The Deluge Tradition.

1. Next to cosmogonies, flood-legends present perhaps the most interesting and perplexing problem in comparative mythology. The wide, though curiously unequal, distribution of these stories, and the frequent occurrence of detailed resemblances to the biblical narrative, have long attracted attention, and were not unnaturally accepted as independent evidence of the strictly historical character of the latter.¹ On the question of the universality of the Deluge² they have, of course, no immediate bearing, though they frequently assert it; for it could never be supposed that the mere occurrence of a legend in a remote part of the globe proved that the Flood had been there. The utmost that could be claimed is that there had been a deluge coextensive with the primitive seat of mankind; and that the memory of the cataclysm was carried with them by the various branches of the race in their dispersion. But even that position, which is still maintained by some competent writers, is attended by difficulties which are almost insuperable. The scientific evidence for the antiquity of man all over the world shows that such an event (if it ever occurred) must have taken place many thousands of years before the date assigned to Noah; and that the tradition should have been preserved for so long a time among savage peoples without the aid of writing is incredible. The most reasonable line of explanation (though it cannot here be followed out in detail) is that the great majority of the legends preserve the recollection of local catastrophes, such as inundations, tidal waves, seismic floods accompanied by cyclones, etc., of which many historical examples are on record; while in a considerable number of cases these local legends have been combined with features due either to the diffusion of Babylonian culture or to the direct influence of the Bible through Christian missionaries.³ In this note we shall confine our attention to the group of legends most closely affiliated to the Babylonian tradition.

2. Of the Babylonian story the most complete version is contained in the eleventh Tablet of the Gilgameš Epic.¹ Gilgameš has arrived at the Isles of the Blessed to inquire of his ancestor Utnapištim how he had been received into the society of the gods. The answer is the long and exceedingly graphic description of the Flood which occupies the bulk of the Tablet. The hero relates how, while he dwelt at Šurippak on the Euphrates, it was resolved by the gods in council to send the Flood (abûbu) on the earth. Ea, who had been present at the council, resolved to save his favourite Utnapištim; and contrived without overt breach of confidence to convey to him a warning of the impending danger, commanding him to build a ship (elippu) of definite dimensions for the saving of his life. The ‘superlatively clever one’ (Atra-ḥasis, a name of Utnapištim) understood the message and promised to obey; and was furnished with a misleading pretext to offer his fellow-citizens for his extraordinary proceedings. The account of the building of the ship (line 48 ff.) is even more obscure than Genesis 6^14–16: it is enough to say that it was divided into compartments and was freely smeared with bitumen. The lading of the vessel, and the embarking of the family and dependants of Utnapištim (including artizans), with domestic and wild animals, are then described (line 81 ff.); and last of all, in the evening, on the appearance of a sign predicted by Šamaš the sun-god, Utnapištim himself enters the ship, shuts his door, and hands over the command to the steersman, Puzur-Bel (90 ff.). On the following morning the storm (magnificently described in lines 97 ff.) broke; and it raged for six days and nights, till all mankind were destroyed, and the very gods fled to the heaven of Anu and “cowered in terror like a dog.”

This brings us to the incident of the birds (146–155):

On this Utnapištim released all the animals; and, leaving the ship, offered a sacrifice:

The deities then begin to quarrel, Ištar and Ea reproaching Bel for his thoughtlessness in destroying mankind indiscriminately, and Bel accusing Ea of having connived at the escape of Utnapištim. Finally, Bel is appeased; and entering the ship blesses the hero and his wife:

