Semitic Peoples

The word Semitic did not originate as a term any of the peoples it describes used for themselves. Eighteenth century European linguists, working from the genealogy in Genesis chapter 10 that traces various ancient peoples to Noah's three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, adopted Shem's name as a convenient label for the family of related languages that included Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic and the older languages of ancient Mesopotamia and the Levant. The classification was linguistic from the start, grouping languages by shared grammar and vocabulary rather than grouping peoples by shared religion, ethnicity or self-identification, and it has stayed that way in serious scholarship since, however loosely the term has sometimes been used outside it.

That linguistic definition produces a strikingly diverse population when applied to actual speakers. Arabic alone is spoken natively by hundreds of millions of people across the Middle East and North Africa, the overwhelming majority Muslim but including significant Christian populations in countries such as Lebanon, Egypt and Iraq. Hebrew, revived as a modern spoken language in the twentieth century after centuries as a liturgical language, is spoken by the citizens of Israel. Aramaic, once the lingua franca of much of the ancient Near East and the language Jesus is generally understood to have spoken day to day, survives today only in small, scattered Christian and Mandaean communities. And Ethiosemitic languages including Amharic and Tigrinya are spoken by tens of millions of people in Ethiopia and Eritrea, a population as religiously mixed between Christianity and Islam as any other Semitic-language-speaking region.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam are often discussed together as the Abrahamic religions, and their shared origin among Semitic-language-speaking peoples of the Near East is part of why: the Hebrew Bible was composed in Hebrew, an early form of Aramaic runs through parts of it and through the language of first century Judea, and the Quran was received and remains recited in Arabic, its language treated within Islam as inseparable from its meaning in a way translation cannot fully replace. The three traditions' scriptures, prophetic figures and core narratives grew out of the same broad linguistic and cultural world even as the religions themselves diverged sharply in doctrine and, for much of their shared history, stood in open conflict with one another.

That linguistic kinship does not translate into a shared modern identity. A Coptic Christian in Egypt, an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem, and a Sunni Muslim in Iraq are all, by the linguistic definition, part of the Semitic-language-speaking world, tracing their liturgical or scriptural language back to the same family tree, yet they belong to communities with little sense of common cause and, in various times and places, active hostility toward one another. Scholars of the ancient Near East generally treat the Semitic language family as exactly what it is, a tool for tracing linguistic descent, and caution against reading it as evidence of any deeper cultural or religious unity among the many peoples it happens to describe.