Genesis 10:7 names him as one of the sons of Kush, which is generally considered to be Ethiopia, that area of Africa that runs along the south-western coast of the Red Sea. However, here it appears at times to be the name for an area of Arabia.
The other sons of Kush were Chaviylah (חֲוִילָה), Savtah (סַבְתָּה), Ra'amah (רַעְמָה) and Savtecha (סַבְתְּכָא). Ra'amah's two sons are then given as Sheva (שְׁבָא ) and Dedan (דְדָן), and Kush in the following verse is said also to have fathered Nimrod, which is an oddity: why was he not included in the list of sons in the previous verse? Nimrod is known from Babylonian documents to have been the ruler of a great empire in Ashur and Mesopotamia, nowhere near Ethiopia. Chaviylah is one of the four rivers of Eden, again a Babylonian legend. How is it possible that Kush should be both in Arabia and East Africa?
Look at the map of the Red Sea region and cast your eye down to Djibouti. It lies at the very mouth of the Red Sea. From Djibouti across to South Yemen is a distance of not more than thirty miles, and several islands allow one to hop across.
How is it that Swahili and Amharic live side-by-side, the one a transnationally Africal language, the other virtually a dialect of Arabic?
How did Islam come across into Africa and spread across as far as Nigeria (to which the answer is: that Muhammad sent several of his early followers into exile there, supported by the King of Abyssinia, which is Ethiopia)?
Two hundred thousand years ago, when Homo Sapiens began to wander, and the aboriginal genetic groups began to disseminate globally, the Arabian Peninsula was still attached to the African continent, the Red Sea was at most a valley-stream, and the gods had not yet begun to smash the tectonic plates in a Creational tantrum. We tend to think that Humankind migrated north, along the Nile into Egypt, and then turned east. And no doubt West and Central African Human did, for the mountain range that divides Kenya from Sudan is immense. But transmigration between Ethiopia and Arabia was also commonplace, sufficiently that Kush became the name for both peoples, and that what we think of as the Yoktanite Arabs – today's Saudi Arabians predominantly - and what we think of as Ethiopians, are in fact the same culture group (not the same people).
And does the above then clarify the Mosaic "crossing of the Red Sea"?
cf Isaiah 43:3 and 45:14; also Psalm 72:10; the latter is important because it makes clear that Seva (סְבָא) and Sheba (שְׁבָא) are two different places, the one with a Seen (ש) and the other with a Samech (ס).
Copyright © 2019 David Prashker
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