A Myth Factory

I have a “Garbage scholarship” file. Whenever I come across an article or book replete with flawed methodology, falsehood or bias so blatant that it can only lower your IQ as you turn the pages, it ends up in that file.
One such book is Nur Masalha’s Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History, arguably one of the go-to manuals for much of the Watermelon crowd interested in making up historical grudges.

Because so much of Palestine’s ancient history is Israelite, the author focused his efforts on crafting a parallel narrative that minimises the millennia-long Israelite past while attempting to sever the links between that past and present-day Jews.
In order to do so, Nur Masalha embarks on a deconstructionist approach to Jewish identity. I’ve read this book so you wouldn’t have to, but the truth is that if you’ve been exposed to any of the anti-Israel tropes about “indigeneity”, you have in a sense unwillingly read large chunks of this book in a disarticulated fashion.

Apart from repeatedly making gross errors, such as the claim that Hebrew was extinct during Jesus’ lifetime (Mishnaic Hebrew was spoken until the 4th century CE) or the numerous spelling errors in Hebrew terms, it has an entire chapter devoted to what the author calls “the founding myths of Modern Hebrew”.

This chapter is, in my estimation at least, the main source for the renewed vivacity in counter-factual tropes surrounding Israeli Hebrew as those repeating said tropes do not seem to be very familiar with the linguistic literature on the topic, to say the least.

It deserves to be cited at length:

Those loose notions of “hybridity” and borrowing espoused above echo the claims of Ghil’ad Zuckermann who likewise affirms that Israeli Hebrew is a “Semito-European hybrid language” and Paul Wexler who promotes the view that Modern Hebrew is “relexified Yiddish”.

So how true is this? Is Israeli Hebrew a linguistic frankenstein monster stitched up by villainous Zionists cosplaying as Middle Easterners, a secretly European language hiding underneath a Semitic garb? Or is this mere wishful thinking?

The Indo-European Perspective

There are two ways to answer that question. The first would be to show what kind of language Israeli Hebrew is. I’ve gone over that at length in this older post of mine.
The other way would be to show what Israeli Hebrew isn’t.

First let us clarify what does and does not matter in terms of linguistic classification. When trying to ascertain which phylum a language belongs to, the language’s morphology is the most crucial element, that is to say the units of speech which codify grammar (what some linguists call “grammemes”). Morphology entails person, case and number endings, gender markers, pronominal systems, basically every element which encodes grammatical meaning. Phonology (the sound inventory) and lexicon, while important, are only of secondary or tertiary importance when taken alone, they can be useful when taken in conjunction with morphology in establishing sound correspondences and a shared basic vocabulary.

Coming back to the question of whether or not Israeli Hebrew is a European language, the vast majority of European languages belong to the Indo-European (IE) family.
This language family has been the topic of research for several centuries, it is so well researched that its prehistorical ancestor (Proto-Indo-European), which was spoken on the Pontic-Caspian steppe of Southern Russia and Ukraine some 6200 years ago, is much better understood than attested languages like Sumerian and Ancient Egyptian.

One of IE’s most prominent features is its rich nominal morphology, nouns are inflected for case, number and gender. This system has largely broken down in the more widely spoken IE languages, but vestiges remain such as the genitive (possessive) -s/-’s in English or the distinction in nominative (I, He, We, They etc) and accusative (Me, Him, Us, Them, etc) forms for personal pronouns.

While languages such as English, Spanish, Italian or French have abandoned this complex system of grammatical endings in favour of a more rigid word order and abundant prepositions, the languages of Central and Eastern Europe have kept much more of IE’s original template.

German, the Slavic languages (Polish, Ukrainian, Russian and so forth, with the exception of Bulgarian and Macedonian), Lithuanian and Latvian maintain distinctions of meaning through case endings, in the same way Classical Latin did.

Alongside Yiddish, a descendant of Middle High German which likely originated in Bavaria, those languages are the ones purported to lie at the root of Israeli Hebrew.
To test that hypothesis, let’s have look at the definite article (‘the’ in English).

In Yiddish, as in German, the definite article is declined for case, number and gender. Yiddish however lost the genitive case, which leaves only three cases namely nominative, accusative and dative, there are three genders (masculine, feminine & neuter) and two numbers (singular and plural). This results in twelve possible forms:

This “conjugated” definite article has parallels in other IE languages such as Greek (both ancient and modern), Old English and Icelandic.
Hebrew also has a definite article, namely -ה /hā-/ (followed by gemination of the following consonant). Apart from being etymologically unrelated, it is declinable neither for case nor number or gender, it remains the same in every circumstance, sees use in genitival constructions (status constructus) and functions in much the same way the Arabic الـ /(ˀ)al-/ and Aramaic 𐡀- /-ā(ˀ)/ do.

Proto-Semitic did have a threefold nominative-accusative-genitive case system, somewhat similar to IE (PIE had 8 cases). This system existed in Akkadian, Ugaritic, (partially) Ge’ez and is still extant in Literary Arabic, but has left mere vestiges in Classical Hebrew. The breakdown of the Semitic case system in Iron Age Northwest Semitic languages means that Israeli Hebrew no longer has grammatical case, for instance those languages (Canaanite & Aramaic) have developed an accusative particle which inflects for person, gender and number, namely אֶת /ˀet/ (Phoenician had 𐤀𐤉𐤕 ˀyt and Aramaic has 𐡉𐡕 /yaṯ/). One case Hebrew did maintain unlike all the other Semitic languages is the allative suffix ה- /-āh/ (habáytāh, qadímāh, ˀaḫórāh, etc) which is derived from the Proto-Semitic *-iša. None of those changes have anything to do with with IE’s case system to begin with.

What about root derivation? Indo-European languages usually form words from a stem by adding a suffix, as with the *ǵenh₁- root meaning “to beget”, from this verbs like the Greek γίγνομαι gígnomai “to come into being” and words like the Latin genitor “parent” (from *ǵénh₁- + *-tōr) or the English king (<*ǵenh₁- + *-yóm) are formed.
Roots in Hebrew do not work in this manner, they are made of a consonantal skeleton to which vowels and affixes confer meaning, as in the case of the g-d-l (ג-ד-ל) root relating to largeness which yields verbs like ləhagdīl “to increase” and ləgaddēl “to grow”, nouns like migdāl “tower” and adjectives like gadōl “big”. Again, much like Syriac, Arabic, Amharic or any other Semitic language that comes to mind.

So far, Israeli Hebrew is proving to be quite unlike Indo-European, it is inherently alien to that language family in grammar and structure. The major difference between Indo-European and Semitic languages is that while the former, especially in their older stages, concentrate much of their morphological complexity in the noun system the latter’s complexity is concentrated in the verb system which is based on derived stems. Israeli Hebrew clearly falls into that latter category.

From this comparative standpoint alone, which can be supplemented with an endless stream of examples highlighting the disconnect, we are justified in concluding that Israeli Hebrew cannot be considered an Indo-European “hybrid language”, much less of the conservative type commonly found in Central-Eastern Europe as posited by Watermelon Hebraists.

I Heard You Say Khumus

Undeterred by what should normally be a clear-cut case of a language failing the most basic requirements for the “European” label, those who’d contest Israeli Hebrew’s Semitic credentials prefer to dwell on the pronunciation (or lack thereof) of specific sounds in that language.

Here too, myths and fallacies abound. The main obsession when it comes to this are the gutturals (AKA pharyngeals), the “throaty” sounds typical of Semitic languages.

We’ll go over those sounds separately, so bear with me:

• The pharyngeals (ע & ח): The Hebrew Ḥet is often mockingly used as proof of Israeli Hebrew’s allegedly “European” nature. Indeed, in Israeli Hebrew it is most often pronounced as an uvular fricative /ḫ/ hence Arabic words such as ḥabībī become khabībī. This isn’t universally the case, especially among speakers of Hebrew that came from the Arab world. The pronunciation of Ḥet as /ḫ/ isn’t etymologically wrong either, as it was originally pronounced both as a pharyngeal fricative /ḥ/ and /ḫ/ in Classical Hebrew. During the period of Aramaic influence over Hebrew this was levelled to /ḥ/, and later on to /ḫ/. This last change ironically restored etymological consistency for many words, such as חמש ḫaméš “five” from Proto-Semitic *ḫamšum or ירח yaʁéᵃḫ “moon” from PS *warḫum, the toponym “Jericho” is derived from that same word yet in Arabic it is called ˀArīḥā which is etymologically incorrect due to the Aramaic levelling of /ḫ/ to /ḥ/ mentioned earlier (the word تاريخ tārīḫ “date; history” in Arabic is derived from that same root for “moon” and therefore preserves the /ḫ/).

Likewise, the Hebrew ˁAyin could originally be pronounced either as a pharyngeal fricative /ˁ/ or as a velar fricative /ǵ/ (equivalent to the Arabic غ Ghayn) depending on the word’s etymology. This is why the Septuagint transcribes עמורה ˁămōrā as Γόμορρα Gómorrhā with a Gamma for the initial ˁAyin (hence the ‘G’ in Gomorrah), here too Aramaic influence led to the levelling of /ǵ/ to /ˁ/ though place names (which are more resistant to change) would’ve kept the distinction long enough for the phoneme to survive in Hellenistic times.

In Israeli Hebrew, this is mostly elided to a glottal stop /ˀ/, though it isn’t rare to hear educated speakers pronounce it as a pharyngeal regardless of communal background. This change however isn’t by any means new or even unique to Hebrew. In the Talmud (Tractate Eruvin) Galilean Jews are mocked for their inability to pronounce the pharyngeals, the Samaritan pronunciation went even further by almost entirely deleting those sounds (alongside /h/ and /ˀ/) resulting in lengthened vowels wherever they are found. This change is also attested in Akkadian (a language we’ll come back to) in a process known as “vowel colouring”, Akkadian also levelled /ḥ/ to /ḫ/, though contact with Sumerian is at fault here. Similar sound changes are attested for Assyrian (Neo-)Aramaic dialects. The same form of contact-induced change however cannot be invoked for the Hebrew examples I brought forth, hence the tendency to drop those phonemes already existed back when Hebrew had native speakers in Antiquity.