3. The dependence of the biblical narrative on this ancient Babylonian legend hardly requires detailed proof. It is somewhat more obvious in the Yahwistic recension than in the Priestly; but there is enough in the common substratum of the two accounts to show that the Hebrew tradition as a whole was derived from Babylonia. Thus both Yahwist and Priestly-Code agree with the Babylonian story in the general conception of the Flood as a divine visitation, its universality (so far as the human race is concerned), the warnings conveyed to a favoured individual, and the final pacification of the deity who had caused the Deluge. Yahwist agrees with Babylonia in the following particulars: the entry of the hero into the ark after the premonitory rain; the shutting of the door; the prominence of the number 7; the episode of the birds; the sacrifice; and the effect of its ‘savour’ on the gods. Priestly-Code has also its peculiar correspondences (though some of these may have been in Yahwist originally): e.g. the precise instructions for building the ark; the mention of bitumen (a distinctively Babylonian touch); the grounding of the ark on a mountain; the blessing on the survivors.¹ By the side of this close and marked parallelism, the material differences on which Nickel (page 185) lays stress—viz. as to (a) the chronology, (b) the landing-place of the ark, (c) the details of the sending out of the birds, (d) the sign of the rainbow (absent in Babylonian), and (e) the name of the hero—sink into insignificance. They are, indeed, sufficient to disprove immediate literary contact between the Hebrew writers and the Gilgameš Tablets; but they do not weaken the presumption that the story had taken the shape known to us in Babylonia before it passed into the possession of the Israelites. And since we have seen (page 177) that the Babylonian legend was already reduced to writing about the time usually assigned to the Abrahamic migration, it is impossible to suppose that the Hebrew oral tradition had preserved an independent recollection of the historical occurrence which may be assumed as the basis of fact underlying the Deluge tradition.—The differences between the two narratives are on this account all the more instructive. While the Genesis narratives are written in prose, and reveal at most occasional traces of a poetic original (8²² in Yahwist, 7^11b 8^2a in Priestly-Code), the Babylonian epic is genuine poetry, which appeals to a modern reader in spite of the strangeness of its antique sentiment and imagery. Reflecting the feelings of the principal actor in the scene, it possesses a human interest and pathos of which only a few touches appear in Yahwist, and none at all in Priestly-Code. The difference here is not wholly due to the elimination of the mythological element by the biblical writers: it is characteristic of the Hebrew popular tale that it shuns the ‘fine frenzy’ of the poet, and finds its appropriate vehicle in the unaffected simplicity of prose recitation. In this we have an additional indication that the story was not drawn directly from a Babylonian source, but was taken from the lips of the common people; although in Priestly-Code it has been elaborated under the influence of the religious theory of history peculiar to that document (page lx f.). The most important divergences are naturally those which spring from the religion of the Old Testament—its ethical spirit, and its monotheistic conception of God. The ethical motive, which is but feebly developed in the Babylonian account, obtains clear recognition in the hands of the Hebrew writers: the Flood is a divine judgement on human corruption; and the one family saved is saved on account of the righteousness of its head. More pervasive still is the influence of the monotheistic idea. The gods of the Babylonian version are vindictive, capricious, divided in counsel, false to each other and to men; the writer speaks of them with little reverence, and appears to indulge in flashes of Homeric satire at their expense. Over against this picturesque variety of deities we have in Genesis the one almighty and righteous God,—a Being capable of anger and pity, and even change of purpose, but holy and just in His dealings with men. It is possible that this transformation supplies the key to some subtle affinities between the two streams of tradition. Thus in the Babylonian version the fact that the command to build the ark precedes the announcement of the Flood, is explained by the consideration that Ea cannot explicitly divulge the purpose of the gods; whereas in Yahwist it becomes a test of the obedience of Noah (Gunkel page 66). Which representation is older can scarcely be doubted. It is true, at all events, that the Babylonian parallel serves as a “measure of the unique grandeur of the idea of God in Israel, which was powerful enough to purify and transform in such a manner the most uncongenial and repugnant features” of the pagan myth (ib.); and, further, that “the Flood-story of Genesis retains to this day the power to waken the conscience of the world, and was written by the biblical narrator with this pædagogic and ethical purpose” (Das Alte Testament im Lichte des alten Orients², page 252).

