Where does the word “Semitic” come from?

Shem in Genesis

Shem is the son who, with his brother Japheth, walks backward into Noah’s tent to cover their father without looking (Genesis 9:23). When Noah wakes, he blesses “Yahweh, the God of Shem” (9:26). In the Table of Nations that follows, the sons of Shem are “Elam, Asshur, Arpachshad, Lud, and Aram” (10:22): Asshur is Assyria, Aram the Arameans. Genesis also calls Shem “the father of all the children of Eber” (10:21), and Jewish tradition heard in Eber the root of Ivri, Hebrew. Nine generations down, his line reaches “Abram, the Hebrew” (14:13).

His name is a word in itself. Shem means “name.” Just before his family tree, the builders of Babel say, “let’s make a name for ourselves” (11:4). Then comes the line of Shem, which leads to Abram and God’s promise:

I will make of you a great nation. I will bless you and make your name great. You will be a blessing.

A label coined in 1781

Scholars had long noticed that Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic and Ethiopic were cousins. They build words on roots of three consonants, and many roots are shared. Hebrew shalom and Arabic salaam both mean peace; Hebrew katav and Arabic kataba both mean he wrote. What the family lacked was a name.

In 1781 August Ludwig von Schlözer, a historian at the University of Göttingen, supplied one. Writing about the ancient Chaldeans, he called the languages spoken from Mesopotamia to Arabia “Semitic,” after Shem, with the genealogy of Genesis 10 as his guide. Other scholars took it up, and it stuck.

Where Genesis and the linguists part

The Table of Nations is not a language map, and the borrowed label shows it. Elam, the first son of Shem, spoke Elamite, which is not related to the Semitic languages at all. Canaan, by contrast, is listed among the sons of Ham (10:6), yet the Canaanites and the Phoenicians of Sidon, “his firstborn” (10:15), spoke languages very close to Hebrew. Isaiah even calls Hebrew “the language of Canaan” (Isaiah 19:18).

Today linguists treat Semitic as one branch of a larger family, Afroasiatic, which also includes ancient Egyptian, the Berber languages, Hausa and Somali. Its older name, Hamito-Semitic, borrowed another son of Noah and has been dropped. The Semitic branch itself is old and wide:

• Akkadian, the language of Babylon and Assyria, the oldest written Semitic language.
• Phoenician, whose alphabet is the ancestor of the Greek and Latin letters.
• Hebrew, the language of most of the Old Testament.
• Aramaic, used in parts of Daniel and Ezra and spoken by Jesus.
• Arabic, by far the most widely spoken today.
• Amharic and Tigrinya in Ethiopia and Eritrea, and Maltese, written in the Latin alphabet.

From language to “race”

In the 19th century, writers such as the French scholar Ernest Renan turned the language label into a racial one and pinned supposed traits on “Semites.” The idea had no basis, but it spread. In 1879 the German journalist Wilhelm Marr popularized the word Antisemitismus, a modern-sounding name for hatred of Jews, and that is what “antisemitism” has meant ever since. It has never referred to hostility toward speakers of Semitic languages in general. A word coined to sort languages, borrowed from a son of Noah, ended up carrying one of history’s darkest prejudices.