Initially at least, the pronunciation of Israeli Hebrew recommended by Ben-Yehudah and the Academy of the Hebrew Language was a pharyngeal one as in Arabic (contrary to the claims made by Watermelon Hebraists), this standard can be heard in the following interview of Ben-Yehudah’s youngest daughter:

• The emphatics (ק & צ ,ט): The emphatics in Hebrew were originally pronounced as ejectives, as in present-day Ethiosemitic languages. Ṭeth therefore was pronounced /t’/. It is possible that under the influence of Aramaic the emphatics underwent pharyngealisation (to /tˁ/ and /sˁ/), most of those arguments however rely either on medieval descriptions of Tiberian Hebrew or on the change צ < ת in the tD (Geminate Reflexive) stem (Binyan Hitpaˁel: להצטמק < להצתמק).
  The pharyngealisation of ejectives is still obscure, but can be observed in Modern South Arabian languages such as Mehri and Soqotri. Regardless, Israeli Hebrew no longer maintains a distinction between Ṭeth and its non-emphatic counterpart Tav, both are now pronounced /t/. In this it resembles Semitic languages that were exposed to Indo-European ones, such as Maltese (a descendant of Siculo-Arabic) with Italian and the Assyrian (Neo-)Aramaic dialects of Urmia with Persian which have also weakened or dropped the emphatics.
  
  The Hebrew Ṣade on the other hand, despite losing its emphatic quality, does retain an archaic feature which disappeared in most Semitic languages (except the Ethiosemitic branch). This phoneme, now pronounced /ts/, was originally a glottalised affricate /ts’/, as in the Ge’ez ጸ Ts’ä. This affricated pronunciation goes all the way back to Proto-Semitic and is attested both through the internal reconstruction of Semitic and through transcriptions of this sound in ancient Egyptian, Greek and Latin sources (among many others). The Z-series of cuneiform signs were also affricated in Akkadian. Sibawayh’s description of this phoneme is likewise consistent with an affricated /tsˁ/ in Early Medieval Arabic (how uniform this was remains debatable). Its survival as an affricate in Western pronunciations of Hebrew is a retention, one that was lost even in Samaritan Hebrew (which has /sˁ/ instead).

  

  Finally Qoph is now pronounced /k/, having also lost its emphatic quality.
  This phoneme as well once was an ejective /k’/, it possibly became an uvular plosive /q/ under the influence of either Aramaic or later Arabic (it is pronounced that way in Samaritan Hebrew). In spoken Arabic, the Qāf is often weakened to /g/ (notably in Mesopotamian and Peninsular Arabic, as is the case with Qoph in Yemenite Hebrew), /ˀ/ (North Levantine and Egyptian Arabic) and even to /k/ (or /kˁ/) in rural dialects of Southern Levantine Arabic. Such variation is doubtless tied to substratal influence suggesting early weakening of this phoneme much prior to the spread of Arabic.

  

  Despite the emphatics no longer being distinguished in Hebrew, it could be argued that no Semitic language (other than Ethiosemitic and Modern South Arabian ones) has maintained their original ejective quality to begin with.
  Hebrew certainly isn’t unique in weakening or deleting emphatics, many of those changes have direct parallels elsewhere, including in Levantine Arabic.
  
  

• The uvular fricative (ר): The Hebrew Resh is now pronounced as an uvular fricative /ʁ/ (similar to the French & German ‘R’). Common wisdom ascribes this to German or Yiddish influence, there are some problems with this though. First of all, the rhotic phoneme in Yiddish was more often than not pronounced as an alveolar flap /r/ as in the Slavic languages, secondly this likely was the original pronunciation in Yiddish (a pronunciation that can still be found in Bavarian and Alemannic German, areas where Yiddish has its roots). The uvular pronunciation, where it did exist, was more akin to a trill /ʀ/. Most first generation Israeli Hebrew speakers would have pronounced it as an alveolar flap as well.
  
  Things get more complicated when reviewing the evidence for the Tiberian pronunciation of Hebrew. In Hidāyat al-Qāriˀ, Resh is said to have a twofold pronunciation, as an uvular /ʁ/ and a pharyngealised /rˁ/, so we have evidence for an uvular realisation of that phoneme in 8th-10th century CE Tiberias within what is supposed to be the learned standard of Hebrew. This would be a mere oddity were it not for the fact that the Arabic spoken by the Jews of Baghdad treated Rāˀ as a velar /ɣ/ or an uvular /ʁ/. It goes without saying that in either case, German or Yiddish influence won’t have much explanatory power.

  

  Interestingly enough, the reflex of Proto-Semitic /r/ was an uvular in Akkadian, assuming this was carried onto Babylonian Aramaic it might explain Baghdadi Jewish Arabic’s uvular Rāˀ. In the end, while the present-day pronunciation of Resh might well be due to German or Yiddish influence, there are older iterations of this pronunciation in Hebrew’s millennia-long history which have nothing to do with European influence. Once more, such changes aren’t unique to Hebrew.
  
  

• The labials (ו & ב): Another argument made by Watermelon Hebraists is the claim that the Hebrew letters Beth and Waw are pronounced /v/ due to German influence. In the case of Waw especially, the parallel is made with the shift of Proto-Germanic /w/ > /v/. This fails on several accounts, primarily because Masoretic treatises already state that the Tiberian Hebrew Waw is pronounced like the Beth Rafe (that is to say labio-dental /v/), but not only. If you have a look at the names of the Samaritan letters posted above, you’ll notice that this letter is called ‘bā́’, this is because the letter is pronounced /b/ intervocalically, the underlying phenomenon here is /w/ > /β/ > /b/. So Waw most likely was pronounced /β/ in certain positions already in Second Temple times in both Judean and Samaritan Hebrew. Assyrian Neo-Aramaic dialects once more provide cases of parallel development. As for Beth, the pronunciation of this letter’s allophone as /v/ is due to Begadkefat spirantisation, which once existed in Samaritan Hebrew as well, it is a feature Aramaic phonology and can be found in both Western and Eastern Syriac as well as in present-day Aramaic dialects. In fact, those two sound changes are ultimately rooted in Middle Aramaic.
  

So where does that leave us? Apart from the emphatics, none of those sound changes are uncommon in other Semitic languages. The pronunciation of Israeli Hebrew isn’t particularly Ashkenazi either, it draws primarily on the Sephardic pronunciation of Hebrew, which is why the Ashkenazic Tav Rafe - pronounced Sav - doesn’t exist in Israeli Hebrew. This extends to the vowels and stress patterns of Hebrew (with the notable exception of personal names, which have penultimate stress).
Coptic is a fairly good example of a language that underwent more widespread change than what is seen in Hebrew today, in the mid-19th century Bohairic (Coptic’s liturgical standard) was subjected to a reform which used Modern Greek as the basis for its pronunciation. Despite this, I’ve yet to see people label Coptic an “Egypto-European hybrid language”.

The gutturals? A pharyngeal /ḥ/ exists in Ukrainian (and it possibly existed in Proto-Indo-European’s more archaic stages), Nakota (a Siouan language), Amis (an Austronesian language spoken in Taiwan), Chechen, Kabardian, Avar and a slew of other North Caucasian languages. Are those somehow more Semitic than Israeli and Samaritan Hebrew or Amharic all of a sudden?
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and what Watermelon linguistics does is provide a measurement of “Semiteness” by using Arabic as the departure point. Much like how Palestinism reduces genetics to Global 25 distance charts, here it reduces linguistics to the pronunciation of Arabic phonemes.

Jewish Esperanto?

Some of the more revealing criticism of Israeli Hebrew compares it to an artificial language, a form of “Jewish Esperanto” if you will. What Watermelon Hebraists tend to have in common is an abysmal ignorance of the Hebrew language, knowing precious little beyond a handful of words like “Shalom”, “Goy” or “Hasbara”, so it isn’t exactly surprising they’d think along those lines.

Still, it’s an interesting thought to ponder… Is Israeli Hebrew really an artificial language? And if not, how can we tell? What are the differences between it and Classical or Biblical Hebrew for that matter?

The amount of difference between Classical and Israeli Hebrew is an interesting topic, there indeed are a few differences. Israeli Hebrew is a standardised version of the language, if it is mainly based on Classical Hebrew it integrates later layers (Mishnaic, Medieval) as well. The result is something akin to Greek, in that language a conscious choice was made to either include or reject influence from older stages of the language (the archaising Katharevousa was Greece’s official language until 1976 and the polytonic system was abolished in 1982) in favour of the spoken language (Demotic), to some extent it can be said that Israeli Hebrew is a koiné language (Koine Greek was mainly based on the Attic dialect and included other dialectal layers).

Some important differences between Classical and Israeli Hebrew include the disappearance of an entire derived stem (Puˁal as the passive of Paˁal, i.e. יֻלַּד & לֻקַּ֖ח), differences in tense, mood and aspect (loss of the jussive, shift from accomplished/unaccomplished to past/present/future), differences in syntax and word formation. Most of those differences are found in the different layers of Hebrew that were streamlined into the standardisation process. Despite those differences, Israeli Hebrew remains close enough to Classical Hebrew to enable any fairly educated speaker to understand with little effort not just the Biblical text or Iron Age inscriptions in the language, but even documents written in Moabite, Phoenician, Ammonite and Edomite, all Canaanite dialects closely related to Hebrew.

