The Bible is a wonderful book that shows the interactions among humans and God’s interactions with man. Although the word of God highlights Israel as God’s centerpiece of mankind, it also points out that God doesn’t play favorites based on race or ethnicity, desiring that all men have a relationship with him. Many stories in the Bible have been made into movies and for the sake of making them palatable and dramatic to moviegoers, much of what was stated in the Bible about characters and events were ignored, making the movies only partially true.
From Genesis to Revelation are many stories of how people of different races and ethnicities affected Israel, Judaism, and Christianity for good and for bad. I’ve decided in this post to highlight a few biblical characters of Hamitic descent. There are plenty of these black people who were at odds with God’s plans like the pharoah of Egypt and his magicians, Jannes and Jambres, who opposed Moses, or the Canaanite people of Sodom and Gomorrah who participated in all kinds of wickedness. But there are also plenty of blacks who had positive contributions and those are the ones I will focus on.
1. Melchizedek, king of Salem: The city of Salem was ancient Jerusalem which was inhabited by the Jebusites, descendants of Canaan, son of Ham. Melchizedek was not only a king but a priest of God (Jehovah), according to Genesis 14. After Abram (Abraham) returned from rescuing Lot and the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, Melchizedek welcomed him with food, drink, and a special blessing from God. In return, Abram paid him a tithe of all of the spoils of the war he had just won. Melchizedek is also referred to as being a symbol of Jesus Christ in Psalms 110 and Hebrews 5-7. It says a lot about a man if he is so highly regarded by God that he is considered a symbol of the Lord and has three whole chapters in Hebrews extolling his virtues as they relate to Christ.
2. Ephron the Hittite: The Hittites were descendants of Heth, son of Canaan, the son of Ham. Abraham lived among them and apparently built up a good rapport with them while living among them. In Genesis 23, when Sarah died, Abraham went to the Hittites to ask if he could have some real estate from them to bury her. The Hittites had such a great respect for Abraham that they told him all he had to do was ask any of them for land and they would give it to him to bury Sarah. Abraham asked Ephron the Hittite to sell him some land. Ephron responded that he didn’t want to sell it, but that it would be a gift. The land was appraised at 400 shekels of silver (over $700) which Ephron thought was such a negligible amount that he didn’t want to bother charging Abraham for it. Ephron must have been pretty wealthy if he thought $700 was next to nothing. But Abraham, being the honorable man he was, paid Ephron anyway and buried Sarah there. Abraham and his descendants down to Joseph were also buried there and the Israelites always called the burial place the field of Ephron in his honor.
3. Asenath, Joseph’s wife: Asenath was the daughter of the pagan priest, Potipherah, in Egypt. The priestly class in Egypt were wealthy and had a high status. Although it is never stated that she converted to follow Jehovah, the God of Joseph, Asenath must have known what a mighty deliverance God had given to Joseph in Egypt. She gave him two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim, who were both named in honor of God.
4. Jethro, or Hobab, Moses’ father in law: Jethro was a descendant of Midian, the son of Abraham through Keturah. We find out that the Midianites (and Keturah) were of Ethiopian descent in Numbers 12 when Miriam and Aaron voiced their opposition to Moses’ having married Zipporah, an Ethiopian. When Moses went back to Egypt to free his people, Zipporah and their sons started to make the journey with him in Exodus 4 but God stopped Moses on the way back and commanded him to circumcise his firstborn son before he would let him continue the journey. Zipporah was so upset with Moses about the circumcision, and they had to wait for their son to heal, that he sent her back to her father before he met Aaron to finish the journey. They all later joined up with Moses and the Israelites in the wilderness (Exodus 18). When Jethro saw that Moses had such a huge burden on him to sit and judge the Israelites’ concerns in the wilderness, he gave Moses wise counsel to appoint rulers to help judge the legal matters of the population. This lightened Moses’ load a great deal so he could be the kind of leader God needed him to be for Israel.
5. Rahab, the Canaanite harlot of Jericho: Although Rahab led an immoral lifestyle, the testimony of God through the Israelites helped her change her ways. She believed that God had given Canaanite lands to Israel and her belief in God was accounted to her for righteousness. She aided and abetted the Israelite spies when they came to scope out Jericho and then misled the Jericho soldiers to allow the spies to return to the Israelite camp safely. As a reward, she saved her household from destruction when Jericho was conquered by hanging a scarlet thread in her window, which became symbolic of Christ’s blood that saves repentant sinners from destruction. She ended up marrying Salmon (Ruth 4:20-21), thereby becoming a direct ancestor of the Lord Jesus Christ.
