CHAPTER II.
THE SONS OF HAM. THEIR MORE RECENT NAMES.
1. (a) Cush was the first mentioned son. Dr. Franz Delitzsch has shown that the Assyrian monuments now prove that Cushites settled in the early ages of the world near the northwest of the Persian Gulf. They afterwards migrated southward along the western shore of the Persian Gulf and onward to the south and southwest of Arabia. Some of these crossed the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb to Africa, and there established themselves in that part now known as Abyssinia, and called first by the Greek geographers Ethiopia.
2. The Hebrew name Cush is translated Ethiopia twenty of the twenty-one times it occurs in the Scripture. There can be no reasonable doubt that in the first mention of the word Ethiopia in Gen. 2:13 the region northwest of the Persian Gulf is meant. In after ages the Cushites had established themselves in Arabia, and the inhabitants in that region were called Cushites, or as it is in our English translation, “Ethiopians,” as in the case of Moses’ wife, who is called an “Ethiopian woman,” Num. 12:1, but it is “Cushite” in the Hebrew.
The varying meanings of the name Cushite afford an indication that all these passages of Scripturecould not have been written in the same period of time.
3. The earliest monuments in Egypt make a strong distinction between the Ethiopians south of Egypt and the negro races, for although the Ethiopians were of a dark or dusky skin, they had straight hair, thin noses, and the form of the head of different shape. It is not apparent that any reference in Scripture is made to the negro race as such;the passage in Jer. 13:23, “Can the Ethiopian change his skin?” may apply to the dark Ethiopian and not to the negro, whose native land was west of Ethiopia.[29]
4. Five races spring from Cush: Seba, Havilah, Sabtah, Raamah, and Sabtecha. These have generally been referred to large tribes settling in Arabia. From Raamah we have the nations Sheba and Dedan. These have been located in Arabia, and it was the queen of the former who visited Solomon, 1 Kin. 10:1 and 2 Chron. 9:1. Dedan was a district north of Sheba, and its inhabitants seem by caravans to have traded and settled northward until the time of Abraham, Gen. 25:3, when their descendants were numerous enough to be known by the old name of their ancestors.
5. Cush begat Nimrod, whose exceptional prowess and enterprise gave him precedence over all his brethren. He was a mighty hunter upon the plains of Babylon, and from the monuments of Assyria itseems that the lion was the chief object of his hunting expeditions. He was the founder of some of the earliest cities. The first mentioned is Babel, afterwards called Babylon by the Greeks, which was built upon the Euphrates.
6. At that early time this city was about one hundred and seventy-five miles northwest from the head of the Persian Gulf, but it is now three hundred miles, the land having been extended southeastward by the annual deposits brought down by the rivers Euphrates and Tigris. Erech, the second city of Nimrod, was seventy-five miles northwest (now 200) of the same gulf; Accad, recently discovered by Rassam, was forty-five miles almost due north from Babylon; and Calneh about fifty miles southeast of Babylon; it is now called Niffer.
7. The land of Shinar was the district corresponding with that now known as the land of Chaldæa. “Out of that land went forth Asshur and builded Nineveh” is the statement made, and the monuments recently discovered have remarkably corroborated this text, for the history shows the importance of Asshur,and that Nineveh, which was the capital of the Assyrian kingdom, was a more recent city than Babylon.[30] Its ruins are two hundred and seventy-fivemiles north by west from Babylon and upon the Tigris River.
8. But it will be seen that Asshur was a son of Shem, while Nimrod was a son of Ham, and recent discovery has sustained the distinction, showing that another people preceded the Assyrians and Babylonians which were not descendants of Shem.In connection with Nineveh are mentioned “the city Rehoboth”[31] and Calah: the former is not known, and the latter is supposed to be at the ruins nearly twenty miles south of Nineveh, now called Nimrud, and a few miles north of the latter is supposed to be the site of Resen.