Cush (Bible)

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Cush
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ChildrenNimrod, Seba, Havilah, Sabtah, Sabtechah Edit this on Wikidata
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Cush or Kush (

Phut, and Canaan. Cush was the father of Nimrod.[1][2]

Cush is traditionally considered the ancestor of the "Land of Cush", an ancient territory believed to have been located near the Red Sea. Cush is identified in the Bible with the Kingdom of Kush or ancient Aethiopia.[3] The Cushitic languages are named after Cush.

Identification

V31
G1
N37
N25
kꜣš[4]
in hieroglyphs
Era: 1st Intermediate Period
(2181–2055 BC)
V31
N37
T14N25
[4][5]
in hieroglyphs
Era: Middle Kingdom
(2055–1650 BC)

Cush is a Hebrew name that is possibly derived from Kash, the Egyptian name of

Mesopotamian city of Kish.[6]

The form Kush appears in Egyptian records as early as the reign of Mentuhotep II (21st century BC), in an inscription detailing his campaigns against the Nubian region.[7] At the time of the compilation of the Hebrew Bible, and throughout classical antiquity, the Nubian kingdom was centered at Meroë in the modern-day nation of Sudan.[6]

References in Bible

A page from Elia Levita's 16th-century Yiddish–Hebrew–Latin–German dictionary contains a list of nations, including the word "כושי" Cushite or Cushi, translated to Latin as "Aethiops" and into German as "Mor".

Cush's sons were

Sabtechah.[2]

Traditional identifications

Josephus gives an account of the nation of Cush, son of Ham and grandson of Noah: "For of the four sons of Ham, time has not at all hurt the name of Cush; for the Ethiopians, over whom he reigned, are even at this day, both by themselves and by all men in Asia, called Cushites" (Antiquities of the Jews 1.6).

The Book of Numbers 12:1 calls a wife of Moses "a Cushite woman", whereas Moses's wife Zipporah is usually described as hailing from Midian. Ezekiel the Tragedian's Exagoge 60-65 (fragments reproduced in Eusebius) has Zipporah describe herself as a stranger in Midian, and proceeds to describe the inhabitants of her ancestral lands in North Africa:

"Stranger, this land is called Libya. It is inhabited by tribes of various peoples, Ethiopians, dark men. One man is the ruler of the land: he is both king and general. He rules the state, judges the people, and is priest. This man is my father and theirs."

During the 5th century AD,

Arameann and Assyrian Christian writers sometimes described the Himyarites of South Arabia as Cushaeans and Ethiopians.[3]

Gregory of Tours claimed that Cush was the same person as the Persian Zoroaster and that he was the inventor of magic and idolatry.[8]

The

Sindis and Indians".[9]

Explorer

Book of Aksum, which Bruce asserts was revered throughout Abyssinia equally with the Kebra Nagast
.

Scholars like Johann Michaelis and Rosenmuller have pointed out that the name Cush was applied to tracts of country on both sides of the Red Sea, in the Arabian Peninsula (Yemen) and Northeast Africa.

Professor Francis Brown suggested that the Cushites referred to both African and Asiatic peoples, with the latter being identified as the Kassites. Brown believes that the Cushites in the Book of Genesis, such as Nimrod, were Asiatics based on contextual information.[11] The Asiatic theory has been supported by archaeologists such as Juris Zarins.[12]

References

  1. .
  2. ^ .
  3. ^ a b The Kingdoms of Kush. National geographic society. 2018. Archived from the original on 2020-05-05. Retrieved 2022-02-19.
  4. ^ a b Gauthier, Henri (1928). Dictionnaire des Noms Géographiques Contenus dans les Textes Hiéroglyphiques Vol. 5. pp. 193–194.
  5. ^ Wallis Budge, E. A. (1920). An Egyptian hieroglyphic dictionary: with an index of English words, king list and geological list with indexes, list of hieroglyphic characters, coptic and semitic alphabets, etc. Vol II. John Murray. p. 1048.
  6. ^ a b David M. Goldenberg (2003), The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, p. 18.
  7. ^ Richard A. Lobban Jr. (2003). Historical Dictionary of Ancient and Medieval Nubia, p. 254.
  8. ^ A history of the Franks, Gregory of Tours, Pantianos Classics, 1916
  9. ^ Al-Tabari (circa 1915). Prophets and Patriarchs
  10. ^ James Bruce (1768-73), Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, p. 305
  11. ^ Brown, Francis (1884). "A Recent Theory of the Garden of Eden". The University of Chicago Press: Journals. 4 (1): 1–12.
  12. ^ Hamblin, Dora Jane (May 1987). "Has the Garden of Eden been located at last?" (PDF). Smithsonian Magazine. 18 (2). Archived from the original (PDF) on 9 January 2014. Retrieved 8 January 2014.