6. Uriah the Hittite: A man of valor who was loyal to king David and helped David in his rise to power and in maintaining his power. Unfortunately, he was repaid by the king with David committing adultery with his wife, Bathsheba, and then David sending him to the front lines in a war where Uriah was killed.
7. The queen of Sheba: The queen of Sheba is also referred to as the queen of the south by Jesus in Matthew 12. There are two lands called Sheba in the Bible. One Sheba is descended from Cush (Genesis 10:7), the son of Ham who founded Ethiopia. This land was in southwestern Arabia and is the land where the queen of Sheba ruled. The other Sheba is descended from Shem (Genesis 10:28) and they settled in western Mesopotamia near the Persian Gulf (according to Josephus and other historians as mentioned in An Historical Geography of the Old and New Testament by Edward Wells (1820), p. 100). The queen of Sheba ruled a land known for its international trade in spices, gold, and precious stones (1 Kings 10) which is how she heard of Solomon. She had to see Solomon for herself to determine if all that she heard was true about him. After she saw how he ran his kingdom and household and after she asked him all kinds of difficult questions, she complimented Solomon and blessed God, acknowledging his power and confessing faith in him, for which Christ himself commended her in Matthew 12. This black woman ruled a nation, was wealthy, highly educated, and most importantly had faith in God.
8. Ebedmelech, the Ethiopian: He served as a eunuch in the household of the Israelite king Zedekiah. After God’s prophet Jeremiah was unjustly thrown in prison for proclaiming God’s word, Ebedmelech heard about it and knew Jeremiah’s life was in jeopardy since it was a holding cell full of deep mud. Realizing that Jeremiah could die from starvation, Ebedmelech ran to king Zedekiah and pleaded with him to let him get Jeremiah out of the cell. The king gave Ebedmelech thirty men to help him, and Ebedmelech used his ingenuity to devise a way to pull Jeremiah out of the muddy cell, saving the man of God’s life. As a reward for blessing the man of God which was an action reflecting his trust in the Lord, the Lord blessed Ebedmelech by sparing his life and sparing him from captivity when Babylon overthrew Jerusalem.
9. Simon of Cyrene: Cyrene was founded by Greek colonists in northwestern Libya in 631 B.C. The Greeks often took the lands forcefully from these descendants of Phut, the son of Ham. But they also intermarried with them to form a mixed people of Africa (The Cambridge History of Africa by Desmond J. Clark, et al., 1975, pp. 114-116). It is believed that some of the Jews fleeing from Babylon eventually settled here as well. From these interracial marriages descended Simon of Cyrene who was forced by the Romans to carry Jesus’ cross to Golgotha, or Calvary. Simon was so affected by what he witnessed that day that he became a believer and witnessed to his own sons, Alexander and Rufus, what he saw.
10. Ethiopian eunuch: A treasurer serving Candace, queen of the Ethiopians. Candace was a title held by several queens of Ethiopia. This eunuch served under the Candace that was reigning in 34 A.D. when the eunuch was making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to worship the Lord. Since he owned a copy of the Hebrew scriptures and was familiar with them, it is obvious that there were Jewish proselytes in Ethiopia during this time. The Ethiopian queen must have been open to allowing her subjects religious freedom if she let her treasurer make a religious pilgrimage. The eunuch was hungry to know the truth behind the prophecy he read in Isaiah and God sent Philip the evangelist to explain it to him. Upon hearing the gospel, the Ethiopian believed and was baptized. He is the one who is credited with taking Christianity to the nation of Ethiopia where many got saved with the blessings of the Candaces who reigned. Their Christian heritage continues there today, although there are known to be incidents of persecution taking place there from time to time.
11. Simeon, called Niger: An African who was named as being among the prophets and teachers at Antioch (Acts 13). He was one who ministered before the Lord with fasting and prayer. As a result, the Holy Spirit spoke to him and the others telling them to separate Barnabas and Saul with the laying on of hands to be sent out from the church as missionaries.
12. Lucius of Cyrene: Another African in Antioch who ministered alongside Simeon and others. He was with the group who the Holy Spirit told to lay hands on Barnabas and Saul to be missionaries.
The fact that God uses people of all races and backgrounds in the Bible shows us that he is the God who desires to be the Lord of all mankind.
–posted by Harry A. Gaylord–