4. Of other ancient legends in which some traces of the Chaldean influence may be suspected, only a very brief account can here be given. The Indian story, to which there is a single allusion in the Vedas, is first fully recorded in the Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa, i. 8. 1–10.¹ It relates how Manu, the first man, found one day in the water with which he performed his morning ablution a small fish, which begged him to take care of it till it should attain its full growth, and then put it in the sea. Manu did so, and in gratitude for its deliverance the fish warned him of the year in which the Flood would come, promising, if he would build a ship, to return at the appointed time and save him. When the Flood came the fish appeared with it; Manu attached the cable of his ship to the fish’s horn, and was thus towed to the mountain of the north, where he landed, and whence he gradually descended as the waters fell. In a year’s time a woman came to him, announcing herself as his daughter, produced from the offerings he had cast into the water; and from this pair the human race sprang. In a later form of the tradition (Mahābhārata, iii. 187. 2 ff.),² the Babylonian affinities are somewhat more obvious; but even in the oldest version they are not altogether negligible, especially when we remember that the fish (which in the Mahābhārata is an incarnation of Brahma) was the symbol of the god Ea.³—The Greeks had several Flood-legends, of which the most widely diffused was that of Deukalion, best known from the account of Apollodorus (i. 7. 2 ff.).⁴ Zeus, resolved to destroy the brazen race, sends a heavy rain, which floods the greater part of Greece, and drowns all men except a few who escape to the mountain tops. But Deukalion, on the advice of his father Prometheus, had prepared a chest, loaded it with provisions, and taken refuge in it with his wife Pyrrha. After 9 days and nights they land on Parnassus; Deukalion sacrifices to Zeus and prays for a new race of men: these are produced from stones which he and his wife, at the command of the god, throw over their shoulders. The incident of the ark seems here incongruous, since other human beings were saved without it. It is perhaps an indication of the amalgamation of a foreign element with local Deluge traditions.—A Syrian tradition, with some surprising resemblances to Priestly-Code in Genesis, has been preserved by the Pseudo-Lucian (De dea Syra, 12, 13). The wickedness of men had become so great that they had to be destroyed. The fountains of the earth and the flood-gates of heaven were opened simultaneously; the whole world was submerged, and all men perished. Only the pious Deukalion-Sisuthros⁵ was saved with his family in a great chest, into which as he entered all sorts of animals crowded. When the water had disappeared, Deukalion opened the ark, erected altars, and founded the sanctuary of Derketo at Hierapolis. The hole in the earth which swallowed up the Flood was shown under the temple, and was seen by the writer, who thought it not quite big enough for the purpose. In Usener’s opinion we have here the Chaldean legend localised at a Syrian sanctuary, there being nothing Greek about it except the name Deukalion.—A Phrygian localisation of the Semitic tradition is attested by the epithet κιβωτός applied to the Phrygian Apameia (Kelainai) from the time of Augustus (Strabo, xii. 8. 13, etc.); and still more remarkably by bronze coins of that city dating from the reign of Septimius Severus. On these an open chest is represented, bearing the inscription ΝΩΕ, in which are seen the figures of the hero and his wife; a dove is perched on the lid of the ark, and another is flying with a twig in its claws. To the left the same two human figures are seen standing in the attitude of prayer.⁶ The late date of these coins makes the hypothesis of direct Jewish, or even Christian, influence extremely probable.—The existence of a Phœnician tradition is inferred by Usener (248 ff.) from the discovery in Etruria and Sardinia of bronze models of ships with various kinds of animals standing in them: one of them is said to date from the 7th century B.C. There is no extant written record of the Phœnician legend: on Gruppe’s reconstruction from the statements of Greek mythographers see above, page 141.

