Shem, Ham, and Japheth
Shem, Ham, and Japheth were the three sons of the Old Testament patriarch Noah. According to the biblical account in Genesis chs. 6-9, Noah, his wife, his three sons and their wives were the only human beings to survive the great Flood. Since Noah had no more children after the Flood, it follows that every human being born since then must be a descendant of Shem, Ham, or Japheth (ibid. ch. 9, v. 19). Genesis ch. 10 lists the earliest descendants of Noah's three sons, and says that the descendants of each son moved to inhabit different parts of the world.
In the Middle Ages the biblical account of the Flood and its consequences led to the belief that human beings may be divided, broadly, into three racial groups, each group corresponding to the descendants of one of Noah's sons and occupying a distinct region of the world. The descendants of Shem, the Semitic peoples, were identified with the inhabitants of the Middle East, the descendants of Ham, the Hamitic peoples, with the inhabitants of Africa, and the descendants of Japheth, the Japhetic peoples, with the inhabitants of Europe, .
Partly under the influence of this medieval anthropology early linguists (e.g., the eighteenth century English philologist William Jones (1746-1794)) applied the adjectives 'Semitic', 'Hamitic', and 'Japhetic' to the groups or families of languages spoken by these different populations. Thus 'Semitic' was applied to the languages of the Middle East (principally Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic), 'Hamitic' to all non-Semitic Afro-Asiatic languages, and 'Japhetic' to what is now called the Indo-European family of languages, .
Needless to say, most of the assumptions which underpinned these anthropological and linguistic classifications are now discredited, and the adjectives 'Japhetic' and 'Hamitic' are no longer used in these disciplines. The adjective 'Semitic' is in a rather different position: the languages identified by early linguists as Semitic do form a genuine family and are sometimes still referred to as Semitic languages. (For more about the use of this adjective see Semitic.)