On the other hand, Israeli Hebrew sometimes picks up right where Hebrew ceased being a spoken language. Highlighted in the letter above for instance, written by none other than Simon bar Kokhba (the leader of the last major Jewish war against Rome), is the word תכבלים. Normally this should read את הכבלים “the chains”, but the weakening of /h/ led to the assimilation of the definite article -ה /hā-/ to the accusative particle אֶת /ˀet/ resulting in /tā-/ which is what we can see in this 2nd century letter.
This merger of -את ה ˀet hā- into tā- is also widespread in contemporary spoken Hebrew, where /h/ is also weakened considerably (and sometimes deleted).

It goes without saying that if Israeli Hebrew were “Jewish Esperanto”, we’d be seeing none of this. Achieving fluency in Esperanto won’t enable you to understand Classical Latin or any of the related languages like Faliscan or Oscan, anymore than it’ll replicate sound changes that existed in Vulgar Latin. As far as superficiality goes, Israeli Hebrew is no more a conlang than Fuṣḥā (Standard Literary Arabic) which likewise happens to be a koiné language, a standardised and modernised form of the language mostly based on Classical Arabic. It in fact is more of an organic language than Fuṣḥā will ever be as it has no dialectal counterpart (and therefore no diglossia) and isn’t merely a literary language relegated to books, movies and the media.

A Despised Tongue

One could surmise that this obsession over Israeli Hebrew often translates into an unironic form of belief in Zionist mythology. It can be said without too much exaggeration that Watermelon Hebraists are much stronger believers in the ‘Revival’ aspect of Israeli Hebrew than ideological Zionists themselves ever were.
That is because Hebrew never truly “died” out, at least not in the way languages like Hittite or Elamite did. And I’m not alluding to its liturgical status when I say this, Medieval Hebrew was a very productive language on par with Latin and Greek, it also was a medium of communication between different communities. Ben-Yehudah himself concentrated his efforts in Jerusalem because a form of pre-Modern Hebrew was already spoken as a vernacular language there due to the many different Jewish communities which shared only Hebrew as a common language.

If the theory of Israeli Hebrew as a “Semito-European hybrid” were even remotely serious, the European component wouldn’t be restricted to Indo-European languages but also extend to Uralic ones such as Hungarian. You seldom hear about Uralic influences over Israeli Hebrew for a simple reason: The claim is spurious.
If there were any truth to the lie that Israeli Hebrew is “morphologically modelled” on Arabic, a lie repeated by Nur Masalha; one should have no problems whatsoever finding the morphological innovations peculiar to Arabic (prepositions such as fī, ˁinda, ḥattā; negation with mā, lam, lan; etc) in Hebrew instead of specifically Canaanite ones, including in the derived stems (Arabic has twelve, of which about ten are productive; Hebrew has seven). Likewise, if Israeli Hebrew made extensive use of Arabic borrowings, those should unproblematically account for a non-trivial percentage of Hebrew vocabulary, yet in reality Ben-Yehuda and others mainly repurposed hapax legomena (words which appear only once in the Hebrew Bible) to create neologisms, in the same way actual borrowings were fully integrated within Hebrew morphology (a typical example would be the verb “to phone”: לטלפן ləṭalfēn, a Piˁel form). Once again, the argument self-destructs, and all that is required is a passing knowledge of the Hebrew language in order to understand that.

Why bother repeating this stuff if it is so easily debunked? If it indeed is quite easy to disprove, this form of linguistic sophistry is appealing because very few are familiar enough with the topic to debunk it efficiently. More importantly however, the Hebrew language embodies a major obstacle for anti-Israel propaganda.
The main issue is that Watermelon Hebraists wish it were the Jewish equivalent of Afrikaans instead of the Levant’s original tongue. It would be easier for them to peddle the myth of “settler-colonialism” had Yiddish been adopted as Israel’s national language. This desire is amplified by their attempts to portray the Palestinian Arabs as the sole and direct heirs of the Canaanites, Hebrew being the only Canaanite language spoken today while the Palestinian Arabs lack a language of their own is a very hard pill to swallow. It’s easier to pretend the pill doesn’t exist, to distort and invent tall tales so as to label the whole thing “fake”, “European” and whatnot.

One may never run out of reasons to hate Israeli Hebrew, from its “uncouth” sounds to its complicated writing system, from its being the language of the Jews, the “Settler Colony”, the language of the “Nakba”, “Apartheid” and “Genocide”.
Speaking Hebrew, or even having a Hebrew accent, is more than enough to put you in danger in many places nowadays. But if you were to ask me, the main reason why people repeat the kind of self-defeating slop dissected in this post is because the language’s very existence is a sore point for Palestinism’s ethnonationalist fantasies…
This is a language they wish they could co-opt and label their own, as has been done to much of Hebrew and Jewish heritage already.

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Israelites & Canaanites

In my last post, I went into some detail over how the Jews and the Samaritans are the Canaanites’ primary linguistic, cultural and biological heirs, going so far as to describe them as “watered-down Canaanites”. There is however one major aspect in which the Israelites differed significantly from the Canaanites: Their national deity.

The worship of Yahweh as Iron Age Judah and Israel’s tutelar deity does not strictly constitute a departure from the Canaanite milieu in which the Israelites emerged, in fact the model of a national (or “territorial”) kingdom with its own national deity was pretty much the norm for the Southern Levantine kingdoms of the Iron II period:

• Moab had Kemosh as its national deity

• Ammon had Milkom as its national deity

• Edom had Qos as its national deity

A point that is too rarely taken into account is that Israel and Judah’s shared national deity decreases the odds of both kingdoms having always been separate. Yahweh worship most likely stemmed from the national cult of a unitary state that later split into both kingdoms which then inherited Yahweh worship, this would broadly mirror the events depicted in the Book of Kings, and almost certainly wasn’t the result of either kingdom imposing its state religion on the other.

Where the Israelites differ from their neighbours is the deity itself being worshipped. Yahweh is seemingly absent from all Bronze Age sources, whether hieroglyphic or cuneiform, and makes an appearance only after the Late Bronze Age collapse.
The mystery begins when we understand that Yahweh could not have been Israel’s original deity, a reality reflected in Israel’s name where the theophoric element is El, the head of the Canaanite pantheon and father of the gods (identical to Ugaritic Ilu).

Yahweh’s adoption must have intervened after the emergence of the Israelites as a distinct ethnic group in the Late Bronze Age, from the collapse of BA society to the emergence of national kingdoms, a Dark Age where there is more speculation than fact. The adoption of this hitherto unknown deity is what made the Israelites uniquely distinct from the Canaanite milieu from which they sprang forth and their no-less Canaanite neighbours. Furthermore, Yahweh’s original profile remains unclear, in order to uncover it and address this historical-religious problem we need to sift through the evidence, both internal and external to the Hebrew Bible.

(All translations below are my own)

Midianites Before Berlin

There are two competing models which attempt to explain the origins of Yahweh:

1. The Midianite-Kenite hypothesis

2. The Berlin hypothesis (thus named after its association with German scholars)

The first hypothesis enjoys more traction, mainly because of how it mirrors what the oldest layer of Hebrew poetry has to say about Yahweh’s origins and because it finds some degree of plausible support in the epigraphic record and even in the archeological record.

This hypothesis, one of the most enduring in the field of Biblical scholarship, advances the claim that since Yahweh was an outsider to the older Canaanite pantheon, his origins must be sought among the nomadic groups of Canaan’s southern desert-steppe periphery, the Sinai peninsula and northwestern Arabia, and that his worship was transmitted either via contact with those groups (such as the Midianites) or was brought by some of those nomads who settled in Canaan (the Kenites and Edomites) alongside the Israelites at the beginning of the Iron Age.

While the earliest exemplars of Hebrew poetry were possibly written down some time between the 9th and 8th centuries BCE, the archaic language of those poems (which finds many parallels in the texts of Bronze Age Emar, Ugarit and Mari) strongly suggests that they were transmitted orally over centuries, their composition likely going back to the Late Bronze Age.

The Song of Deborah is understood as embodying the most archaic layer of the Hebrew language in the entire Biblical corpus, it is also significant that it is found in the Book of Judges which is almost unanimously seen as reflecting the situation in the earliest phases of the Early Iron Age in the highlands of Judea-Samaria.

                                     יְהוָה בְּצֵאתְךָ מִשֵּׂעִיר בְּצַעְדְּךָ מִשְּׂדֵה אֱדוֹם אֶרֶץ רָעָשָׁה גַּם-שָׁמַיִם נָטָפוּ גַּם-עָבִים נָטְפוּ מָיִם׃
                                                                                   הָרִים נָזְלוּ מִפְּנֵי יְהוָה זֶה סִינַי מִפְּנֵי יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל׃

From the onset, this poem describes Yahweh marching out to battle from his abode, named in quick succession as “Seir” and “the field of Edom”, Yahweh is given the title Zěh Sinay, an archaic phrase where the first element is not the (identical) demonstrative “this” but rather serves the same function as Arabic ḏū “owner, possessor”, hence “Lord of Sinai” would be an accurate translation.
Seir and Edom which are both mentioned as Yahweh’s home are situated in Canaan’s southern desert periphery, Seir also appears alongside Sinai in another archaic poem, the Blessing of Moses (Deuteronomy 33:2).

Outside the Hebrew Bible, Sˁrr “Seir” makes an appearance in the New Kingdom topographic lists of the temples of Soleb and Amara West in Nubia (respectively dating back to the 14th and 13th centuries BCE), detailing several tribes of the Shasu, nomadic pastoralists who encroached on Egyptian trade routes. More importantly, among those Shasu nomads is another group known as the “Shasu of Yhwꜣ” in what might be the first mention of the deity by name, going back to the Late Bronze Age.

