The Bible’s genealogy of Noah’s sons provided the conceptual origin of the Semite category

Evidence

The idea of the Semites was based on the Bible’s genealogy of the peoples of the world, which begins with the aftermath of the Flood and its surviving human remnant, Noah and his family, as set out in the book of Genesis, chapters 9 to 11. ‘And the sons of Noah that went forth of the ark’, the Bible states, ‘were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth … These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole earth overspread.’ The chronicle explains that Noah cursed Canaan, son of Ham, and blessed ‘the LORD God of Shem’. He went on to prophesize that ‘God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem’, suggesting a special bond between their descendants. The line of the sons of Shem, who were thus the peoples of God, led, the chronicle tells us, to Abraham, the patriarch of the children of Israel and the descendants of Ishmael. Evidently, this account of human origins is primarily a genealogical schema that places at its centre the notion of lineage, and a biological division of the world’s population into familial groups: ‘These are the families of the sons of Noah, after their generations, in their peoples [begoyehem]: and by these were the peoples [ha-goyim] divided in the earth after the flood.’ — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 630

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the biblical genealogy of Shem, Ham, and Japheth as the root of the Semite/Hamite distinction.