Abstract: This article examines the treatment of several personages identified as Hamites in the Book of Abraham. It proposes that, in contrast to traditional readings of the text, Hamites are featured positively in the Book of Abraham. This is particularly true of the daughters of Onitah and of Pharaoh himself, both of whom are presented as righteous people practicing an early form of monotheism. While I do not claim that the Book of Abraham is completely free of elements possibly deemed to be racially problematic, until now, the positive depiction of the Hamites in the text has largely been overlooked.

It has become in vogue as of late to attack the Restoration by attacking the Book of Abraham (hereafter BoA). One sees this in the recent CES Letter published by Jeremy Runnells and in the frequent discussions of the BoA from numerous critics of the Latter-day Saint faith.1 While most of these arguments against the BoA have been thoroughly rebutted by Latter-day Saint scholars,2 one argument that has not received adequate [Page 34]attention is the charge that the BoA is an explicitly racist, particularly anti-black racist, document.3 John Dehlin, for example, makes this contention in several of his online presentations.4

Scholars who have acknowledged this concern take two positions. The first is that those passages in the BoA that appear to have racist content were not original to the text. This is the view taken by Dan Vogel in his work Book of Abraham Apologetics.5 He argues that the passages referring to a priesthood curse and traditionally applied to black persons of African descent in the history of interpretation were themselves interpolations made by W. W.