BOOK I. OF THE PRIMEVAL DEPOSIT AND ITS DISPERSION. HEAD IV. OF THE SONS OF HAM.

×It were premature, before the line of Ham has been distinguished into its several branches, to attempt more than a statement of the ground upon which the second thesis, which affirms that the deposit was corrupted chiefly in the line of Ham, through Cush and Mizraim, is to be maintained, and of the manner in which it differs from the opinion of those who have regarded the family as a whole, and have given to it, upon the strength of a single worship, a single name; for the thesis, if it is to be received, requires that the sons of Ham should be known, that the countries which they occupied should be fixed so far as the testimony permits, and that no son should be credited with what the evidence assigns to another, and it is to these preliminaries that the present head is devoted.¹ I shall set down, in the first place, what the sacred text relates of the sons of Ham; in the second, the opinion of Mr. Bryant respecting the family and its name; in the third, three testimonies which fix, so far as such testimonies can, the position of the several branches; and I shall deliver, in the fourth, the view which I propose, reserving to the two heads which follow the proof of the part which Cush and Mizraim respectively had in the corruption. NB-01-004 NB-05-006 NB-06-014

×The sacred text relates that the sons of Ham were Cush, and Mizraim, and Phut, and Canaan; and it pursues, of these four, the line of Cush before any other, naming five sons of Cush, and two sons of Raamah, and one more, Nimrod, whom it sets apart, saying of him that he began to be a mighty one in the earth (Gen. x. 6–8).² It is to be observed that the sacred writer, who says of Nimrod that he began to be a mighty one, does not say where, nor over whom; and that the pedigree, as it is given by him, is a pedigree and nothing more, naming no country and ascribing to no son of Ham any worship, any invention, or any doctrine. I have drawn the pedigree out in the collections, to be corrected as the notes which follow may require; and I have added to it nothing from any other author, for it appears to me that the first condition of an inquiry into the corruption of a deposit in a particular line is that the line itself should be set down as the text gives it, and not as it has been made by those who have afterwards had occasion to make use of it. NB-01-004

×Mr. Bryant holds that the Cuthites, with their kindred, among whom he reckons Mizraim, the Caphtorim and the sons of Canaan, were "all of the line of Ham, who was held by his posterity in the highest veneration"; that "they called him Amon: and having in process of time raised him to a divinity, they worshiped him as the Sun: and from this worship they were styled Amonians" (Bryant, Analysis, vol. i. Preface).³ The first of these statements is the text's own: that the sons of Ham were of his line is not in dispute. The rest are Mr. Bryant's, and each depends upon the one before it; the name is inferred from the worship, and the worship is asserted and not shewn, so that the whole is a chain of which the first link only is of the text, and of which each of the others is warranted, so far as I have been able to perceive, by the link which precedes it, and by nothing else. A collective name for the line of Ham is lawful, if it be understood as a name of convenience, and I should not wish to dispute the use of it; but it becomes an argument only when the ancient witness is produced who says that Ham was called Amon and was worshipped; and that witness I have not yet found. It is to be added that the order in which Mr. Bryant places the worship of the sun and the deification of the ancestor, if it be the order which he intends, is the reverse of that which I shall endeavour to establish in the second Book; and I do not therefore contend that the name is false, but that it presupposes, in the order of the argument, what it was designed to prove. The question is to be kept under the deified patriarchs, and nothing is to be built upon the name until the place is found. NB-05-006

×Of the three testimonies by which the position of the branches is fixed, the first is the boundary of the Canaanites, which the sacred text gives as being "from Sidon, as thou comest to Gerar, unto Gaza" (Gen. x. 15–20); and the second is the statement of Josephus that "all the children of Mesraim, being eight in number, possessed the country from Gaza to Egypt" (Joseph. Antiq. lib. i. c. 6).⁴ The Canaanites are bounded, then, at Gaza on the south-west; and the country of Mizraim's children begins at Gaza, if Josephus is to be understood as he is written. Two sons of Ham held land which met at one place, and the Scripture and the historian, who do not agree about the number of Mizraim's sons, agree about this. The place is a fixed point, and I enter it for that reason only; I do not infer from it that the two peoples held their lands in harmony, nor that the line of Canaan did or did not receive the deposit differently from the line of Mizraim, and it is not until the other branches have been fixed in their turn that any argument can be raised upon the boundary. NB-06-014