This somewhat enigmatic mention has confused many, as the list ties the Shasu clans to specific areas from which they hail, Yhwꜣ is thus best understood as a place name (or even a tribal name). Still, the close geographic association between Yahweh and those southern areas isn’t entirely problematic, the region from which this group hailed might have easily been named after the deity altogether.

Several scholars (Donald Redford and Anson Rainey to name but a few) have considered this datum sufficiently compelling to posit an identification between the Shasu and the Proto-Israelites. From a narrower archeological standpoint, this could work if we endorse the view (espoused by Israel Finkelstein and Avraham Faust) that the Iron I settlement in the Judean & Samarian highlands was a phenomenon rooted in Transjordanian nomadic clans arriving in a set of migrations from the east, that being said the evidence linking those pastoralists to the inhabitants of the Negev and northwest Arabia is flimsy.

Midian-Edom-Cain Nexus

The notion that Yahweh was transmitted to the early Israelites through contact with the Midianites is found in the Wilderness narrative and its description of Midian, whence Moses first encounters Yahweh and whose father-in-law is described as “the priest of Midian”:

                   וּמֹשֶׁה הָיָה רֹעֶה אֶת-צֹאן יִתְרוֹ חֹתְנוֹ כֹּהֵן מִדְיָן וַיִּנְהַג אֶת-הַצֹּאן אַחַר הַמִּדְבָּר וַיָּבֹא אֶל-הַר הָאֱלֹהִים חֹרֵבָה׃

Here too, we see that Yahweh is tied to a “Mountain of the Elohim”, which echoes the toponymic nature of the Shasu lists. The portrayal of the Midianites in the Hebrew Bible is quite ambiguous however, if they are depicted in the Wilderness narrative as a friendly group with which Moses freely intermarries and with whom the Israelites seem to share their faith in Yahweh, they are more often described as enemies of Israel.

It is the Midianites (often confused with the Ishmaelites) who sell Joseph as a slave in Egypt. Moses himself wages war against the Midianites and kills five of their kings, all vassals of the Amorite Siḥōn (Numbers 31). In Judges 6 (right after the Song of Deborah), the Midianites are raiding and enslaving the Israelites as punishment for their impiety, they are delivered by Gideon who captures and executes the Midianite chieftains ˁŌrēḇ “Crow” and Zəˀēḇ “Wolf” before taking the fight into Midianite territory and doing the same to two of their kings, one of whom bears a very peculiar name:

                                               וַיָּקָם גִּדְעוֹן וַיַּהֲרֹג אֶת-זֶבַח וְאֶת-צַלְמֻנָּע וַיִּקַּח אֶת-הַשַּׂהֲרֹנִים אֲשֶׁר בְּצַוְּארֵי גְמַלֵּיהֶם׃

Ṣalmunnāˁ is — much like Israel — a theophoric name, containing the name of a deity known as Ṣalm which appears in several Taymanitic texts. Taymanitic was a language spoken during the first half of the 1st millennium BCE in northwestern Arabia close to the oasis of Taymā, this language seems to have been of the Northwest Semitic type (meaning it shares a more recent common ancestor with Canaanite, Aramaic and Ugaritic than it does with Arabic).

Midian shows up in a Taymanitic text discovered in 2012 in Wādī al-Zaydāniyyah, south of Taymā in Tabuk Province, possibly dating back to the Iron IIA considering the morphology of the letters. This is important as it provides external attestation of Midian, which can no longer be dismissed as a mere product of Judahite scribal imagination. The context is also crucial, regardless of the boast inherent to the inscription, there is good reason to suspect that the Midianites were either akin to the Taymanites or spoke a form of Taymanitic.

While Yitrō “Jethro” features a final /w/ typical of Old Arabic names (think of Gashmu the Arab or Gindibu the Arabian from the Kurkh monoliths), his name undoubtedly is the Midianite version of Wtr, a personal name found in other Ancient North Arabian inscriptions. The catch however is that this name partakes in the word-initial /w/ > /y/ shift which is a hallmark of NW Semitic and is present in Taymanitic inscriptions.

The identification between the Midianites and the Taymanites also finds some degree of support in the archeological record, the painted pottery of Tayma appears to be a local variant of Qurayyah Painted Ware (QPW) which is usually understood to be tied to the Midianites, there is also some overlap between those and Edomite pottery (STNP) which appears in the Negev during the Early Iron Age.

Leaving those subtleties aside, if we assume the Midianites worshipped Ṣalm as their chief deity, we might need to look elsewhere for Yahweh’s origins.
What of Edom and the Kenites? The former are said to have battled against the Midianites in Genesis 36, and as we’ve seen above Yahweh is described as stepping out of the “field of Edom”.

The earliest mention of Edom is to be found in Papyrus Anastasi VI (13th century BCE), the Hebrew Bible traces the Edomites back to Esau, Israel’s brother, thereby making them close relatives of the Israelites. From the few Edomite inscriptions discovered so far (mostly ostraca), they were linguistically Canaanite.
At Ḥorvat Teman (Kuntillet ˁAjrud), a caravanserai (likely established by the kingdom of Judah) which also served as an early pilgrimage site, several late 9th century inscriptions refer to Yahweh alongside other deities such as El, Ba’al and Asherah, some closely mirror the poetic language of the passages discussed above. One inscription in particular contains a blessing where “Yahweh of Teman and his Asherah” are invoked.

The mention of “Teman”, a word usually meaning “south” in Classical Hebrew, brings us back to Edom. In Genesis 36, “Teman” is listed as a bona fide Edomite clan:

                                          אֵלֶּה אַלּוּפֵי בְנֵי-עֵשָׂו בְּנֵי אֱלִיפַז בְּכוֹר עֵשָׂו אַלּוּף תֵּימָן אַלּוּף אוֹמָר אַלּוּף צְפוֹ אַלּוּף קְנַז׃

Pay attention to the last name, Kenaz, we’ll be coming back to it shortly.

Another basis for comparison would be the Blessing of Moses which potentially mentions Asherah in an oblique manner:

                            וַיֹּאמַר יְהוָה מִסִּינַי בָּא וְזָרַח מִשֵּׂעִיר לָמוֹ הוֹפִיעַ מֵהַר פָּארָן וְאָתָה מֵרִבְבֹת קֹדֶשׁ מִימִינוֹ אשדת לָמוֹ׃

The word ˀšdt in this enigmatic passage is gibberish, and very likely a scribal error where the original version had Resh instead of Dalet, two very similar letters in the Paleo-Hebrew script (and still today in the Square Hebrew script), leading us to the reading ˀšrt “Asherah”.

The mention of Kenaz brings us to the Kenites. Unlike Midian and Edom, the Kenites are unattested outside the Hebrew Bible, we are then entirely dependent on Biblical sources. The Kenites’ name is etymologically-related to metal-working based on Aramaic and Arabic comparanda, they are indeed described as itinerant smelters and are thought to be Cain’s descendants (of Cain & Abel fame). At the beginning of the Book of Judges, Moses’ father-in-law is labeled a Kenite, not a Midianite:

                   וּבְנֵי קֵינִי חֹתֵן מֹשֶׁה עָלוּ מֵעִיר הַתְּמָרִים אֶת-בְּנֵי יְהוּדָה מִדְבַּר יְהוּדָה אֲשֶׁר בְּנֶגֶב עֲרָד וַיֵּלֶךְ וַיֵּשֶׁב אֶת-הָעָם׃

In the Song of Deborah, the Kenites are described as fighting alongside Israel against Sisera and Jabin of Hazor, to make a long story short they are often tied to the Kenizzites who feature prominently in the conquest narratives surrounding Caleb, son of Yephunneh, himself a Kenizzite. Nevertheless, Kenaz is listed as an Edomite clan alongside Teman as we’ve seen above, which adds another layer of complexity.
The Kenizzite clans are said to have settled in and around Hebron, which would become king David’s first capital.

Closer ties between Yahweh and Edom would explain the absence of polemic against Qos, Edom’s national deity, in the Biblical text and might even hint at a common background for both deities, but this is really an argument from silence (for that matter one could make the same argument with Ṣalm). The Kenites have an objectively better shot at being the group that brought the cult of Yahweh to Israel, that is unless we prioritise the Kenizzites’ Edomite genealogy (which would make them practitioners of the cult of Qos instead).

Looking at the tribes of Israel, three stand out as potential sources for early Yahweh worship, those being Levi, Simon and Judah. The first two tribes notoriously lack any tribal allotment (pointing to an exogenous origin) and are often lumped together (as in the Rape of Dinah and the Blessing of Jacob), the Levites are very strongly associated with the Exodus and Wilderness narratives and at least one of their clans is listed in Genesis 36 among the Edomite clans, one of their families is also named after Hebron, likewise Judah seems to have been a constellation of nomadic clans (including the Calebites-Kenizzites).

In summary, the process of transmission of Yahweh from the south is unlikely to have been restricted to a handful of Shasu tribes making their way to EIA Israel, there’s a slew of contenders at our disposal which means it must’ve been a rather continuous affair largely tracking repeated waves of semi-nomadic clans, originating in northwestern Arabia and the Arabah, settling in the Negev starting from the 12th century BCE and continuing well into the 6th century BCE.
The intensification of those waves of nomadic settlers could explain the discrepancies between Judahite and Israelite forms of Yahwism, with Judahite religious practice staying closer to the originally aniconic and austere nature of the cult of Yahweh because of greater exposure and integration of families of Midianite or Negevite descent in Judah, while Israelite religious practice in the north displayed more syncretism as it enshrined the centrality of pilgrimage and communal feasting that seems to have been a salient feature of Yahweh’s cult, explaining the nature of Elijah’s pilgrimage from Israel to Ḥoreḇ.

