Ham, pronounced something like khawm, means “warm” or “hot.” You’ll be surprised with his biography.
One more lesson on the amazing history of Ham. According to the Bible, he was the father of all people of color. Not the swarthy-skinned people of the Middle East, who traced their line to Shem; nor the lighter-skinned people of the Indus Valley, who were related to Japheth; but the Negroid people of Africa, the Native peoples of North and South America, and the Asian people groups—all belong to Ham. History records a repeated pattern of migration. While the sons of Shem stayed local to the Fertile Crescent (composed of the Nile, Jordan, and Tigris-Euphrates Valleys), the sons of Ham were pushed to the extremities of civilization, often to inhospitable environments like the Australian Outback, the Arctic, or the Kalahari in Africa. There they not only survived, but thrived, by being technologically inventive. Westerners may think we trace our technological roots to Greece and Rome, but they learned it from the Etruscans, Minoans, and Egyptians, all sons of Ham. Citing over 100 sources, Arthur Custance shows that the basic tools (like the Archimedes’ Screw, used from drill bits to grain augers), production methods (like metallurgy and vulcanizing), and domesticated animals and field crops all came from the sons of Ham. But soon the sons of Japheth would move in and dominate the culture. Japheth developed science, but Ham provided the technology to do it. Our world works best when the three lines of humanity—specializing in spiritual, physical, and intellectual pursuits—work in harmony. Some day it will work perfectly, when the true Servant of servants reigns and His loyal subjects will be, as Revelation 5:9 states, “redeemed…to God…out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation.”