What Does the Torah Say About Black People? A Comparative Look at Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

The Torah — comprising Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy — contains no passage that categorizes, demeans, or racially defines Black people as a group. The Hebrew word shachar (שָׁחֹר), meaning dark or black, appears in poetic and descriptive contexts, not racial ones. Jeremiah, writing in the prophetic tradition closely tied to Torah values, uses blackness as a metaphor for grief: 'I am black; astonishment hath taken hold on me' Jeremiah 8:21, expressing mourning over national suffering, not racial identity.

Historically, the most damaging misreading linked to the Torah is the so-called 'Curse of Ham' (Genesis 9:20–27), in which Noah curses Canaan. Generations of European and American slaveholders claimed this cursed Black Africans to perpetual servitude. However, the text curses Canaan, not Ham, and makes zero reference to skin color or African peoples. Scholar David Goldenberg, in his 2003 work The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, demonstrated conclusively that the racial reading was a medieval and early-modern invention with no grounding in the Hebrew text itself.

The Torah's ethical framework, particularly in Deuteronomy, is concerned with covenant faithfulness and moral behavior — not ethnicity or skin tone. Curses in Deuteronomy are tied to apostasy and injustice Deuteronomy 29:18, Deuteronomy 27:18, not to racial identity. Causing harm to the vulnerable is explicitly condemned Deuteronomy 27:18, a principle that cuts directly against any racially oppressive reading of the text.

The Christian scriptures, including the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible as received by Christians, don't contain racial doctrine targeting Black people. In Matthew 5:36, Jesus uses 'black' and 'white' as illustrations of human limitation — neither color carries moral weight or racial meaning Matthew 5:36. The verse is about oath-taking, not ethnicity, and it's worth noting that Jesus himself was a person of color from the Middle East, a fact often obscured in Western artistic traditions.

Like Judaism, Christianity was later distorted by interpreters who used the 'Curse of Ham' to justify the transatlantic slave trade. Theologians like Thornton Stringfellow in the antebellum American South constructed elaborate biblical defenses of slavery. These arguments have been thoroughly dismantled by modern biblical scholars, including Wil Gafney and Randall Bailey, who point out that the text simply doesn't support racial hierarchy.

The New Testament's consistent message is one of human equality before God. Galatians 3:28 (not in the retrieved corpus but widely cited) declares there is 'neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free.' The Sermon on the Mount, from which Matthew 5:36 is drawn Matthew 5:36, presents a moral vision rooted in humility and justice — values fundamentally incompatible with racial supremacy.

The Quran contains no racial hierarchy and explicitly rejects the idea that God wrongs human beings based on any characteristic. Surah 10:44 states clearly that injustice originates with humans, not God Quran 10:44 — a verse that Islamic scholars have long used to argue that racism, as a form of injustice, is a human corruption, not a divine order. The Quran's vision of humanity is one of shared origin and dignity, with differentiation based solely on piety (taqwa), not ethnicity or skin color (Surah 49:13).

The Prophet Muhammad's Farewell Sermon (632 CE) is one of the most direct anti-racist statements in early religious history: 'No Arab has superiority over a non-Arab, and no non-Arab has superiority over an Arab; no white person is superior to a Black person, and no Black person is superior to a white person — except through piety.' Bilal ibn Rabah, an enslaved Black African man, was chosen as Islam's first muezzin (caller to prayer), a position of enormous spiritual honor.

Islamic jurisprudence, drawing on the Quran's insistence that God does not oppress people Quran 10:44, has generally condemned racial discrimination as a violation of divine justice. While slavery existed in the medieval Islamic world, it wasn't racially codified in the same way as in the Americas, and manumission was strongly encouraged. Modern Islamic scholars like Sherman Jackson have written extensively on Islam's resources for confronting anti-Black racism.