                               וַיָּקָם וַיֹּאכַל וַיִּשְׁתֶּה וַיֵּלֶךְ בְּכֹחַ הָאֲכִילָה הַהִיא אַרְבָּעִים יוֹם וְאַרְבָּעִים לַיְלָה עַד הַר הָאֱלֹהִים חֹרֵב׃
                                                                                                                 וַיָּבֹא-שָׁם אֶל-הַמְּעָרָה וַיָּלֶן שָׁם׃

Even though some scholars (such as Amzallag) emphasise the metallurgical and volcanic qualities of this deity (which aligns with the Kenites’ status as metalworkers), the original profile of Yahweh is more convincingly that of a war god or a divine warrior granting victory on the battlefield to his followers.
Yahweh’s ultimate origins would be among a set of early North Arabian deities alongside Qos (whose name, etymologically related to the Arabic qaws “bow”, also points towards a war god) and Ṣalm (possibly meaning “image”, hinting at aniconism), all of which might be manifestations of the pan-Semitic god ˁAṯtar, this would also explain the more localised and tribal aspect inherent to these deities.

Finally, if we accept Yahweh’s origin among proto-historical North Arabian tribes, from a genomic perspective we should expect this transmission to be reflected by a steady influx of Ancient North Arabian admixture trickling into IA Israel.
Tentatively, several Y-Chromosomal lineages found among Jews that have unambiguous LBA and EIA Arabian ties are potential candidates for such an association, some of the best examples would include J-ZS2121 (downstream from FGC8712, under which we find the Qurashite J-L859) and E-BY11629, but this is mere speculation at this stage even if those lineages fit the bill.

In the next part, we’ll be looking at the shortcomings of the Midianite-Kenite hypothesis and focus more closely on the Berlin hypothesis.

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Arab Canaan

In my earlier post on Canaanwashing, I mentioned briefly how Palestinian agitprop is heavily reliant on Canaanite cosplay in order to promote the illusion of historical continuity between the Levant’s Bronze Age inhabitants and present-day Palestinian Arabs and in so doing enshrine their legitimacy in a past that predates the Israelites.

This type of historical mythmaking constitutes one of Palestinian Arab identity’s cornerstones, it is expounded both in the inner (geared towards an Arabic-speaking audience) and outer (for Western consumption) track narratives.
The only major difference is that in the inner track the Canaanites are thoroughly Arabised and depicted as a tribe that migrated directly from the Arabian peninsula so as to bolster Palestinian Arabness, while the outer track invokes the Canaanites to cast doubt on the Palestinians’ Arabness which makes their claim to indigeneity rather suspicious.

This attempt to rewrite history is largely echoed in recent Arabic historiographical literature, as in ˁAlā Maḥmūd Abū ˁĀmer’s book entitled “The Palestinians - The Ancient Canaanites” which proposes to set the record straight by showing how Zionism distorted Palestinian history and hid from the masses that the Philistines were not invaders that came with the Sea Peoples but rather Canaanite Arabs who had settled in the Aegean, creating the Minoan culture and later still settling in Italy to create Etruscan civilisation.

From PLO dictator Arafat claiming Jebusite descent and Palestinian Arab children being taught at school that the Canaanites were the first Arabs in the Levant, all the way to hordes of red triangles and watermelons pasting screenshots of Vahaduo distance and admixture charts attesting to the Palestinian Arabs’ purity and proximity to the Canaanites of old, this nationalist myth factory often veers into sheer ridicule and easily becomes a parody of itself.

Take the following user above on X, he is repeating a very common claim according to which the Shekel is in fact “Palestinian” and adduces a picture of what he believes is a ”Canaanite“ coin… While it is in fact an Achaemenid-era specimen bearing the name of the Persian province of Judea (Yehud Medinata)! A passing knowledge of the Phoenician script would suffice to avoid this kind of embarrassment, but the Palestinian Arabs are rather inept Canaanites insofar as they cannot be bothered with learning any element of the Canaanite culture they insist on laying claim to.

Or take this schoolbook, within its pages we discover that the Canaanite cities have Hebrew names, the Arabic names are between brackets, to explain this blatant contradiction we are told that “the Zionists stole” those Canaanite place names.

The above should be put in parallel with yet another trope that has been gaining traction lately, namely the insistence on using Arabic place names instead of the Canaanite ones the Zionists allegedly stole according to Palestinism’s inner track narrative and which are recast as artificial or “colonial” place names.

I could keep providing examples in this manner indefinitely, but I think the point is already being driven home. While the Palestinian Arabs might well have inherited a significant chunk of Canaanite ancestry, genes are by and large the only thing they owe them, having inherited precious little of the culture, religion, folklore, identity and language of the Canaanites, which is what leads to the kind of ineptitude I spoke of. All of this begs the question:

If not the Palestinian Arabs, who then inherited all of those things?

The Lip of Canaan

It is often said that Hebrew is a Canaanite language, however here we risk falling into the cycle of banality and trivia. What do we mean exactly by “Canaanite language”? Hebrew is a Semitic language and so is Arabic, what makes them different?
Is Hebrew, especially its “Modern” form, a constructed language invented out of thin air by pillaging Arabic as so many anti-Israel propagandists affirm so confidently?

I shall start by making the following statement: Hebrew isn’t only a Canaanite language, it is THE Canaanite language par excellence. And not just because its speakers were acutely aware of speaking in the “Lip of Canaan” (Śəfat Kənaˁan; Isaiah 19:18). But first, let’s go back to the first question asked above, what do we mean by “Canaanite language”?

Hebrew, like Arabic is part of the Semitic language family, which is itself part of a larger macrofamily with roots extending back to the Epipaleolithic period (Afroasiatic). The similarities between Semitic languages are often overstated by those unfamiliar with the linguistic literature, in truth the language family is every bit as diverse as the Indo-European language family, Proto-Semitic and Proto-Indo-European for that matter were roughly contemporary (having been spoken around 4000 BCE) and have therefore been diverging for a similar amount of time.

The primary divide within Semitic is between a Western and an Eastern branch, the latter is extinct and comprises Akkadian (and its Assyrian & Babylonian dialects) alongside Eblaite, in contrast all of the surviving Semitic languages branched from Common West Semitic. The main innovation common to West Semitic is the transformation of the P-S stative *ḳatil- “is killed” (equivalent to Akk. paris “is cut off”) into a perfective verbal form *ḳatal- “has killed” with an accompanying vocalic shift, while the earlier perfective *yaḳtul loses ground. Common innovations are errors that became the norm, think of them as mutations.

Similar mutations of the sort enable us to group Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic together in a Central Semitic node, this has been the consensus view since Hetzron’s studies in the 70s. One major flaw in comparison with the Indo-European languages is that the number of those mutations is very low indeed, thankfully the Central Semitic hypothesis has stood on solid ground since Huehnergard adduced a number of common features in a 2005 paper. The fact that all three of Semitic philology’s classical languages derive from a single language spoken circa 2500 BCE somewhere between the Levant and Northern Arabia contributes considerably to the undue impression of uniformity in the Semitic family.

Underneath that Central Semitic node, Hebrew falls into a narrower group known as Northwest Semitic which also comprises Aramaic, Ugaritic and Amorite.
Northwest Semitic is not as well fleshed out as Central Semitic and though it clearly has some defining features, such as the word-initial shift of P-S */w/ > PNWS */y/ (compare Arb. walad & Hbr. yéled) and the prefixation of ˀa- to the 1st ps. pl. pronoun *niḥnu, it bears the features of a sprachbund.

By the 1st millennium BCE, NWS still was a dialect continuum. At one end of the dialect chain stood Aramaic and closely-related dialects (such as Sam’alian and the language of the Deir Alla inscription) while at the opposite end stood Old Byblian (Phoenician’s earliest dialect) along with the rest of the Canaanite dialects. In practice, what this means is that while a Phoenician in all likelihood would have struggled to understand an Aramean, a Phoenician could almost effortlessly converse with an Ammonite or an Israelite.

So again, what do we mean by “Canaanite” here? In short, the Canaanite dialects constitute a rather well-defined subgroup, sharing 5 diagnostic features:

1. The Canaanite Vowel Shift: NWS */ā/ > Proto-Canaanite */ō/

2. The 1st cs. suffix: NWS -tū̆ > P-C -tī (by analogy with the 1st sg. personal pronoun NWS *ˀanākū > P-C *ˀanōkī)

3. Levelling of 1st cp. clitic -nū

4. Factitive (Doubled-)stem: NWS *paˁˁila > P-C *piˁˁila

5. Causative stem: NWS *hapˁila > P-C *hipˁila

Because of the discrete nature of most of those features, they are usually unlikely to show up in the written record. They do appear in Amarna Canaanite (even the last feature appears in letter EA 256, line 7, as ḫi-iḫ-bi-e “he hid”, compare Hbr. heḥbiˀ), making it obvious that those changes had already taken root by the LBA, but the only feature here that appears consistently in hieroglyphic and cuneiform sources is the Canaanite vowel shift, chiefly in place names and personal names.
This is why ˀašḳelōn (Ashkelon) is dyed-in-the-wool Canaanite while ˁasqalān isn’t.

Another feature which was shared by all 1st millennium BCE Canaanite dialects, even though it did not exist in Proto-Canaanite, and is easily identifiable in the epigraphic material written in those dialects is the definite article (“the” in English, Arabic has al- though Old Arabic also used hn-, h- & ˀ- along ˀl- with h- being the most common).

That being said the Canaanite dialects were far from uniform, one example of this can be seen in the masculine plural suffix used in those languages. Most of them use -īm, however Moabite has -īn as its masc. pl. marker instead and in this it aligns with Aramaic more closely.