5. There remains the question of the origin of this widespread and evidently very popular conception of a universal Deluge. That it embodies a common primitive tradition of an historic event we have already seen to be improbable. If we suppose the original story to have been elaborated in Babylonia, and to have spread thence to other peoples, it may still be doubtful whether we have to do “with a legend based upon facts” or “with a myth which has assumed the form of a history.” The mythical theory has been most fully worked out by Usener, who finds the germ of the story in the favourite mythological image of “the god in the chest,” representing the voyage of the sun-god across the heavenly ocean: similar explanations were independently propounded by Cheyne (Encyclopædia Biblica, 1063 f.) and Zimmern (ib. 1058 f.; Die Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament³, 555). Of a somewhat different order is the astrological theory advocated by Jeremias (249 ff.). The Babylonian astronomers were aware that in the course of ages the spring equinox must traverse the watery (southern) region of the Zodiac: this, on their system, signified a submergence of the whole universe in water; and the Deluge-myth symbolises the safe passage of the vernal sun-god through that part of the ecliptic.—Whatever truth there may be in these theories, it is certain that they do not account for the concrete features of the Chaldean legend; and if (as can hardly be denied) mythical motives are present, it seems just as likely that they were grafted on to a historic tradition as that the history is merely the garb in which a solar or astral myth arrayed itself. The most natural explanation of the Babylonian narrative is after all that it is based on the vague reminiscence of some memorable and devastating flood in the Euphrates valley, as to the physical possibility of which, it may suffice to quote the (perhaps too literal) description of an eminent geologist: “In the course of a seismic period of some duration the water of the Persian Gulf was repeatedly driven by earthquake shocks over the plain at the mouth of the Euphrates. Warned by these floods, a prudent man, Ḥasîs-adra, i.e. the god-fearing philosopher, builds a ship for the rescue of his family, and caulks it with pitch, as is still the custom on the Euphrates. The movements of the earth increase; he flees with his family to the ship; the subterranean water bursts forth from the fissured plain; a great diminution in atmospheric pressure, indicated by fearful storm and rain, probably a true cyclone, approaches from the Persian Gulf, and accompanies the most violent manifestations of the seismic force. The sea sweeps in a devastating flood over the plain, raises the rescuing vessel, washes it far inland, and leaves it stranded on one of those Miocene foot-hills which bound the plain of the Tigris on the north and north-east below the confluence of the Little Zab” (Eduard Suess, The Face of the Earth, i. 72). See, however, the criticism of Sollas, The Age of the Earth, 316.

Noah is here introduced in an entirely new character, as the discoverer of the culture of the vine; and the first victim to immoderate indulgence in its fruit. This leads on to an account of the shameless behaviour of his youngest son, and the modesty and filial feeling of the two elder; in consequence of which Noah pronounces a curse on Canaan and blessings on Shem and Japheth.—The Noah of verses ^20–27 almost certainly comes from a different cycle of tradition from the righteous and blameless patriarch who is the hero of the Flood. The incident, indeed, cannot, without violating all probability, be harmonised with the Flood-narrative at all. In the latter, Noah’s sons are married men who take their wives into the ark (so expressly in Priestly-Code, but the same must be presumed for Yahwist); here, on the contrary, they are represented as minors living in the ‘tent’ with their father; and the conduct of the youngest is obviously conceived as an exhibition of juvenile depravity (so Dillmann, Budde, al.). The presumption, therefore, is that verses ^20–27 belong to a stratum of Yahwist which knew nothing of the Flood; and this conclusion is confirmed by an examination of the structure of the passage.

First of all, we observe that in verse ²⁴ the offender is the youngest son of Noah, and in verse ²⁵ is named Canaan; while Shem and Japheth are referred to as his brothers. True, in verse ²² the misdeed is attributed to ‘Ham the father of Canaan’; but the words חָם אֲבִי have all the appearance of a gloss intended to cover the transition from ^18 f. to ^20 ff.; and the clause וְחָם הוּא אֲבִי כְנַעַן in ^18b can have no other purpose. Now ^18a is the close of Yahwist’s¹ account of the Flood; and ¹⁹ points forward either to Yahwist’s list of Nations (chapter 10), or to the dispersion of the Tower of Babel. Verses ^20–27 interrupt this connexion, and must accordingly be assigned to a separate source. That that source is, however, still Yahwistic, is shown partly by the language (יַהְוֶה, verse ²⁶ [in spite of אֱלֹהִים in verse ²⁷]; and וַיָּחֶל, verse ²⁰); and more especially by the connexion with 5²⁹ (see pages 3, 133 f.). It is clear, therefore, that a redactor (Redactor^Jahwist) has here combined two Yahwistic documents, and sought to reduce the contradiction by the glosses in ^18b and ²².

