Who are Semites?

The names of Noah's sons are given us in verse 18, -- Shem, Ham and Japheth, -- then the positive declaration is made that "from these the whole earth was populated. Shem is the father of the Semitic, swarthy races, Ham of the darker races, and Japheth of the fairer white races. However obscure some races have been, they have become obscure since Noah's time. How they were scattered through the world, -- even into North and South America, -- we have no clear knowledge, but all are the descendants of Noah.

The names of Noah's sons are given us in verse 18, — Shem, Ham and Japheth, — then the positive declaration is made that “from these the whole earth was populated.” Shem is the father of the Semitic, swarthy races, Ham of the darker races, and Japheth of the fairer white races. However obscure some races have been, they have become obscure since Noah's time. How they were scattered through the world, — even into North and South America, — we have no clear knowledge, but all are the descendants of Noah.

The Ninevites or Assyrians, as known in scripture and on the monuments, are judged to have belonged to the Semitic stock — the older inhabitants of the district having been expelled or destroyed. They would thus be allied in blood and in language to the Hebrews. They differed from the Babylonians who were a mixed race, partly Accadian and partly Semitic.

It is not very clear why Abraham was called a Hebrew. It is generally supposed to be derived from his ancestor Eber or Heber; but it will be seen from Gen. 11:17-26 that there were five generations between Eber and Abraham, so by this derivation many others might have been called Hebrews. Gen. 10:21 says that Shem was "the father of all the children of Eber." This shows that the Hebrews were Shemites, but many other tribes were 'Shemites' that could not be called Hebrews. In scripture the name is not applied to any except to Abraham and his descendants, and only to those who descended through Isaac and Jacob, to the exclusion of the children of Ishmael and Esau. So that there must be some other reason for the name and for its being thus restricted.

The root of the word is 'to pass over,' as when one passes over a river, or from one region to another. Abraham was bidden to leave his country and his kindred and to go into the land of Canaan, and the word Hebrew is not employed until Abraham had left his country and was in the land of Canaan. Gen. 14:13. When there he was a 'sojourner,' in a strange country, dwelling in tents. Heb. 11:9. The name was therefore characteristic, and the people of the land could go to Abraham the 'sojourner' and tell him that Lot had been taken prisoner. Joseph when in Egypt said he had been stolen from "the land of the Hebrews." Gen. 40:15. The above characteristic was doubtless subsequently lost, and nothing seen in it but the natural descent from Abraham through Isaac and Jacob; the same persons being mostly called Israelites. The descendants of Ishmael and Esau were not sojourners in the promised land, but wandered whither they would. The name Hebrew does not occur in the O.T. after 1 Samuel except in Jer. 34:9, 14 and once in Jonah 1:9.

Of Shem — Mesopotamians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Lud and Syrians.

The portions of the earth occupied by the descendants of Shem intersect as it were the portions of Ham and Japheth, and stretch from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. Shem had five sons:

It may be necessary to premise that learned men divide the whole number of languages that are, or ever have been, spoken, into several chief families. Of these by far the most important are — First, the Indo-Germanic family, including Sanscrit, Greek, Latin, and German, with nearly all European tongues. And secondly, the Shemitic, including Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic or Syriac.

The Old Testament is the collection of books, written almost entirely in Hebrew, which have come down to us from the ancient Jews and the first Christians, stamped with Jewish reception and New Testament citation. Hebrew, by us the most cherished of what since the time of Eichhorn has been called the Semitic family of languages, may be called the mother-tongue of the Israelites, which they derived from the Patriarchs. Abram, if we may judge by comparative philology combined with the words of a Prophet, would seem when he entered the land to have adopted the 'language of Canaan' (Isa. 19:18),which would thus become the Hebrew language. He would have the less difficulty in doing so if, as seems probable, it were a Semitic dialect. There is no indication of Abram's having employed an interpreter in Canaan, as his descendants at a later period were obliged to do in Egypt (Gen. 42:23). Renan gives as examples of Canaanite names of men or towns, being pure Hebrew, Abimelech, Adoni-bezek, Kirjath-sepher, Kirjath-jearim. Munk includes Melchisedek in his list. The Hebrews do not seem even to have translated names, but sometimes changed them: see Num. 32:38. Such oft-recurring words as God in the form El, of Baal, king, priest, sacrifice, pillar, are Canaanitish or Phoenician. The usual language of Laban, possibly akin to the mother-tongue of Abram himself, who was however a native of Babylonia, was not Hebrew, but Aramaic. This appears from Gen. 31:47. Renan makes Hebrew the language also of the old stock, but only by treating this passage as unhistorical. The 'Chaldee,' which has come down to us as the original Text of Ezra 4:8 - 6:18, and Ezra 7:12-26, Daniel 2:4 - 7:28, and Jeremiah 10:11, by mistake called 'Syriac' in the A.V. of Dan. 2:4, was the language the Jews of the Captivity brought with them from Babylon; it is another of the Aramaic dialects, and must not be confounded with the language of the Chaldeans spoken of in Dan. 1:4. This Chaldee seems to have been a principal ingredient in the vernacular of Palestine in the time of our Lord, though in the New Testament called 'The Hebrew dialect,' because spoken by Hebrew, as distinct from Hellenist or Greek-speaking Jews. The 'holy nation,' then, began and, in a sense, ended with a language not that of the long period during which it rightly took its place before the rest of the nations as the people of God. We shall resume the consideration of the history of the Hebrew language in a separate chapter.

It has been judged that the Hebrew word Kasdim, translated 'Chaldeans,' is from the Assyrian word Kasadu, 'to conquer,' and is applied to those who 'conquered' the Chaldean plain. The earlier inhabitants had an agglutinative language, such as the descendants of Cush would have: whereas the Chaldeans spoken of in the O.T. were a Semitic race, who then possessed the land. At first they were a number of tribes in South Babylonia, but were afterwards united and increased. They became merged by the mixing of races, intercourse, etc., so as not to be distinguishable from the Babylonians.

The Jews, as is known, assign to Cush (translated Ethiopia ordinarily) not only his African seat but the opposite coast of Arabia and the southern shore of Asia generally into India. And this is well founded. But Arabia received also a large Shemitic population which gave character to their language; and this as we shall see not only from Joktan, Eber's son, but from Jokshan, Abraham's son by Keturah, and from Ishmael's twelve sons, with some of Esau's descendants. Even Homer (Od. ii. 23, 24) speaks of Ethiopians as divided into two parts, the most distant of men, some at the setting sun, and some at the rising. It was a Turanian race, which included the Turks, but not the Armenians who were rightly given to Japheth. But the Jews seem never to have realised the fact that the ancient Persian tongue (Zend) and that of northern and central India (Sanskrit) yield the fullest indication of Japhetic origin.