exhibited, and the subsequent behaviour of his youngest son, are meant to convey an emphatic warning against the moral dangers attending this new step in human development, and the degeneration to which it may lead.
II. In the narrative, however, the cultural motive is crossed by an ethnographic problem, which is still more difficult to unravel. Who are the peoples represented by the names Shem, Japheth, and Canaan? Three points may be regarded as settled: that Shem is that family to which the Hebrews reckoned themselves; that Canaan stands for the pre-Israelitish inhabitants of Palestine; and that the servitude of Canaan to Shem at least includes the subjugation of the Canaanites by Israel in the early days of the monarchy. Beyond this everything is uncertain. The older view, which explains Shem and Japheth in terms of the Table of Nations (ch. 10),—i.e. as corresponding roughly to what we call the Semitic and Aryan races,—has always had difficulty in discovering a historic situation combining Japhetic dominion over the Canaanites with a dwelling of Japheth in the tents of Shem.[1] To understand the latter of an ideal brotherhood or religious bond between the two races brings us no nearer a solution, unless we take the passage as a prophecy of the diffusion of Christianity; and even then it fails to satisfy the expressions of the text (Di., who explains the figure as expressing the more kindly feeling of the Heb. towards these races, as compared with the Canaanites).—A number of critics, starting from the assumption that the oracles reflect the circumstances and aspirations of the age when the Yahwistic document originated, take Shem as simply a name for Israel, and identify Japheth either with the Philistines (We. Mey.) or the Phœnicians (Bu. Sta. Ho.). But that the Hebrews should have wished for an enlargement of the Philistines at their own expense is incredible; and as for the Phœnicians, though their colonial expansion might have been viewed with complacency in Israel, there is no proof that an occupation of Israelitish territory on their part either took place, or would have been approved by the national sentiment under the monarchy. The alienation of a portion of Galilee to the Tyrians (1 Ki. 911-13) (Bu.) is an event little likely to have been idealised in Heb. legend. The difficulties of this theory are so great that Bertholet has proposed to recast the narrative with the omission of Japheth, leaving Shem and Canaan as types of the racial antipathy between the Hebrews and Canaanites: the figure of Japheth, and the blessing on him, he supposes to have been introduced
- ↑ As regards the former, the expulsion of Phœnician colonists from the Mediterranean coasts and Asia Minor by the Greeks (Di.) could never have been described as enslavement (see Mey. GA1, i. 311 f.); and the capture of Tyre by Alexander, the Roman conquest of Carthage, etc. (De.), are events certainly beyond the horizon of the writer,—unless, indeed, we adopt Berth.'s suggestion (see above), that v.27 is very late. For the latter, Di. hints at an absorption of Japhetic peoples in the Semitic world-empires; but that would rather be a dwelling of Shem in the tents of Japheth.