18, 19. Connecting verses (see above).—Noah’s sons are here for the first time named in Yahwist, in harmony, however, with the repeated notices of Priestly-Code (5³² 6¹⁰ 7¹³). On the names see on chapter 10 (page 195 f.).—20. Noah the husbandman was the first who planted a vineyard]—a fresh advance in human civilisation. The allusion to Noah as the husbandman is perplexing. If the text be right (v.i.), it implies a previous account of him as addicted to (perhaps the inventor of) agriculture, which now in his hands advances to the more refined stage of vine-growing. See the note on page 185.

Amongst other peoples this discovery was frequently attributed to a god (Dionysus among the Greeks, Osiris among the Egyptians), intoxication being regarded as a divine inspiration. The orgiastic character of the religion of the Canaanites makes it probable that the same view prevailed amongst them; and it has even been suggested that the Noah of this passage was originally a Canaanitish wine-god (see Niebuhr, Geschichte des ebräischen Zeitalters, 36 ff.). The native religion of Israel (like that of Mohammed) viewed this form of indulgence with abhorrence; and under strong religious enthusiasm the use of fermented drinks was entirely avoided (the Nazirites, Samson, the Rechabites). This feeling is reflected in the narrative before us, where Noah is represented as experiencing in his own person the full degradation to which his discovery had opened the way. It exhibits the repugnance of a healthy-minded race towards the excesses of a debased civilisation.—Since the vine is said to be indigenous to Armenia and Pontus (see Delitzsch, Dillmann), it has naturally been proposed to connect the story with the landing of the ark in Ararat. But we have seen that the passage has nothing to do with the Deluge-tradition; and it is more probable that it is an independent legend, originating amidst Palestinian surroundings.

19. נפצה כל־הארץ] ‘the whole (population of the) earth was scattered.’ For the construction compare 10⁵.—נָֽפְצָה] hardly contracted Niphal from √ פצץ [= פוץ] (Gesenius-Kautzsch § 67 dd); but from √ נפץ, whether this be a secondary formation from √ פוץ (Gesenius-Buhl¹⁴ 465 f.), or an independent word (Brown-Driver-Briggs, 659). Compare 1 Samuel 13¹¹, Isaiah 11¹² 33³.—20. ויחל וגו׳] compare 4²⁶ 6¹ 10⁸ 11⁶ 44¹² (Yahwist) 41⁵⁴ (Elohist). The rendering ‘Noah commenced as a husbandman’ (Davidson § 83, R. 2) is impossible on account of the article (contrast 1 Samuel 3²): to insert להיות (Ball) does not get rid of the difficulty. The construction with ו construct, instead of infinitive, is very unusual (Ezra 3⁸); hence Cheyne (Encyclopædia Biblica, 3426²), following Kuenen (Theologisch Tijdschrift, xviii. 147), proposes לַֽחֲרשׁ for אִישׁ: ‘Noah was the first to plough the ground.’ That reading would be fatal to any connexion of the section with Genesis 3, unless we suppose a distinction between עבד (manual tillage) and חרשׁ. Strangely enough, Rashi (on 5²⁹) repeats the Haggadic tradition that Noah invented the ploughshare; but this is probably a conjecture based on a comparison of 3¹⁷ with 5²⁹.¹

