Genesis 10:6

The sons of Ham; Cush. The Hebrew people were more intimately associated with the Hamitic races than with the descendants of Japheth. Cush, or Kush, is ancient Ethiopia, which was in classical times called Nubia. It was not Abyssinia, but included a part of Egypt and a part of the Sudan, extending from the first cataract of the Nile, at Aswan, as far south as Khartoum. In Egyptian inscriptions this land is called Kash, in Assyrian cuneiform texts, Kusu. Cush, however, included not only African Nubia but also the western part of Arabia bordering on the Red Sea. Some of the sons of Cush are known to have settled there. Zerah, the Cushite of 2 Chronicles 14:9, and the Cushites of Isaiah 45:14, mentioned with the Sabeans as men of stature, are thought to be western Arabians. About the time of Hezekiah, Judah was in contact with the African Cush, or Ethiopia, which is mentioned frequently in the later books of the Old Testament (see 2 Kings 19:9; Esther 1:1; 8:9; Psalm 68:31; etc.).

Mizraim. The Egyptians were descendants of Ham’s second son. The origin of the Hebrew name Mizraim is obscure. Although this word is virtually the same in the Assyrian, Babylonian, Arabian, and Turkish languages as in the Hebrew, a similar native name has never been found in Egyptian inscriptions. The Egyptians called their country either the “Black Land,” designating the fertile strip of soil bordering on both banks of the river Nile in contrast with the desert “Red Land,” or they spoke of it as the “Two Lands,” reflecting an earlier historical division of the country into two separate kingdoms. Whether the word Mizraim, with its Hebrew dual ending, may be a reflection of the expression “Two Lands” is a disputed subject among scholars. Modern Egyptians use the name Misr and the adjective Misri in referring to Egypt.

Phut. Phut has traditionally been identified as the progenitor of the Libyans. This tradition goes back to the time of the LXX, which translated Phut as “Libya.” This identification is probably wrong. Ancient Egyptian inscriptions mention an African land by the name of Punt, Puta in Babylonian texts, to which from early times Egypt sent expeditions to obtain myrrh trees, leopard skins, ebony, ivory, and other exotic products. Punt, therefore, was probably the African coast of Somaliland and Eritrea and the Phut, or Put, of this text.

Canaan. Hieroglyphic and cuneiform inscriptions of the second millennium B.C. locate Canaan as the region bordering the Mediterranean on the west, Lebanon on the north, and Egypt on the south. It is, furthermore, a collective name for the indigenous population of Palestine, Phoenicia, and the Hittite city states of northern Syria. The Phoenicians and their colonists the Carthaginians of Northern Africa referred to themselves as Canaanites, on their coins, until Roman times (see verse 15). Though Canaan was the son of Ham, the Canaanitic language was Semitic — as the writing of the Canaanites clearly reveals. It seems that they accepted the Semitic language at a very early stage of their history. This was apparently true of the Egyptians also, for their language is strongly Semitic. In fact, the ancient Egyptians, whose Hamitic relationship no scholar will dispute, took over so many Semitic elements into their language that some scholars have classified ancient Egyptian as Semitic. The geographic proximity of the Canaanites to the Semitic nations of the Near East may have been responsible for their acceptance of the Semitic language. Babylonian culture, language, and script were taken over by virtually all peoples who lived between the Euphrates and Egypt, as the Amarna Letters of the 14th century B.C. indicate.

That a language spoken by a people is not always a clear indication of the race to which they belong is evident from numerous ancient and modern examples. The Arabic conquest of the whole Mediterranean region made Arabic the spoken and written language of Semitic and non-Semitic populations alike, from the Atlantic coast to the Indus.