Race and Ethnicity at Genesis 10 and the Idea of “Semites”

What is it about?

This interdisciplinary paper integrates analysis of social identity and of textual meaning to argue that the idea of “Semites” and “Semitic” should not be used for peoples, places, cultures, religions, and even languages. On the one hand, it proposes, the text at Genesis 10 is a collation of three separate works, which have contrary ideas about the zones and groups of the world, only one of which features Shem as a progenitor of a large segment of humanity. Semitic identity was not an obvious and long-lived category in ancient Israel and Judea. On the other hand, it is much later cultures that responded to the collated text at Genesis 9–11 and used its terms and concepts selectively to map their own world, which has had a pernicious, bloody afterlife down to our own times.

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