188 JASTROW — THE HAMITES AND SEMITES. [April 4, 



risky and hazardous conjectures.^ It is to be noted that Canaan 

 occupies the fourth and last place among the sons of Ham, which 

 of itself raises the suspicion that its addition is due to an after 

 thought, and that, moreover, P does not follow up the genealogy 

 of either Mizraim or Canaan, so that the later redactor was 

 obliged to supply the omission from J. I venture to suggest, there- 

 fore, that we have in the addition of Canaan the first betrayal of 

 the compiler's subjective point of view. Under the influence of the 

 same hostile spirit toward the Canaanites which manifests itself in 

 the old poem embodied in J, but with the extension of this hostility 

 to a larger group — to Ham, which was substituted for Canaan — the 

 compiler of P's list places Canaan in the group now associated 

 with the accursed nations, but which was originally intended 

 merely to represent the remote nations of the south, as Japheth rep- 

 resented remote nations of the west, north and northeast. That 

 even a learned compiler living in Babylonia, and actuated primarily 

 by a scholastic aim to draw up an elaborate scheme of a series of 

 nations and peoples in illustration of his theory that all mankind 

 can be traced back to a single ancestor, should be subject to the 

 deeply imbedded hostility existing from the days of the Hebrew 

 invasion of Palestine between Hebrews and Canaanites is surely not 

 surprising. Such a limitation of the mental horizon is precisely of 

 the kind that we would have a right to expect. Removing Canaan 

 from the group, we would have the Hamites consistently represent- 

 ing the remote nations of the south, as the Japhethites represent the 

 remote nations of the west, north and northeast. 



VI. 



Leaving aside for the moment the problem involved in the 

 change of sentiment which converted the Hamites into a group 

 synonymous with the '* accursed" nations and turning to the gen- 

 ealogy of Shem, it is noticeable that the beginning is made with 

 Elam, lying immediately to the east of Babylonia, and that the group 

 is closed with Aram, which appears to be a general designation for 

 the district lying to the west and northwest of Babylonia and 

 Assyria. We now know that the political relations between Elam 



^As, e.g., the view maintained by Dillmann (^Genesis, p. 179) that the inclu- 

 sion of Canaan among the sons of Ham rests upon the knowledge that the 

 Canaanites came from a southern district. 