×The opinion of Bochart respecting Canaan is of a different kind, and is to be entered with greater caution. He makes Canaan the same as Mercury (Bochart, Phaleg, lib. i. cap. 2), Chanaan idem qui Mercurius (Canaan is the same as Mercury), upon three grounds: that both were sons of Jove, which with him is Ham; that both are named from trade; and that as Canaan was a servant to his brothers, so the heathen bound Mercury to servile ministries.⁵ He adds that Mercury is set over roads because the Canaanites, that is the Phenicians, were the first to venture on the remotest voyages, and that the Phenicians called Mercury by a word meaning minister. Of the three grounds the second and third are the nearer to a testimony; the first rests upon taking Jove for Ham, which is his reading and is not yet shewn, and which, when it is employed as a ground of the identity, supposes the very point which the identity was to confirm. Whether it is Canaan, and not another son of Ham, who is meant wherever the heathen name Mercury, I cannot say from the chapter before me; the question is to be looked at again when the other sons have been read, and I defer it to the head in which the Hermes of the Egyptians is considered, where it will appear that the equation, if it be made, must be made with some regard to the sons of Mizraim. NB-03-033

×The third testimony is that of Josephus respecting Phut, the third son of Ham in the order of the text, who, he says, "was the founder of Libya," and called the inhabitants Phutites from himself (Joseph. Antiq. lib. i. c. 6).⁶ The country is made by the same historian to bear the name of two of Ham's descendants: of Phut at the first, and afterwards, by a change, of one of the sons of Mizraim, who was called Lybyos. The older name remained, he says, in the Grecian historiographers and in the river. Here, then, is a case in which the name of one son of Ham was displaced by the name of another's son, and the witness for it is ancient. Whether the displacement was of the kind which he reports, or whether he has made the two names answer to two persons because he found two names, I cannot decide; it is enough that the line of Mizraim is shewn, by a witness to whom no one will impute a design upon the present question, to have given a name to a country as well as the line of Chus; and the testimony is to be set beside that of the Ethiopians, which is considered in the head which follows. NB-07-018

×The view which I propose, as at present sketched, is that the sons of Ham, being four in the order of the sacred text, are to be considered each in his own place, and that no one of them is to be taken for the representative of the whole line; that the collective name which has been given to the family is to be used, if at all, as a name of convenience; and that the deposit was corrupted in the line of Ham chiefly through two of the four, of whom the one is Cush, and the other Mizraim, the proof of which is reserved for the two heads which follow. It will be observed that the view differs from that of Mr. Bryant not in the extent of the line, in which we are agreed, but in the distribution of the part: for Mr. Bryant, if I have rightly understood him, regards the Cuthites as the chief carriers of the corruption, and the other branches as following them, whereas I regard the corruption as divided, in the first instance, between the two branches which are known to have held the countries of the Nile and of the Ethiopians.⁷ The objections which may be raised against it I do not affect to underrate. NB-01-004 NB-05-006 NB-06-014 NB-03-033 NB-07-018

×It may be objected, in the first place, that the sacred text, which names four sons of Ham, and which pursues one of them at length, has by that very fact indicated which of the four it regards as the more considerable, and that the view of Mr. Bryant is therefore the more consonant with the Scripture; to which I answer that the sacred text pursues the line of Cush because it is the line through which the text proceeds to the building of cities, and that a selection made for the purposes of the narrative is not a judgment as to the part taken in the corruption. It may be objected, in the second place, that the collective name Amonians, being convenient, is already established, and that to refuse it is to refuse what is useful; to which I answer that I do not refuse it, but that I deny that it can be received as a name of the ancient family until the witness is produced. It may be objected, in the third place, that the testimony of Josephus respecting Phut is an interpretation of a name by a writer who found two names and made two persons, and that I have therefore relied upon what I have myself said that I cannot decide; to which I answer that I have said only that the name of Mizraim's line is shewn to have been given to a country, and that this much holds upon either supposition. And it may be objected, lastly, that Bochart's identification of Canaan with Mercury, if it should be established, would give to a single son of Ham the whole of the Egyptian god, and would therefore go to shew that the corruption was not in the line of Mizraim; to which I answer that the objection is premature, the identification being, so far as the chapter which I have read shews, no more than a conjecture, and the claims of the other sons of Ham to be heard upon the same god being not yet examined. These objections, and others which may be urged with less force, will be considered at greater length under the next head. NB-01-004 NB-05-006 NB-06-014 NB-03-033 NB-07-018