Yaphet (Japheth)


יפת


Based on the Masoretic pointing, the name should be pronounced Yephet, though it is usually rendered as Yaphet.

The second son of No'ach (Noah), whose descendants occupied the western and northern regions i.e. Europe; which accords with the Greek view of the role of Japhet. (See Graves, Greek Myths 39:2; 161:2 and 169:5)

Graves identifies Yaphet with Yiphtach (יפתח), the Gil'adi (Gileadite) judge whose sacrifice of his daughter is described in Judges 11:12, and who is mentioned in 1 Samuel 12:11. The root there however is Patach (פתח), so is this just wishful thinking, or has Graves' understanding of the Greek myth (in which Japhet and Jephthah are clearly the same person) led him to discover by accident an error in the Yehudit? Yiphtach's tale is, after all, a version of another Greek legend, that of Iphigenia

Interestingly, the lexicographers from Gesenius onwards have all had trouble with the root of Yaphet. Gesenius says of Yaphat that it is "a spurious root, which some have invented on account of the noun Mophet (מופת)". He then goes to the aetiological explanation of Yaphet in Genesis 9:27, and presumes that it must be an error for Yiphtach (יפתח), thereby pre-endorsing Graves. In fact, from the sense of Genesis 9:27, Yiphtach makes much more sense.

If it is Yiphtach, then we should note that Joshua 15:43 mentions a town in the tribe of Yehudah by that name; and there is also Yiphtach-El (יפתח-אל), a valley in the tribes of Zevulun and Asher according to Joshua 19:14 and 27.

Gesenius' "Mophet" stems from mophet (מופת) = "a prodigy" or "divine portent" or "miracle"; it is usually in the plural - mophtim (מופתים). The problem with this explanation is that mophet almost certainly does not derive from YAPHA (יפה) = "beautiful", as would be needed to make the Yaphet link here, but from the Egyptian city of Memphis (Moph/מוף in Hebrew), famously the centre of the arcane crafts in ancient times, as we know from the Yoseph stories especially.

Note that Prometheus was a son of this same Iapetus, and that Iapetus, the Greek Yaphet, was a son of No'ach. His brother Epimetheus means "afterthought" - does Prometheus then mean "forethought"?




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