Canaanite can be further subdivided thanks to a number of key isoglosses, both morphological and lexical. One isogloss that has been the object of discussion by the past is the verb “To be”, in Phoenician the verb is derived from the k-w-n root (Proto-Semitic *kawana) which is also found in Ethiosemitic and Arabic, while in Hebrew and Moabite the verb is derived from the h-w-y root (P-S *hawaya) which is shared with Aramaic and has a cognate in the Akkadian ewûm “To become”.

Likewise, the verb “To do” constitutes another critical isogloss pointing in the same direction: In Phoenician the verb is derived from the p-ˁ-l root (here too, shared with Arabic), in Hebrew and Moabite the ˁ-ś-h root is the main exponent (with at least one Ugaritic cognate) and Ammonite seemingly uses ˁ-b-d like Aramaic.

These important isoglosses, including many others I have not mentionned, indicate that the primary divide within Canaanite follows a coastal-inland pattern pitting Tyro-Sidonian, Byblian, Philistine against Hebrew, Moabite, Ammonite and Edomite.

Despite the imperfect attestation of those features in Edomite, Philistine and Ammonite (due to the small amount of written material left behind in those languages), this situation is unlikely to change.

Another example of this divide can be seen in the further development of the causative stem in Phoenician where *hipˁila > yip̄ˁil while Edomite retains the initial hi- (hibraktīka in the Horvat Uza ostracon), Phoenician’s negation strategy is also quite unlike that of the other Canaanite dialects as the reflex of *lāˀ is absent while the main negative particles are bl, ˀy & ˀl (which appear in the other dialects but not always with the same function or frequency).

We can safely assume the divide between a more innovative coastal core and a more conservative inland periphery is the primary one.

The Canaanite dialects can be subdivided further still by looking at other isoglosses, such as the relative pronoun which differs in several of the languages. Phoenician uses ˀš while Hebrew, Moabite and Edomite used ˀšr from which the former is derived (ultimately from P-S *ˀṯr “place, trace”, which yielded Aramaic ˀaṯrā “place”, the source of Hebrew ˀătā́r “site”).

The classification then obtained from such isoglosses divides the Canaanite dialects into Northern (Phoenician, Ekronite), Central (Israelian Hebrew, Ammonite) and Southern (Judean Hebrew, Moabite, Edomite) clusters. In many ways the Central Canaanite cluster is an intermediate one, with the Southern one being the cluster exhibiting the most archaic features and the Northern cluster exhibiting the most innovative ones.

What is known as “Modern” (Israeli) Hebrew is neither a conlang, nor “relexified Yiddish” and much less an imitation of Arabic but really a standardised and modernised version of the language using Classical (“Biblical”) Hebrew as its template, the latter being the literary form of Judean Hebrew. Israeli Hebrew thus bears the hallmarks of the Southern Canaanite cluster, the most archaic and conservative part of the Canaanite dialect chain.

It is also worth keeping in mind that in the course of the second half of the 1st millennium BCE, most of the Canaanite languages lost their last monolingual (and even bilingual) speakers as they were swept aside by Imperial Aramaic. Hebrew held out longer, with its last monolingual speakers dying out in the 3rd and 4th centuries CE, Punic (the last form of Phoenician to be spoken) also lasted until the 5th and 6th centuries in North Africa.

The difference being that Hebrew kept playing an important part in the cultural, intellectual and religious life of the Hebrew people (the Jews and the Samaritans) for well over a millennium after it had ceased being spoken as a first language.
Jews and Samaritans were proficient in Hebrew to such an extent that treatises, letters, poems and the like kept being produced for generations. All in all, if we grant that Canaanite was first spoken circa 1700-1500 BCE, Hebrew accounts for about half of Canaanite’s ~3500 years of history.
It is also the Canaanite language that produced the most enduring written tradition, one needs merely to review the remaining inscriptional evidence in Phoenician, Moabite or Edomite, much of which is fragmentary, to comprehend how deep the gap is. It is above all in this sense that Hebrew is THE Canaanite language par excellence (for the same reason Latin is THE Italic language par excellence).

What of Palestinian Arabic you might ask?
Surely the Canaanite languages must have left some trace, after all many are very confident in claiming that the Palestinian Arabs are the real Canaanites right?
In truth, the amount of Canaanite material in Southern Levantine Arabic’s NWS substrate is vanishingly low, in my earlier post on the Arameans I wrote in detail on how Aramaic had a pervasive influence on the language’s morphology, but Canaanite in comparison has very little to show for beyond a few isolated lexical elements (many of which might easily be Aramaic).
One possible exception would be the use of Form VII verbs for roots in which this derived stem is either uncommon or simply absent in Arabic.
Some examples would include:

• inqā́l “to be said” instead of the internal passive qīla (Form I); parallel with Hbr. neˀĕmā́r

• inwálad “to be born” instead of int. pass. wulida (Form I; also contrast this with the more Aramaic-like ˀitwálad); parallel with Hbr. nōlā́d

• inḥább “to be loved” instead of int. pass. ḥubba (Form I); parallel with Hbr. neˀĕhā́ḇ

• inṣalab “to be crucified” instead of int. pass. ṣuliba (Form I); parallel with Hbr. niṣlā́ḇ

• inšā́f “to be seen” instead of int. pass. šīfa (Form I); parallel with Hbr. niṣpā́

• inšáfā “to be healed” instead of ištafā (Form VIII); parallel with Hbr. nirpā́

The Form VII (N-stem) verbs that are passives of Form I (G-stem) verbs offer a very direct parallel to Canaanite where Nip̄ˁal (N-stem) is the passive of Paˁal (G-stem), despite the variance in derived stems observed between some of the Canaanite dialects. This however is an “original” thought exercise by yours truly, and I’m not sure whether this has been noticed or discussed in the available literature on Arabic dialectology. Beyond this oddity, Palestinian Arabic has surprisingly little when it comes to a supposed Canaanite substrate.

The Hands of Canaan

Now that we’ve established beyond any reasonable doubt that the Jews and the Samaritans are the main linguistic heirs of the Canaanites, if not the only ones, let us now turn to their cultural heirs.

There is some degree of tension within the Hebrew Bible as to the origins of Israel, tension between an origin outside the land of Canaan (whether from Ur of the Chaldees and Haran or Egypt) and one which is more firmly local and can be seen in the narratives of Isaac, Jacob and several individual tribes, in addition to later events involving more discrete groups (such as the Gibeonites).

The earliest Israelites emerged in the wake of the Late Bronze Age collapse which marked the beginning of a dark age. Despite this, quite a few things are clear about them. First of all, we know they existed as a separate group by the late 13th century BCE. For Merenptah’s Israelites to have caught Egypt’s attention and warranted a campaign that put them on the same footing as more traditional Canaanite city-states like Gezer or Ashkelon, the Israelites must have come into existence at least during the first half of that same century (probably around 1270 BCE).

What is indeed known to us is that the Iron I (1200-1000 BCE) material culture found in the highlands of Judea-Samaria and which can be tied to the Proto-Israelites starting from the 12th century BCE is largely a continuation of Late Bronze Canaanite culture.

Collared-rim jars, four-room houses and lime-plastered cisterns, the conjunction of which characterised Iron I Israelite settlements (along with the lack of decoration in pottery), all have earlier parallels in LB Canaanite sites, even the taboo on pork consumption seems to have earlier roots.

The provenance of those settlers remains contentious, but for the most part it is extremely likely that they originated on the coastal plain of Canaan, these urban drop-outs must have left the city-states in search of safety, driven out by the incursions of the Sea Peoples, they also wanted out of the older Egyptian system (which in part explains the anti-Egyptian animus inherent to Israelite identity).

This continuity in material culture stretches well beyond the Iron I, four-room houses were the main feature of Israelite & Judahite architecture (even in casemate walls) all the way down to the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BCE, the continuity in pottery morphology lasted even longer into the Persian period.

Speaking of the tension between local and exogenous origins within the Hebrew Bible, the division between Coastal & Inland Canaanite does fit Israelite self-perception, in the Abrahamic narrative the Ammonites and the Moabites are described as Israel’s kin while in Jacob’s story arc it is the Edomites who are described as Israel’s brethren.
The Iron I material culture tied to the Israelites is not limited to Judea-Samaria but appears in the Transjordanian highlands as well. This is but one of the cases where the linguistic and archeological data converge with the Hebrew Bible.

The book of the Hebrew Bible that is likely the closest to the reality glimpsed through the Iron I finds would be the book of Judges. The Judges (šōftīm) as an institution could be found almost a millennium later in Carthage (Suffetes). The book describes a series of internecine tribal conflicts, both between Israelite tribes and their neighbours, caused by their lack of belief in Yahweh, salvation is delivered by the Judges appointed to lead the people to victory. The book of Joshua also contains elements that legitimately date back to the LBA, this includes the narratives of wholesale slaughter or “Herem warfare” (which finds parallels in other parts of the Semitic world, such as EIA Yemen).

The Paleo-Hebrew script (a derivate of the Phoenician script) was in use all the way until the first centuries CE and was imbued with nationalistic connotations (all of the coinage minted during the Jewish revolts bore inscriptions in that script), it is still in use among the Samaritans today.

To quote Dearman (Religion and Culture in Ancient Israel, 1992; p.33):

On the basis of material cultural analysis, early Israel is indistinguishable from the larger Canaanite world.

Israelite religion also preserves many elements reminiscent of earlier Canaanite religion. The name “Israel” itself is a theophoric one, containing the name of the head of the Canaanite pantheon (El), had Yahweh been Israel’s original deity the name would contain -yahu or -yah instead.
Likewise, Elohim finds a parallel in the ˀilāhūma (a category of deities tied to Ilu) of Ugarit’s ritual texts, one out of many parallels one could find between Israelite and Ugaritic mythology.

