Hebrews, Semites, and Jews (ancient history question)

Factual Questions
1

Please try not to laugh at the inept description to follow. What is comes down to is that I don’t understand, historically, the difference between Semites, Hebrews, and Jews.

I’m reading a book about ancient history, called The History of the Ancient World, by Susan Wise Bauer. It’s pretty good. If I have one complaint, it’s that it is so detailed it’s hard to get the broad strokes of what’s going on. It has helpful maps, but the maps are super zoomed in, to just a few cities at a time, making it difficult to see how everything is related. And the cities change names like most people change socks, so it doesn’t help.

So Bauer brought up the story of Abraham, and I was like, ‘‘Aha! A biblical thing to sort of give me a point of reference in all this.’’ So as I understand it, the Semites were sort of hanging out in Egypt and were then enslaved, and Abraham led them out into the desert and this is where Judaism was born. So I’m thinking, okay, these are Jewish people. Fast forward some decades (centuries?), Moses gets his hands on the ten commandments, then Moses dies and this other guy takes over (Judah?) and then all twelve tribes return to Jericho, which is, as I understand it, their promised land. But by now, the author is referring to these tribes as Hebrews, and she makes a comment to the effect of the Hebrews taking over Semitic lands when they crash Jericho’s walls.

And I’m like WTF, I thought these wandering desert people were the Semites. I thought Semite and Jew and Hebrew were essentially the same lineages. After all, we call people anti-Semites if they are racist against Jews. Now I’m only partway through the book, somewhere around 800 BCE, so maybe I’m missing something I haven’t read about yet. But would someone be so kind to explain how these three ethnic groups are related?

Thanks so much!

2

From here:

“Semite (sĕm´īt, sē´mīt), originally one of a people believed to be descended from Shem, son of Noah. Later the term came to include the following peoples: Arabs; the Akkadians of ancient Babylonia; the Assyrians; the Canaanites (including Amorites, Moabites, Edomites, Ammonites, and Phoenicians); the various Aramaean tribes (including Hebrews); and a considerable portion of the population of Ethiopia. These peoples are grouped under the term Semite, chiefly because their languages were found to be related, deriving presumably from a common tongue, Semitic.”

Mainly though, I just wanted to post “Hebrews, Semites and Jews, oh my!”

3

Damn! Missed opportunity.

So it seems like the term ‘‘Semite’’ encompasses a much broader range of groups than Hebrews, but that Hebrews are considered Semites. Are Jews then considered the descendants of the Hebrews?

Does this mean ‘‘anti-Semite’’ is really kind of an inaccurate term?

4

Ok, so first off, Hamito-Semitic, aka Afro-Asiatic, is a language group. Semitic is a subgroup of that, and the surviving Semitic languages are pretty much Arabic, Hebrew, some of the Ethiopian languages, Maltese, and a bunch of little languages that are spoken in Yemen. So, if you hear about the Semitic languages, that’s what we’re talking about.

So, now, for a distinction between Semitic, Hebrew, and Jew, you can also go to the bible. According to the book of Genesis, the earth was flooded, and Noah’s descendants had to repopulate the world. Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japeth, and all the people of the world are descended from one of those sons. According to Genesis, Shem had five sons, who became the ancestors of the Assyrians, the Lydians, the Elamites, the Arameans, the Chaldeans, and the Hebrews.

Now, if you follow that list, in the bible, Shem’s great-grandson was Eber, who became the ancestor of the Hebrews. His descendants made up the following tribes: the Israelites, the Arabs, the Moabites, the Ammonites, the Edomites, and the south Arabs.

Now, the Israelites are, again, according to the bible, descended from the twelve sons of Israel/Jacob, and of the twelve Israelite tribes, one of them is the tribe of Judah. Now, because of history, most of the twelve tribes of Israel were destroyed as distinct entities (After the death of Solomon, all the tribes except for Judah, Benjamin, and Levi rebelled against his son and set up their own kingdom, which had a good run until the Assyrians destroyed it and wiped them out as distinct entities. In the kingdom of Judah, which was made up of the three tribes that didn’t revolt, the tribe of Benjamin, being smaller and less politically important, got absorbed into the tribe of Judah. The tribe of Levi, which still exists today, never had much land, and and made up a hereditary religious caste). So, when the Babylonians took over the kingdom of Judah, the survivors lumped themselves together as “Jews”, after Judah.

Note that that’s the biblical answer. Modern archaeology and anthropology suggests that the Canaanites, who the bible says are from the tribe of Ham, spoke the language that developed into modern Hebrew, and that the term Hebrew comes from the word “Haibiru/Apiru”, which was used by both ancient Egyptians and Sumerians to refer to a social group in Canaanite society that herded cattle and engaged in mercenary work/raiding and banditry, and that the “Hebrew” tribes are probably descended from that social group.

As for anti-Semitism, the term comes from Germany. Until the 1880s, people who didn’t like Jews used the term “Judenhass”, Jew-hatred, to refer to their anti-Jewish feeling. An anti-Jewish publisher named Willhelm Marr didn’t like the term, because he thought it was crude, so in 1879, he coined the term “Antisemiten”, or Anti-Semite, which he thought was a more scientific and sophisticated term…it was his way of saying “I’m not one of those bigots who hates Jews for no reason. I just know science proves they’re inferior and part of a plot to destroy European civilization.”

