Note A — No. 4 THE ANTI-SLAVERY EXAMINER. THE BIBLE AGAINST SLAVERY. AN INQUIRY INTO THE PATRIARCHAL AND MOSAIC SYSTEMS ON THE SUBJECT OF HUMAN RIGHTS. NEW-YORK: PUBLISHED BY THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, NO. 143 NASSAU STREET. 1837. (continued 2)
Reading edition
Further, if Ham were meant what propriety in calling him the younger son? The order in which Noah's sons are always mentioned, makes Ham the second, and not the younger son. If it be said that Bible usage is variable, and that the order of birth is not always preserved in enumerations; the reply is, that, enumeration in the order of birth, is the rule, in any other order the exception. Besides, if the younger member of a family, takes precedence of older ones in the family record, it is a mark of pre-eminence, either in original endowments, or providential instrumentality. Abraham, though sixty years younger than his eldest brother, and probably the youngest of Terah's sons, stands first in the family genealogy. Nothing in Ham's history warrants the idea of his pre-eminence; besides, the Hebrew word Hakkaton, rendered younger, means the little, small. The same word is used in Isaiah xl. 22. "A LITTLE ONE shall become a thousand." Also in Isaiah xxii. 24. "All vessels of SMALL quantity." So Psalms cxv. 13. "He will bless them that fear the Lord, both SMALL and great." Also Exodus xviii. 22. "But every SMALL matter they shall judge." It would be a perfectly literal rendering of Gen. ix. 24, if it were translated thus, "when Noah knew what his little sonA, or grandson (Beno hakkaton) had done unto him, he said, cursed be Canaan," &c.