21. uncovered himself] the same result of drunkenness in Habakkuk 2¹⁵, Lamentations 4²¹.—22. There is no reason to think (with Holzinger and Gunkel) that Canaan was guilty of any worse sin than the Schadenfreude implied in the words. Hebrew morality called for the utmost delicacy in such matters, like that evinced by Shem and Japheth in verse ²³—24. בְּנוֹ הַקָּטָן cannot mean ‘his younger son’ (LXX, Vulgate) (i.e. as compared with Shem); still less ‘his contemptible son’ (Rashi); or Ham’s youngest (Abraham Ibn Ezra). The conclusion is not to be evaded that the writer follows a peculiar genealogical scheme in which Canaan is the youngest son of Noah.—25–27. Noah’s curse and blessings must be presumed to have been legible in the destinies of his reputed descendants at the time when the legend took shape (compare 27^{28 f. 39 f.} 49) (on the fulfilment see the concluding note, page 186 f.). The dominant feature is the curse on Canaan, which not only stands first, but is repeated in the blessings on the two brothers.—25. The descendants of Canaan are doomed to perpetual enslavement to the other two branches of the human family.—a servant of servants] means ‘the meanest slave’ (Gesenius-Kautzsch § 133 i).—to his brethren] not the other members of the Hamitic race, but (as is clear from the following verses) to Shem and Japheth.—26. Blessed be Yahwe the God of Shem] The idea thus expressed is not satisfactory. To ‘bless’ Yahwe means no more than to praise Him; and an ascription of praise to Yahwe is only in an oblique sense a blessing on Shem, inasmuch as it assumes a religious primacy of the Shemites in having Yahwe for their God. Budde (294 f.) proposed to omit אֱלֹהֵי and read בְּרוּךְ יַהְוֶה שֵׁם: Blessed of Yahwe be Shem (compare 24³¹ 26²⁹ [both Yahwist]). Dillmann’s objection, that this does not express wherein the blessing consists, applies with quite as much force to the received text. Perhaps a better emendation is that of Graetz בָּרֵךְ י׳ אָֽהֳלֵי שֵׁ (יְבָרֵךְ would be still more acceptable): [May] Yahwe bless the tents of Shem; see the next verse.—27. May God expand (יַפְתְּ) Yepheth: a play on the name (יֶפֶת). The use of the generic אלהים implies that the proper name יהוה was the peculiar property of the Shemites.—and may he dwell] or that he may dwell. The subject can hardly be God (Jubilees, Targum^Onkelos, Bereshith Rabba, Rashi, Abraham Ibn Ezra, Nöldeke, al.), which would convey no blessing to Japheth; the wish refers most naturally to Japheth, though it is impossible to decide whether the expression ‘dwell in the tents of’ denotes friendly intercourse (so most) or forcible dispossession (Gunkel). For the latter sense compare Psalms 78⁵⁵, 1 Chronicles 5¹⁰.—A Messianic reference to the ingathering of the Gentiles into the Jewish or Christian fold (Targum^Jonathan, Fathers, Delitzsch, al.) is foreign to the thought of the passage: see further below.

