Few passages of Scripture have enjoyed such a malign influence in the modern world as Genesis ix.25, or what has come to be known as the Curse of Ham. Indeed David Whitford notes that in 1964 Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, in the course of a defiant speech against civil rights, had Genesis ix.18–27 read into the Congressional Record: proof, it seemed, that racial discrimination rested upon divine authority. Yet, as Whitford shows, the Curse of Ham as we now recognise it is of relatively recent provenance. In a compelling study, Whitford traces the piecemeal formation over the course of the early modern era of what he calls the ‘Curse matrix’ – the familiar compound of Ham, blackness, race, Africa and slavery – which only solidified in its modern form during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The reception history of Genesis ix.25, it transpires, is far from straightforward. Certainly, Whitford demolishes the notion that the Curse of Ham was a straightforward inheritance from the distant past, and in particular the canard that responsibility for the association between Hamite slavery and Africans lay with Jewish exegetes, a misunderstanding which continues to have serious implications for race relations in the United States. Instead Whitford demonstrates convincingly that no clear set of connections among the various elements of the Curse matrix existed during the early modern era, and indeed that residual counter-connections continued to shape readings of the text. For example, since the Middle Ages some commentators had identified Ham with serfdom (without any connection to race), but this was more than counterbalanced by a genealogical tradition which linked Ham with kings and learned magicians, and identified him, insofar as race had any bearing on things, as white. For several commentators Ham's associations were indeed negative, but connected to idolatry and false religion, not to servitude. Annius of Viterbo – and several early modern theologians, cosmographers and antiquaries who followed his lead – thought that the Persian demi-god Zoroaster was, in fact, a disguised memory of the biblical Ham. So too was the Roman god Saturn. The curse itself was equally problematic for as recounted in Scripture it was not a malediction upon Ham himself, but upon his son Canaan, who, as Whitford notes, was silently written out of commentaries on this topic in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Meanwhile, in the works of the Elizabethan seafarer, George Best, who was troubled that relative proximity to the sun could not explain variations in skin colour, Whitford shows how an association was becoming established between the Curse and blackness. However, the scrupulous Whitford never forecloses on the variety of discordant residual interpretations which continued to surround the emergent, but far from established, Curse matrix. Only in the eighteenth century in the work of Thomas Newton, who became bishop of Bristol, does Whitford find that Genesis ix.25 assumed the function of a prophecy. The Curse of Ham emerged – all too conveniently, perhaps, but, it seems, barely consciously – from convergent, but unconnected, processes of elision and distortion.