Cush (Bible)

Identification

Cush is a Hebrew name that is possibly derived from Kash, the Egyptian name of Upper Nubia and later of the Nubian kingdom at Napata, known as the Kingdom of Kush. Alternatively the biblical name may be a mistranslation of the Mesopotamian city of Kish.

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. 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.

Biblical scholar Kevin Burrell argues that Cush in the Table of Nations should be identified with Meluhha, a placename originally referring to a region east of Mesopotamia but which starting from the mid-2nd millennium BC onwards became equated with the territory of Kush in Nubia. According to Burrell, this explains both Cush's Mesopotamian connections in the biblical narrative through his son Nimrod and the fact that his name derives from a Nubian kingdom.

References in Bible

Cush's sons were Nimrod, Seba, Havilah, Sabtah, Raamah, and Sabtechah.

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, Moses is said to have married a "Cushite woman" (אִשָּׁה כֻשִׁית, ishah kushit), provoking criticism from his siblings Miriam and Aaron:

The identity of this woman has been widely debated in biblical scholarship. In the Book of Exodus, Moses’s wife is named as Zipporah, daughter of Jethro, the priest of Midian (Exodus 2:15–21). Midian is traditionally located in the northwest Arabian Peninsula, not in the region of Cush, which is generally understood in biblical geography to lie south of Egypt, corresponding to Nubia or ancient Sudan.

Some commentators interpret "Cushite" in Numbers 12:1 as figurative or descriptive, referring to Zipporah’s skin tone or foreign status, while others argue it may refer to a second wife of Moses, distinct from Zipporah. An important Hellenistic Jewish source, Ezekiel the Tragedian’s Exagoge (2nd century BCE), offers an alternative version of Zipporah’s origin. In fragment 60–65, preserved in Eusebius’s Praeparatio Evangelica (9.29.7–8), Zipporah describes her homeland as Libya, a Greek term broadly used for regions west and south of Egypt. She refers to her father as ruler of a land inhabited by “Aethiopians, dark men”:

This dramatic retelling reimagines [Zipporah as hailing from an African kingdom populated by Ethiopians (Greek: Aithiopes), a term often used in antiquity to refer to Nubians or dark-skinned peoples of the Upper Nile. Scholars view Exagoge as an example of how Hellenistic Jews integrated biblical narratives with Greek geographical and ethnographic understandings, possibly offering a literary attempt to reconcile “Cushite woman” in Numbers with Moses’s wife.

In the Jeremiah story, when the Babylonians and Judahites were in conflict and Jeremiah was giving prophecies of doom for the Judean king, Jeremiah's princely adversaries cast him into a Jerusalem cistern. "Ebed-melech the Cushite" became the hero of the story by approaching the king and getting permission to extricate the prophet from his prison. (Jer 38: 4–10)

During the 5th century AD, Aramean and Assyrian Christian writers sometimes described the Himyarites of South Arabia as Cushaeans and Aethiopians.

The Persian historian al-Tabari (c. 915) recounts a tradition that the wife of Cush was named Qarnabil, daughter of Batawil, son of Tiras, and that she bore him the "Abyssinians, Sindis and Indians".

Explorer James Bruce, who visited the Ethiopian Highlands c. 1770, wrote of "a tradition among the Abyssinians, which they say they have had since time immemorial", that in the days after the Deluge, Cush, the son of Ham, traveled with his family up the Nile until they reached the Atbara plain, then still uninhabited, from where they could see the Ethiopian table-land. There they ascended and built Axum, and sometime later returned to the lowland, building Meroë. He also states that European scholars of his own day had summarily rejected this account on grounds of their established theory, that Cush must have arrived in Africa via Arabia and the Bab-el-Mandeb, a strait located between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula, and Djibouti and Eritrea on the Horn of Africa. Further, the great obelisk of Axum was said to have been erected by Cush in order to mark his allotted territory, and his son Ityopp'is was said to have been buried there, according to the 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. The Asiatic theory has been supported by archaeologists such as Juris Zarins.

References

References

1. Williams, Frank. (2008-11-27). "The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis". Brill.
2. (2006). "Bible". Tyndale House.
3. (2018). "The Kingdoms of Kush". National geographic society.
4. Lamberti, Marcello. (1991). "Cushitic and Its Classifications". Anthropos.
5. (1928). "Dictionnaire des Noms Géographiques Contenus dans les Textes Hiéroglyphiques Vol. 5".
6. (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 (publishing house).
7. David M. Goldenberg (2003), ''The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam'', p. 18.
8. Richard A. Lobban Jr. (2003). ''Historical Dictionary of Ancient and Medieval Nubia'', p. 254.
9. Burrell, Kevin. (2020). "Cushites in the Hebrew Bible: Negotiating Ethnic Identity in the Past and Present". BRILL.
10. Drummond, Jennifer. (2023-02-09). "The Kingdom of Cush".
11. PhD, James K. Hoffmeier. (2019-03-22). "The Archaeology of the Bible". Lion Scholar.
12. Redford, Donald B.. (1992-12-31). "Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times". Princeton University Press.
13. Levine, Baruch A.. (1993). "Numbers 1–20: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary". Doubleday.
14. Wasserstein, A.. "The Exagoge of Ezekiel – Howard Jacobson: The Exagoge of Ezekiel. P. 252. Cambridge University Press, 1983". Cambridge.
15. Feldman, Louis H.. (1993-01-01). "Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World". Princeton University Press.
16. Gruen, Erich S.. (1998-12-31). "Heritage & Hellenism". University of California Press.
17. Al-Tabari (c. 915). [https://books.google.com/books?id=BQNtV--kD5sC&pg=PA11 ''Prophets and Patriarchs''], via Google books.
18. James Bruce (1768–73), ''Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile'', p. 305.
19. Brown, Francis. (1884). "A Recent Theory of the Garden of Eden". U. Chicago.
20. Hamblin, Dora Jane. (May 1987). "Has the Garden of Eden been located at last?". Smithsonian Magazine.