavery and racial hierarchy. But the text never says Ham was Black. It never says Canaan was Black. It says Ham was the father of Canaan, whose descendants included the Canaanite peoples of the Levant. The whole racist interpretation is a later invention with zero textual basis. I've spent more time than I care to admit debunking this exact misreading in online discussions, usually after someone posts a screenshot of some sermonic video claiming black people were cursed. Simcha Fasman, an Israeli artist, did a series of paintings showing Jesus and the disciples as Middle Eastern and North African people. Some people lost their minds over it. But Fasman was just looking at what the archaeological and textual evidence actually says about the region. The people of Judea in the first century looked like people from that geography. They didn't look like Northern Europeans.

How To Approach This Topic Without Getting It Wrong

Most people who ask about Black people in the Bible haven't read the actual texts. They've heard about them secondhand, usually from someone trying to make a political point. The first thing I tell anyone approaching this material is to read the passages in context and in a decent translation. The King James Version is fine for literary purposes but terrible for historical understanding. You want something like the New Jerusalem Bible or the Jewish Study Bible if you're approaching it from a Jewish angle. The second thing is to understand that the ancient world didn't categorize people the way we do now. Race as we understand it didn't exist. The closest thing to race in antiquity was ethnicity tied to geography and language. A Cushite was someone from Cush. An Egyptian was from Egypt. A Judean was from Judea. These weren't biological categories with hierarchies attached to skin color. They were geographic and cultural markers. This distinction matters because it changes how you read every passage about foreigners in scripture. One thing I learned the hard way: when someone quotes the Song of Solomon verse about being dark but lovely, the Hebrew word negah can also mean "plague" or "affliction." Context determines which meaning applies. In Song of Solomon 1:5, most scholars agree it means dark-skinned because it's a love poem and the speaker is responding to compliments about her appearance. But if someone tries to use that same word to argue the text is saying "I am afflicted," they're pulling it out of context. I've seen this happen in comment sections more times than I can count.

Common Pitfalls And What Beginners Miss

The biggest mistake people make is assuming that because the Bible mentions African peoples, it's making some kind of progressive statement about race. It isn't. The biblical authors had no concept of racial equality. They were concerned with covenant, law, worship, and survival as small peoples surrounded by empires. When they mention Cushites or Ethiopians, it's usually in passing. The Ethiopian eunuch is significant because he becomes an early convert, not because of his race. The Cushite wife of Moses is significant because Miriam and Aaron object to it, and God sides with Moses. The racial reading is imposed from the outside. Another pitfall is treating every dark-skinned figure in scripture as symbolic of Black identity. That's anachronistic. The Bible describes various peoples with different skin tones, but these descriptions serve narrative or theological purposes, not anthropological ones. When Rahab is described as a prostitute in Jericho, that's a characterization of her profession, not her ethnicity. When the Shulammite woman in Song of Solomon is called dark, it's part of a love poem. Don't project modern identity politics onto ancient texts and then pretend the texts were saying something they never intended to say. The real problem with the whole discussion is that it gets weaponized. I've watched people use the presence of Black figures in the Bible to score points in culture wars without engaging with the actual texts. Meanwhile, people who genuinely want to understand the diverse ethnic makeup of the biblical world get dismissed as doing identity politics. Both sides are usually misreading the sources.

If you want to go deeper, the work of Frank M. Yamada on race and the Bible is solid. Also look at Nicholas Postgate's writings on Cush in the Hebrew Bible. For the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition, which has its own rich biblical scholarship and keeps the Kebra Nagast alongside scripture, that's a whole separate conversation that most Western readers haven't encountered. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church has been Christian since the fourth century and their biblical canon includes books most Protestant and Catholic churches don't use. Their of these passages is thousands of years old and completely detached from European racial debates. That alone should tell you something about how recently the whole "Black in the Bible" conversation became what it is today.