5

“Antisemite” is a term coined by antisemites themselves to try to give an air of scientific credibility to what is basically irrational religious bigotry. “Semitic” is, as already noted, a linguistic term - semitic peoples are those who speak semitic languages - but antisemites employed it as a racial/ethnic term, dividing the world into Caucasians, Semites, Negroids, etc and then arguing for a racial hierarchy.

For obvious reasons, this is a thoroughly discredited use of the word “semitic”, and nobody employs it now except in the wilder fringes of right-wing racist political circles. “Antisemite” means what it has always meant but is no longer considered a neutral terms, and “semitic” is employed only in linguistic contexts - e.g. Maltese is a semitic language.

6

Abraham was, according to the bible, from Ur [of the Chaldees]. Moses led the Hebrews out of Egypt.

7

Linguists don’t use the term “Hamito-Semitic” anymore. Among other things, that would imply that the languages of the Afro-Asiatic family can be usefully split into two halves, with the Semitic subfamily being one of them and the rest all being part of a Hamitic subfamily. Rather, there are five or six subfamilies - Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, Semitic, and maybe Omotic. Some sources say that the Omotic languages aren’t part of the Afro-Asiatic family at all but are in a couple of separate families. The Semitic subfamily of the Afro-Asiatic family includes Hebrew but it includes many other languages, including Arabic.

8

That’s only an hypothesis, and without much evidence to back it up besides the similarity of names. Finkelstein thinks that the Hebrews were just another Canaanite subgroup, agriculturalist and settled like the others.

9

Jew = Hebrew, when using the terms to refer to “a people, culture or race”. As so often happens when two synonyms have multiple meanings, not all the meanings are synonyms. And yes, Semite originally was broader and yes, as several other posters have explained better than I would, anti-semite is a purposefully inaccurate term; its spread led to Semite getting a narrower meaning which coincides with those of Jew/Hebrew, but using “Semite” to mean “Jew” kind of buys what the antisemites sell.

10

Actually, that is less than universally accepted.

11

Interesting to note that “Semite” used more historically accurately includes Arabs and many other groups now inhabiting the northeast Africa + Middle East region.

And that at least in the US, many people who would privately agree that they’re anti-Semite = Anti-Jew would also be pretty thoroughly anti-Arab, anti-northeast African and anti-Middle Easterner.

So in an odd sense, the over-broad coinage explained in Captain Amazing’s last paragraph has come to be more accurate in today’s world than it was when Marr coined it in 1879.
IOW, hate expands to fill the names given it. Humans really are a hot mess.

12

Note that the Samaritans consider themselves descendants of a different tribe of Hebrews (Joseph?).

13

Joseph’s tribe was split into Ephraim and Manasseh and it is from those two tribes along with a some Levites that the samaritans claim ancestry.

14

On the other hand, a fair number of modern anti-Jews are themselves Arabic, and hence also Semitic.

15

There were twelve tribes of Israel which correspond to the 12 sons of Jacob. However, the tribe of Levi were the priests and did not have their own tribal land. Joseph’s two sons Ephraim and Manasseh were each given a tribe to make the total 12. Samaritans claim to be descendant of those two tribes.

As has been pointed out the Jews were descendants of Judah who returned from Babylonian exile. Samaritans were thought to be descendants of those tribes which were conquered by the Babylonians but did not get sent to exile.

16

Surely she’s not suggesting this is actually what happened, is she?

Historically, there is no evidence for the foundational stories of the Israelites.

Here is an article from the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia on the usage of “Hebrew” for the people.

17

Searching for words from this review, I get this. So it looks like yes, Susan Dumbass Bauer really does suggest that.

18

Crazy. Simply crazy. She shouldn’t be writing history.

19

Ehh, that’s a little misleading. The title of the book would better be A Written History of the Ancient World - her entire introduction makes it clear how murky history is in the earliest years, and how she is weaving together mythology and the earliest written accounts to show how individual stories are a reflection of culture. She makes it very clear that a lot of these stories are posthoc dating from much later in time than when they allegedly happen and are often a reflection of the culture in which they are written. It’s pretty obvious when she’s talking about myth vs. fact, and sometimes if it’s murky she explains what is/is not credible. So, no, she’s not suggesting it actually happened, she’s suggesting that the story of it happening is foundational to the people that would eventually call themselves Jews. In essence, she’s telling the history of people through their own worldview.

Though I do agree the style in which the book is written makes it difficult at times to suss out which is which. It’s not entirely clear to me if the Exodus was a real thing. The sense I get is that most mythology has some historical basis - the Battle of Troy, for example, probably happened (there is archeological evidence that the city was destroyed), but our only real insight into why it happened and what was going on culturally at the time is in the mythology surrounding it, which wasn’t put down on paper until hundreds of years later. So, it’s a lot of guesswork.

20

Captain Amazing:

Benjamin wasn’t really absorbed, the reason Judah (alone) was the name for the remaining group is because the kings were from the tribe of Judah.