Sem (Bible)
Sem ( Hebrew שֵׁם, Greek Σημ, Arabic سام Sām , DMG Sām ) is, according to biblical tradition, the eldest of the three sons of Noah ( Genesis 5,32 EU ), from whom, according tothe genesis table, all of today's peoples of mankind should have emerged. According to Genesis 9 : 20-26 EU , he and his brother Japhet were given a special blessing from his father, while Ham's son Canaan was cursed by Noah. The background is unclear. Most Bible translations say that Ham had previously seen his drunken father Noah naked, and that his brothers shamefully covered his father afterwards.
Sem's brothers were called Ham (or Cham) and Jafet (or Japhet).
family tree
| Sem | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Elam | Assyria | Arpachschad | Lud | Aram | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Schelach | Uz | Hul | Geter | Mash | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| boar | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Peleg | Joktan | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Regret | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Almodad Shelef Hazarmawet Jerach Hadoram Usal Diklah Obal Abimael Sheba Ofir Hawila Jobab |
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| Serug | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Nahor | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Terah | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Abraham | Sarah | Nahor | Haran | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Biblical and biblical ancestry legends
According to the biblical sources, all people after the flood, and thus also peoples, descended from these three brothers and their wives. Therefore there are numerous legends of origin here . For Sem it is the following:
Sem had five sons ( Gen 10.21ff EU ):
- Elam was originally an empire in the highlands with the capital Susa bordering the estuary of the Euphrates and Tigris .
- Assyria was generally associated with Mesopotamian Assyria and the peoples of Mesopotamia .
- Arpachschad was assigned the ancestral fatherhood of the Chaldeans by Josephus and others . The name should have been preserved in the province of Arrapachitis in northern Assyria .
- According to Josephus, Lud became the progenitor of the Lydians in Asia Minor, who differ from the Ludites in Africa.
- Aram is the name of Syria , but it particularly refers to the highlands of Lebanon .
Aramaeans , Assyrians , Chaldeans , Elamites and Lydians were therefore traced back to Shem. Based on this, all peoples of the Middle East (more precisely: Hebrews , Assyrians, Arameans , Arabs , Erythreans and Ethiopians ) were called Semitic peoples . The Indo-Europeans and (Central and Far Eastern) Asians, based on the Tanach, were considered to be the descendants of Japhet and the Black Africans as those of Ham .
The shape of the Shem was a point of reference for the development of pseudepigraphic literature in the time of the Second Jewish Temple. The writing of Sem is a calendar contained only in a Syrian manuscript, probably from Egypt in the last years of the first century BC.
Ideologizations of the lineage legends
Ham's descendant attribution was mainly used for Christian justifications, because the blessing for Shem had also been a curse on Ham, so that slavery was justified in the Bible Belt of the USA .
The term Semites was used colloquially and appropriately in Germany from the 19th century onwards only for Jews (hence: " Antisemitism "; " Philosemitism ").
literature
- James H. Charlesworth : The Scripture of Sem. Jewish Scriptures from the Hellenistic-Roman Period (JSHRZ) NF 2/9. Gütersloh 2005, ISBN 978-3-579-05241-0 .
Web links
- Holger Gzella: Sem / Semites. In: Michaela Bauks, Klaus Koenen, Stefan Alkier (Eds.): The Scientific Biblical Lexicon on the Internet (WiBiLex), Stuttgart 2006 ff.