1903.J JASTROW— THE HAMITES AND SEMITES. 195 



from all labor — is instituted to serve as a reminder to the people 

 of the conditions under which they lived in Egypt (Deut. 5, 15). 

 If we turn to the Prophets, we find Egypt invariably associated 

 with cruelty, deceit and oppression/ Pharaoh becomes a type of 

 the persecutor and of the oppressor. Egypt is therefore placed like 

 Babylonia and Assyria in the same category as Canaan — with the 

 '' accursed " races. It so happens, as already pointed out, that the 

 position of Egypt accords with the geographical scheme that P adopts 

 for the Hamitic nations ; and while, in view of this, we are not 

 justified in attributing to this compiler a motive of national hatred 

 in placing Egypt with Cush, J, who does not appear to have had 

 such a geographical system and for whom Ham is merely the larger 

 term for Canaan which permits him to place under one category a 

 whole series of nations who were hostile to his people, and who in 

 his opinion are responsible for the dark pages in pre-exilic 

 Hebrew history, is evidently actuated by such motives of national 

 hatred in associating Egypt with Canaan \ and as already intimated, 

 the compiler who combined J with P, likewise, no longer occupies 

 the objective and more purely scholastic standpoint of P, and takes 

 over therefore from J the extended notices about Egypt and Canaan 

 in order to point out in detail all those who belong to the " ac- 

 cursed " sons of Ham. 



VIII. 



This spirit of hostility crops out again in the inclusion of the 

 Capthorites (verse 14) where the addition of the gloss ''whence 

 came the Philistines" reveals the animus of the compiler. Cap- 

 thor, as Prof. W. Max Muller^ has shown, is a term of indefinite 

 character but which certainly included Cilicia and adjacent parts 

 of the Asia Minor coast, and even a writer of so limited a range of 

 ethnological and geographical knowledge as J, granting that he no 

 longer knew the exact distinction of Capthor,^ could hardly have 

 supposed the Capthorites to belong in the same category with the 



^ It is sufficient to refer to such passages as Isaiah ii, 15, and chap. 19; Eze- 

 kiel, chap. 30; Jeremiah, chap. 46; Amos 8, 9. 



"^ Asien und IC?-iropa, p. 347, supplemented by the same writer's SUidien 

 zur vorderasiatischen Geshichte, ii i^Mitteilungen der vorderasiatischen Gesell- 

 schaft, 1900), pp. 6-1 1. 



3 That in accord with prevailing views or traditions he identified Capthor with 

 Crete is, on the whole, more than likely. 



