Myth #47:

The Sons of Ham were Cush, Mizraim, Phut, and Canaan.

The Myth: And the sons of Ham; Cush, and Mizraim, and Phut, and Canaan. (Gen. 10:6)

The Reality: This genealogy parallels that in an earlier Greek myth about the origins of the Danoi, the Greeks who allegedly invaded Troy in the twelfth century B.C.

The Table of Nations makes Ham the father of four countries, Cush, Mizraim, Phut, and Canaan. Ham, as we noted earlier, has a name identical to one of the ancient names of Egypt, Keme. Three of his sons have names that easily can be identified with nations in the Egyptian sphere. Cush is the ancient name of Ethiopia; Mizraim is the Hebrew name for Egypt; and Canaan obviously corresponds to the land of Canaan.

The name of the fourth son is not as easily identified but it is usually equated with Libya, which makes good geographical sense. Libya was the Greek name for all of Africa west of Egypt.

In this genealogy, we have a geographic scheme in which Ham generally corresponds to the area of Egypt and its surrounding neighbors, and his four sons constitute four divisions within that region, Ethiopia to the south, Libya to the west, Egypt in the center, and Canaan to the north.

The genealogy reflected in this branch of the biblical story closely adheres to that appearing in a Greek myth about the origins of the Danoi, the Greek people who, Homer wrote, conquered Troy at about the twelfth century B.C.

According to the Greek story, the god Poseidon (the Greek God of the seas) mated with a woman named Libya. They had twin sons named Belus and Agenor. The latter moved to Phoenicia where he became king, and Greeks believed him to be the ancestor of all the Phoenicians.

Belus became king of Egypt and, according to the mythic traditions, he had four sons, a set of twins named Danaus and Aegyptus and two other sons named Phineas and Cepheus. According to the Greek stories, Aegyptus was king of Egypt, Danaus of Libya, and Cepheus of Ethiopia, but ruling in Joffa in Canaan. The fourth son, Phineas, has a name meaning Ethiopian.

Belus and Ham share a number of characteristics.

1. Belus is the son of Poseidon, god of the oceans, and Ham is the son of Noah, who is not only the survivor of a worldwide flood, but has been identified herein with Nun, an Egyptian equivalent to Poseidon.
2. Each is the father of four sons, three of whom are identified with Egypt, Ethiopia, and Libya.
3. Belus’s fourth son, Cepheus, is sometimes identified as a Canaanite king and Ham’s fourth son corresponds to Canaan.
4. Belus is portrayed as the brother of the King of Canaan while Ham, his biblical counterpart, appears as the father of Canaan. However, the biblical genealogy is ambiguous and, as we saw earlier in Myth #33, the Bible at times suggests that Canaan was the brother of Ham rather than the son.

Although the genealogical structure between the two family trees is almost identical, there is one significant difference in emphasis. Genesis relates the genealogy to the evolution of mankind immediately after worldwide destruction. The Greek myth is simply couched in geopolitical symbolism. Nevertheless, it shows an early tradition in which Egypt appeared as the brother of Libya, Ethiopia, and Canaan.

Finally, we should note that the Greek Danoi, who disappeared from the historical record by the first millennium B.C., were one of the “Sea Peoples,” a group of Greek allies (among whom were the Philistines) who invaded Canaan in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries B.C., about the same time that Israel settled there after the Exodus from Egypt. This would suggest that the Greeks brought the myth into Canaan where Hebrew scribes picked it up and incorporated it into their world history.