Here too, I am but scratching the surface. An in-depth look would reveal a staggering amount of continuity not just between the early Israelites and the Canaanites, but with their Jewish & Samaritan descendants as well. The irony here of course is that the latter are too often unreceptive to those facts because of a simpler, artificial reading of the Hebrew Bible and an unnuanced acceptance of the anti-Canaanite bias within it, which makes them reluctant to accepting the obvious: They are watered-down Canaanites.

Once more, what of the Palestinian Arabs?
Is Dabkeh a Canaanite fertility dance?
Is Tatreez Canaanite embroidery?
There is nothing to suggest that any of these are rooted in Canaanite culture, much less in the Hebrew culture that it evolved into. Much like the Jordanian claim that mansaf - a traditional bedouin dish - was allegedly created by king Mesha (Mōšaˁ in Moabite) to make sure the Israelites would not eat his supplies, we are in the presence of modern mythmaking which, if looked at more closely, reveals an astounding lack of actual Canaanite cultural material.
That is, when the Palestinian Arabs are not busy destroying Canaanite archeological sites such as Tell es-Sakan.

The Blood of Canaan

Genetic Palestinism makes a lot of noise around the Palestinian Arabs’ supposed genetic proximity to Bronze Age Canaanites, while peddling the lie that Jews are simply an eclectic bunch of converts with no blood ties to their ancient namesake whatsoever.

The focus on autosomal data is understandable given the tenuous (not to say dishonest) nature of the argument that is being made, it holds only so long as one does not delve too deeply into the data. In another post of mine, I detailed how the majority of Palestinian Arab paternal lineages are of Peninsular Arab origin, and how the diagnostic Arab branches of J-P58 alone account for about 1/3 of all of their paternal lines. This is why the uniparental data is rarely if ever touched upon by proponents of Genetic Palestinism, at least in the outer track narrative.

In terms of Canaanite Y-lines, a pre-print that was released at the beginning of this month included two dozen samples from Sidon, most of which dated back to the Middle Bronze Age c. 3700 yBP. One of the samples carried haplogroup J-FGC13863.

While this has major implications for the origins of the Jewish priesthood, which I won’t get into here, it is nonetheless quite telling that this line is 90% Jewish nowadays, with only two Palestinian Arabs testing positive for what is more commonly known as the “CMH” (Cohen Modal Haplotype), neither of whom form a discrete branch which is to be expected (both are of Jewish origin).

This dearth of Canaanite lineages among the Palestinian Arabs contrasts with what is seen among Jewish groups, for instance ~70% of the paternal lines among Ashkenazim (the most tested Jewish group) are of Middle Eastern origin, the overwhelming majority of this is going to be rooted in the MLBA-EIA Levant.
There is little doubt (in my mind at least) that lines such as E-L791, J-FGC4992, Q-Y2209 or J-Z18297 to cite but a few were present in Iron Age Israel and Judah (though most likely in the former, again for reasons I won’t get into here).

You’ll notice that under those branches, Palestinian Arabs are an absolute rarity, if they’re even there to begin with. The Palestinian cluster under Q-L245 for example is of Kurdish origin, the cluster under Z18297 on the other hand is upstream from a pan-Jewish branch, an Israelite origin (MRCA circa 1000 BCE) is a foregone conclusion in this case.

This kind of Palestinian-Jewish branch is not the norm but rather the exception.
The accident of preservation does have a part to play in this, but only to a certain extent, the overall picture here is one of replacement in Palestinian Arabs and not one of continuity from the Iron Age (let alone the Bronze Age).

Again, this lack of continuity explains why Genetic Palestinism deals mainly with autosomal data (usually in a superficial manner, in the form of Vahaduo distance charts), if the picture were reversed with Palestinian Arabs having a higher proportion of MLBA Levantine Y-lines than Jews this is something you would be hearing about all the time.

Conclusion

The continuity between Jews and Canaanites is one which is hard to grasp for many, chiefly for the Jews themselves whose national tradition bears animosity towards the Canaanite past, all the more so now that anti-Israel agitprop has done its very best to rewrite history and colour perceptions of the conflict by playing on Western stereotypes of the unchanging East (ironically denounced by none other than Edward Said). And yet, denying this continuity which is plain for all to see is an exercise in futility. For this to be “debunked” one would need to overturn the sum of our comparative linguistic, archeological and genetic knowledge.

Jews (a label under which Samaritans are subsumed) are watered-down Canaanites. Palestinian Arabs on the other hand are no Canaanites at all. They may lay claim to another form of continuity, namely continuity in settlement, but this does not extend far beyond a millennium. Linguistically-speaking, there is very little tying them to the Canaanites indeed (you’ll notice that the basis for comparison is Hebrew to begin with), culturally they are no more Canaanite than their Levantine Arab brethren in Syria and Jordan. Genetically, they do have a fair chunk of Canaanite ancestry, but tellingly not where it counts the most (Arab society is a patriarchal one, paternal descent matters), more importantly this ancestral strand was not inherited randomly, much of it was mediated via Jewish ancestry.

The Palestinian Arabs had virtually no notion of being Canaanite before Hebrew nationalism scored its first successes. The very fact that they had to go fetch the Canaanites, the Jebusites, the Amorites and the Hivites by digging through the Jews’ epic and historical texts bears testimony to this. This is a recent reactionary tendency, an attempt at building an identity predating the Hebrew one in the Levant.
Sadly for them, this attempt was always bound to fail, no matter how hard the Arabs try they are never going to win the “Who is Canaanite” game against the Jews.

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Jewashing (or Hebrewashing)

Canaanwashing should make it clear that the Palestinian Arabs and their supporters feel uniquely entitled to appropriating all of the cultures that once existed in the Levant for themselves. Increasingly, this includes Hebrew culture.

How come, you might ask, but if you’ve ever paid attention to the anti-Israel movement’s behaviour pattern, you know that one of its recurring themes is “Jesus the Palestinian”. It is by now a tradition for every Christmas to become an opportune time during which anti-Israel discourse is dedicated to the promotion of Jesus’ allegedly Palestinian identity and in so doing to the imposition of the Palestinian Arabs’ indigenist narrative to a Western audience, while the Jews are once again cast as the deicide people (Arafat famously claimed that Jesus was “the first Palestinian shaheed”), a classic trope of antisemitic discourse.

The phenomenon we’re about to discover belongs to the same category, except for the fact that it’s on steroids. In fact the sheer intensity and indecency of the falsehoods promoted during the last Palestinian Jesus season, spearheaded by charlatans such as Nassim Taleb, contributed in no small measure to the creation of this Substack (I was counting on remaining silent after the closure of Anthrogenica).
The scope of this tactic has been greatly extended through the use of population genetics in order to deny the Jews their own identity while attributing it to the Palestinian Arabs.

If it can be said of Semitewashers that they intend to turn the Palestinian Arabs into the true Semites, we can say that Jewashers turn them into the true Jews.

There recently is a very distinct effort to de-Judaise the Jews while Judaising the Palestinian Arabs. As usual, the way this is done is by invoking the usual G25 distance charts and models, to say nothing of outright lies and deception.

One such case would be the oft-cited 80% “Hebrew” figure (as can be seen above), which is based on a model from Agranat-Tamir et al.’s 2020 study of Bronze Age Levantine remains, while simultaneously claiming the amount of “Hebrew genes” stands at 2.5%, despite the model from which the former figure was taken showing something in the 50-60% range for Ashkenazim (see Figure 5 from that paper).

Nowadays, every agitator in the anti-Israel movement is a self-styled expert in population genetics. One issue however is that the Palestinian Arabs are not, in fact, the ancient Israelites’ closest living relatives. Far from it.
This is a point of contention and a major dilemma for the proponents of Jewashing, and so the way in which they skirt this issue is by driving the focus away from the Muslim population (which, it bears repeating, is quite diverse and constitutes a crushing majority of the Palestinian Arab population, well over 90% according to the most conservative estimates) and shifting it instead to minority groups such as the Christians and, more importantly the Samaritans.

If your knowledge of genetics is limited to Vahaduo distance charts, this is bound to work wonders. What these self-styled experts will not tell you however is that using the same methodology, one can make even more groundbreaking pronouncements on the origins of mankind and brand countless peoples, tribes and nations as mere impostors.

Let’s assume for the time being that this is a valid line of reasoning.
Let us also take a study that was published in June of this year.
In this paper we find that the inhabitants of what is now Southwestern Germany during the Hallstatt period (Early Iron Age) resembled not the present-day German inhabitants of this area - who are instead sandwiched between them and Early Medieval German samples with a more distinctly Northern European profile - but the French and Belgians (Walloons) alongside other non-Germanic Alpine populations as well as Iberians to some extent.

This French-like profile visible in the EIA samples from Southern Germany is not the exception, rather looking at the Hallstatt and later La Tène samples from Austria, Czechia, Hungary, Slovakia it very much seems to have been the norm.

While I won’t get into the debate over the deeper origins of Celtic here (this is for a future post) both of those archeological horizons, Hallstatt and La Tène, are widely acknowledged as the bearers of incipient and classic Celtic culture. The Lepontic language (the oldest attestated Celtic language) for example is securely tied to the Golasecca culture which was derived from the earlier Urnfield horizon much like Hallstatt with which it was contemporary.

If we were to visualise the degree of autosomal affinity between present-day populations and the Iron Age Continental Celts, we’d see the strongest retention of IA Celtic ancestry in present-day Frenchmen with an especially high retention rate among the Eastern French and the Swiss in particular.