The question of the origin and significance of this remarkable narrative has to be approached from two distinct points of view.—I. In one aspect it is a culture-myth, of which the central motive is the discovery of wine. Here, however, it is necessary to distinguish between the original idea of the story and its significance in the connexion of the Yahwistic document. Read in its own light, as an independent fragment of tradition, the incident signalises the transition from nomadic to agricultural life. Noah, the first husbandman and vine-grower, is a tent-dweller (verse ²¹); and this mode of life is continued by his oldest and favoured son Shem (²⁷). Further, the identification of husbandry and vine culture points to a situation in which the simpler forms of agriculture had been supplemented by the cultivation of the grape. Such a situation existed in Palestine when it was occupied by the Hebrews. The sons of the desert who then served themselves heirs by conquest to the Canaanitish civilisation escaped the protracted evolution of vine-growing from primitive tillage, and stepped into the possession of the farm and the vineyard at once. From this point of view the story of Noah’s drunkenness expresses the healthy recoil of primitive Semitic morality from the licentious habits engendered by a civilisation of which a salient feature was the enjoyment and abuse of wine. Canaan is the prototype of the population which had succumbed to these enervating influences, and is doomed by its vices to enslavement at the hands of hardier and more virtuous races.—In the setting in which it is placed by the Yahwist the incident acquires a profounder and more tragic significance. The key to this secondary interpretation is the prophecy of Lamech in 5²⁹, which brings it into close connexion with the account of the Fall in chapter 3 (page 133). Noah’s discovery is there represented as an advance or refinement on the tillage of the ground to which man was sentenced in consequence of his first transgression. And the oracle of Lamech appears to show that the invention of wine is conceived as a relief from the curse. How far it is looked on as a divinely approved mode of alleviating the monotony of toil is hard to decide. The moderate use of wine is certainly not condemned in the Old Testament: on the other hand, it is impossible to doubt that the light in which Noah is 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 (chapter 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 (Dillmann, who explains the figure as expressing the more kindly feeling of the Hebrew 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 (Wellhausen, Meyer) or the Phœnicians (Budde, Stade, Holzinger). 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 Kings 9^11–13) (Budde) is an event little likely to have been idealised in Hebrew 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 after the time of Alexander the Great, as an expression of the friendly feeling of the Jews for their Hellenic conquerors.²—Gunkel’s explanation, which is put forward with all reserve, breaks ground in an opposite direction. Canaan, he suggests, may here represent the great wave of Semitic migration which (according to some recent theories) had swept over the whole of Western Asia (circa 2250 B.C.), leaving its traces in Babylonia, in Phœnicia, perhaps even in Asia Minor,³ and of which the later Canaanites of Palestine were the sediment. Shem is the Hebræo-Aramaic family, which appears on the stage of history after 1500 B.C., and no doubt took possession of territory previously occupied by Canaanites. It is here represented as still in the nomadic condition. Japheth stands for the Hittites, who in that age were moving down from the north, and establishing their power partly at the cost of both Canaanites and Arameans. This theory hardly explains the peculiar contempt and hatred expressed towards Canaan; and it is a somewhat serious objection to it that in 10¹⁵ (which Gunkel assigns to the same source as 9^20 ff.) Heth is the son of Canaan. A better defined background would be the struggle for the mastery of Syria in the 14th century B.C.⁴ If, as many Assyriologists think probable, the Ḥabiri of the Tel-Amarna Letters be the עִבְרִים of the Old Testament,—i.e. the original Hebrew stock to which Israel belonged,—it would be natural to find in Shem the representative of these invaders; for in 10²¹ (Yahwist) Shem is described as ‘the father of all the sons of Eber.’ Japheth would then be one or other of the peoples who, in concert with the Ḥabiri, were then seeking a foothold in the country, possibly the Suti or the Amurri, less probably (for the reason mentioned above) the Hittites.—These surmises must be taken for what they are worth. Further light on that remote period of history may yet clear up the circumstances in which the story of Noah and his sons originated; but unless the names Shem and Japheth should be actually discovered in some historic connexion, the happiest conjectures can never effect a solution of the problem.

22. ויַּגֵּד] LXX prefered καὶ ἐξελθών.—23. הַשֵּׁמְלָה] On the article, see Gesenius-Kautzsch § 126 r. That it was the שׂ׳ which Canaan had previously taken away, and that this notice was deliberately omitted by Yahwist (Gunkel), is certainly not to be inferred. The שׂ׳ is the upper garment, which was also used for sleeping in (Exodus 22²⁶ etc.).—24. וַיִּיקֶץ] on the irregular seghol, see Gesenius-Kautzsch § 70 n.—26. לָמוֹ may stand either for לָהֶם (collective) or לוֹ: see Note 3 in Gesenius-Kautzsch § 103 f. The latter is the more natural here. Olshausen (Monatsberichte der Königlich-Preussischen Akadamie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin., June 1870, 382) proposed to omit ^26b, substituting ^27aβ (וישכן—שם), and retain ^27b with reflexive of plural suffix to אֶחָיו. LXX has αὐτοῦ in ^26b and αὐτῶν in ^27b.—27. יַפְתְּ] LXX πλατύναι, Vulgate dilatet, etc. The √ פתה in the sense ‘be spacious’ is extremely rare in Hebrew (Proverbs 20¹⁹ [?24²⁸]), and the accepted rendering not beyond challenge. Nöldeke (Bibel-Lexicon, iii. 191) denies the geographical sense, and explains the word from the frequent Semitic figure of spaciousness for prosperity. This would almost require us to take the subject of the following clause to be God (v.s.).