these children, the hand and design of the Creator. He had already been informed, in some supernatural way, and, doubtless, by the appearance or ministration of angels, that in about 100 years from the births of his three sons, the globe was to be destroyed by water, on which account he had already been at work twenty years in carrying forward the erection of the ark, when Shem, Ham and Japheth were born.
As a philosopher and a prophet, Noah foresaw, in the ruin of the earth by water, that its mild, healthy, and pristine climates would undergo a horrid change; and of necessity inhabitants of different characters, constitutions and complexions, would be wanted to people it; on which account he bore patiently, for the sake of the Divine purposes, the misfortune of the strange and monstrous production of his wife, in the birth of Ham, the first negro. For this reason, God produced the two new races.
In reference to the foregoing arguments, which respect the cause of Ham's name, we notice that after the flood, when children were added to his family, the same circumstance, their complexion, seems to have exerted an influence on their names also. Cush was one of the sons of Ham, which word also had a reference to that which was black. Cush, Cushan, Cushi, and Chu-Shan-Rish-A-Thaim, are all of the same or relative import, and especially the word Cushanrishathaim, signifies Ethiopian blackness, as well as the blackness of iniquity.
On this very account, the ancient country of Ethiopia, situated in Africa, in the region of the head waters of the Nile, which was settled first of all by
