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



Ionia and Assyria with the genealogy of Ham through Nimrod, the 

 grandson of Ham, yet shares the common tradition which traces 

 Eber the ancestor of the Hebrews (or Terah the descendant of 

 Eber} to Ur-Kasdim, i.e., to Chaldsea. Hence J, despite his hos- 

 tility to Assyria and Babylonia, admits Arpachshad, which cer- 

 tainly stands in some relationship to Ur-Kasdim, among the She- 

 mites. Since P, however, places Asshur or Assyria with the sons of 

 Shem, he does not share J's view of Assyria or Babylonia, and 

 there would be no reason why he should either omit Babylonia or 

 specifically differentiate Chaldaea from Babylonia, unless it be, indeed, 

 that he includes Arpachshad in obedience to the tradition which 

 associated the latter with the home of his people. On the whole, 

 this appears to be the more plausible view, for while P, as we have 

 seen, manifests his purely scholastic interests to an astonishing 

 degree, he yet is not entirely free from the natural spirit of national 

 likes and dislikes, and at all events would be inclined to embody 

 in his list current traditions regarding the origin of his people, even 

 where such an embodiment might be superfluous or render his 

 scheme somewhat ambiguous. Assuming then that Elam includes 

 Babylonia, and that Arpachshad is Chaldaea, the Shemites, accord- 

 ing to P, would represent the groups living in the district to which 

 the Hebrews traced their origin, Elam, Babylonia, Assyria and Chal- 

 daea, and the groups immediately to the west and northwest, classed 

 by P under the general designation of Aram. We have no means of 

 determining whether J's list also included Aram among the sons of 

 Shem, but there is also no positive evidence against it. If it did, 

 the genealogy of Aram was probably identical with the one pre- 

 served in P, or at all events did not contain sufficiently important 

 derivations to warrant the compiler who combined J with P in 

 extracting anything from J's list. So much seems certain, that J's 

 chief interest lay in Arpachshad, because of the supposed connec- 

 tion between this district and Ur-Kasdim or Chaldaea as the home 

 of the Hebrews, and J's interest here was sufficiently pronounced 

 to induce him to carry down the line of Arpachshad in its two 

 branches, Eber-Peleg and Eber-Joktan, the former representing a 

 northern group, the latter a southern, much as the Arabs carry the 

 genealogies of their clans to a northern and southern ancestor.^ 



1 See Wlistenfeld's Genealogische Tabellen der Arabischen Stdmnie und 

 Familien (Gottingen, 1852). 



