1903.] JASTROW — THE HAMITES AND SEMITES. Ibd 



having no connection originally with the tale itself/ Whether 

 the introduction of Ham led to the implied change and to the en- 

 largement of the conceptions connected with Japheth is, again, a 

 question on which it is useless to speculate, and we must content 

 ourselves with the recognition of the wide gulf existing between 

 Shem, Japheth and Canaan on the one hand as they appear in the 

 old poem and Shem, Ham and Japheth as found in the later strata 

 of J and in P. The poem is a fragment of an old composition 

 reflecting tribal dissensions — probably in Palestine — whereas the 

 later figures of Shem, Ham and Japheth belong to the period of an 

 enlarged historical perspective and of more advanced political 

 organization, when, through contact with the nations around, 

 interest was aroused in the larger aspects of humanity as a motley 

 group of peoples and when speculation arose as to the origin of the 

 great variety of nations into which mankind appeared to be divided. 

 This speculation woven in with more or less uncertain traditions 

 and legendary lore finds its first definite expression in a survey of 

 the nations of special interest to the Hebrews and its final outcome 

 in such an elaborately constructed list as is furnished by the present 

 Volkertafel. 



IV. 



Coming back, now, to this contrast presented by the remains of 

 an older Volkertafel as embodied in J and the later one in P, we 

 are permitted to conclude from the fact that the final redactor of J 

 and P supplemented P's list by data which bear primarily on those 

 nations with whom the Hebrews came into more or less close con- 

 tact in the course of their history, and since J (with later editions) 

 constituted the source of the compiler for such data, J's Volkertafel 

 would thus represent the natural intermediate stage between an 

 indifference on the one hand to the determination of the relation- 

 ships existing between the nations of the known world — the feature 

 of the period in which Shem, Japheth and Canaan living in close 

 proximity to one another marked the extent of ethnological inter- 

 est — and the endeavor, on the other hand, to view this relationship 



1 E.g , the so-called " Song of the Well " (Numbers 21, 18) which certainly 

 does not fit in with the narrative in which it has been inserted, and the « Song 

 of Heshbon " {id. vv. 28-30) which is a song celebrating the triumph of some peo- 

 ple — hardly the Hebrews — over Moab and which is introduced in connection 

 with a tale of Israel's victory over Sidon. See Gray's Commentary to Numbers^ 

 pp. 301, 302. 