The map would look fairly similar to this:

Considering that the LBA-EIA transition in the British Isles is also marked by a slight but unmistakable shift towards what might be termed the Gaulish profile, we can safely assume that this strand of ancestry is the earliest strand of Celtic ancestry.

I’d like to draw your attention to the fact that while Alpine populations tend to have the greatest chunks of Hallstatt & La Tène admixture, it is the present-day Celtic-speaking populations (the Welsh, Bretons, Irish, Scottish and Manx) that seem to be on the lower side, well below the 40% range and even below the 30% range for the Irish. This is because the older Bell Beaker-like profile weathered this demographic shift much better due to insular isolation.

The reason why I’m telling you this is that by endorsing the same genetic standards Jewashers use, we’re left with no choice but to conclude that neither the Irish nor the Welsh are “true Celts” and that we must now get used to thinking of the Swiss and the French as the “real Celts”, despite their being rather dubious candidates after not having spoken a Celtic language for the last 1,500 years.

In this scheme of things, it is not the people who kept Celtic language, literature, identity, symbolism, law, kinship, folklore and spirituality as a living tradition who are deserving of the Celtic label but the culturally Romanised, linguistically Latinised and partially Germanised descendants of the Gauls and Helvetians. Likewise the latter would also be entitled to much of Central Europe, much of which was resettled by waves of intrusive Germanic, Slavic and Ugrian tribes.

This is a very direct parallel (one out of many I could make) to what Jewashing seeks to accomplish with the Palestinian Arabs, by focusing solely on the autosomal aspect (and never too deeply as we’ve already seen) and by tossing out every other element so as to give you the impression that the Palestinian Arabs indeed are purely Israelite.

Once again however, the Palestinian Arabs are not the Israelites’ closest living relatives, in fact the French are incomparably more Gaulish than they are Israelite. This is where the minorities come in handy, quite often the Christians are put forth as exemplars of genetic continuity from the Early Iron Age (a comfortable choice as they are ideologically aligned with Palestinian Arab nationalism), but even they are not the closest genetic proxy for the Israelites.
The closest living proxy would be the Samaritans. And unlike the Palestinian Christians, they are not significantly aligned with Palestinism or any form of Arab nationalism for that matter. They are also too clearly identified with Zionism, the Jews and the state of Israel for this to work smoothly.
Jewashers therefore have to invest more effort into Palestinising them.

The tokenisation of the Samaritans as quintessentially Palestinian is fast becoming one of the axial themes of Jewashing, as can be seen below this is done by simply subsuming them under the “Palestine” label in yet another G25 distance chart.

What can be said of the Samaritans, without getting into too much detail, is that all of them are Israeli citizens, the majority (including those that live on Har Gerizim, a sensitive issue) serve in Israeli security services, those that are under PLO rule were driven out of the old city of Shekhem by their Arab neighbours during the First Intifada and now live under IDF protection in a “settlement” (Qiryat Luza).
They are Hebrew-speaking practitioners of a religion that strongly resembles Judaism (and is in fact derived from late Judahite cult), so much so that the Palestinian Arabs call them “Jews”. They are keenly aware of belonging to the people of Israel and have preserved the tribal kinship system, for this reason they readily view the Jews as their brethren. The Samaritans were subjected to numerous pogroms at the hands of their Arab neighbours, the last attempt to exterminate them fully via forced conversion to Islam dates back to the 1840s, roughly a century before Israel’s independence.

These facts, and others I’ll be writing about in a future post, should be kept in mind whenever a proponent of Palestinian Agitprop starts enthusiastically claiming that the Samaritans are an inherent part of the fabric of Palestinian Arab society and that relations between them and their Arab neighbours have always been completely harmonious, this is just meant to promote them as the Kosher Palestinians while portraying the Jews as genetic intruders.

Inner and Outer Tracks

If you think those who promote this kind of mythical thinking are unaware of what they’re doing, think again. Remember, these are the same people who get agitated and wail endlessly about “cultural appropriation” whenever a Jew eats falafel, hummus, mansaf and the like. Their main problem is that unlike the Phoenicians, the Amorites, the Sumerians, the Moabites or any of the other extinct ancient tribes, peoples and kingdoms whose identity present-day Arabs enjoy claiming for themselves whenever it is convenient for them to do so, the Hebrew people is still very much alive and kicking.

The Palestinian Arabs are not those who preserved Hebrew language, culture, religion and identity. It is not the Palestinian Arabs but the Jews who had to take “Israel” as a middle name (“Sarah” for women) starting from August 1938 when the German government enacted a law forcing all Jews bearing first names of non-Jewish origin to do so. The Palestinian Arabs never experienced the consequences of deicide accusations (which they themselves echo), blood libel, the Inquisition, pogroms and what have you. In short they never suffered for being Israelites, an identity they were never aware of having, never claimed for themselves (that is, until the Cult of the Watermelon came about) and which they view with utter contempt.

Genetic Palestinism, in the way it is articulated and as it has been analysed in this series of posts is designed to suit Western expectations of burden and proof.
As such the attempt to wrestle the Jews’ identity out of their hands and bestow it upon the Palestinian Arabs is part of the outer track narrative of Palestinian Arab propaganda, which has a non Arabic-speaking audience as its main target.
Within this framework, it becomes possible and even desirable (because of Western culture’s Christian sensitivity) to portray the Palestinian Arabs as the sole inheritors of the region’s Hebrew and Jewish past.

This is an especially interesting development because Palestinian propaganda’s inner track narrative, the one which caters to the expectations and demands of an Arab Muslim audience, is almost uniquely obsessed with denying and downplaying the very notion of a Hebrew and Jewish past in the land of Israel.

The very existence of the Jewish Temples in Jerusalem is roundly denied, a literal reading of Hebrew scripture is adopted so as to conveniently portray the Hebrews as mere invaders and interlopers (the outer track narrative instead tries to downplay the importance of the Hebrew Bible as a historical source) with the Palestinian Arabs cast as the Canaanites, any Hebrew inscription is immediately declared a forgery.
“Tahwid” or Judaisation is often raised as a scarecrow (think of the “Judaisation of Jerusalem”). The list can be extended indefinitely.

A fairly good example of this inner track narrative can be gleaned from the words of Ikrima Sabri, the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (translation is my own):

By the way, using the Jewashers’ zero-sum logic virtually any Jewish Kohen (as descendants of the priestly caste that officiated in the Jewish temples until 70 CE) would be well within his rights to proclaim his “indigenous” status over that of the above Mufti considering that he carries one of the Arabian branches which are so abundant among Palestinian Arabs (J-FT385290). But again, were it not for double standards, genetic Palestinism would simply cease to exist.

In addition to this, the vandalisation and outright destruction of archeological sites tied to the Hebrew kingdoms of Israel and Judah as well as later periods of Israelite settlement (whether Jewish or Samaritan) is rampant and completely normalised. Sebastia, the site of Samaria (the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel) was set ablaze as late as 2022, leaving much of the Iron II palace a heap of charred rocks.

So it is rather daring, not to say hypocritical, of the Jewashers to come and claim that the Palestinian Arabs are in fact the real Israelites, it is very much akin to claiming that ISIS are the true Assyrians.

This endeavour’s success depends to a large extent on keeping both the inner and outer track narratives completely separate so as to minimise exposure to the inherent contradictions of their claims and making sure those narratives do not spill over into each other. Sadly for them, and despite the anti-Israel movement’s remarkable message discipline, such spillage does happen quite a bit.

Take the following video for example:

Notice how the Essenes, a major sect of Second Temple Judaism, suddenly become an “unknown religion”. All the while this visitor spends much of her time insisting on the “Palestinian” identity of the Bedouin shepherd who discovered the scrolls.
What you see in this video is what happens when both the inner and outer track narratives of Palestinian agitprop collide.

What we are then left with is a period of about 1,500 years in which an unknown people set up a series of unknown kingdoms, spoke, thought and prayed in an unknown language, practiced an unknown religion and wrote about it in mysterious scrolls. This sanitised version of history, devoid of any Jewish presence, is the only kind of history that Palestinism can tolerate. Jewashers would rather have you not know about any of this of course, as they try to tie the Palestinian Arabs to a past that they are busy suppressing and censoring.

Conclusion

If you’ve made it this far, I commend your endurance and patience.

Now would be a good time to remember Shlomo Sand’s quote in our first post:

« As of today, no study based on anonymous DNA samples has succeeded in identifying a genetic marker specific to Jews, and it is not likely that any study ever will. It is a bitter irony to see the descendants of Holocaust survivors set out to find a biological Jewish identity: Hitler would certainly have been very pleased! »

With Jewashing, Palestinism is fast approaching Nazi race science levels of insanity.
It goes without saying that much of the genetic arguments that are being made are completely designed to portray the Jews as allogenic vermin and lay the groundwork for the rationalisation of genocidal violence against them. This is why those arguments have been incorporated into the toolbox of Anti-Israel agitprop in the aftermath of the October 7th massacres, they are meant to retroactively justify and minimise the severity of Palestinian Arab violence.

“Every accusation is a confession” is a line anti-Israel activists enjoy repeating, not understanding that they are merely projecting their own behaviour onto Israel here as well. For all the talk about Israel being an ”Ethnostate”, genetic Palestinism in its various forms seems set on portraying the Jews genetic aliens while depicting the Palestinian Arabs as a sort of Master Race, whether Semitic, Canaanite or Israelite in origin and quite often all of those at the same time.

Effectively, we are dealing with the Arab version of the Black Hebrew Israelites.
An approach that is not one of acknowledgment of common descent but one of culture vultures who will stop at nothing to degrade the culture they aim to plunder, who openly denigrate the people whose identity they seek to snatch and for whom no lie is too ridiculous, no amount of mental gymnastics too great and the law of non-contradiction need not apply. As the pan-Arab slogan had it, “no voice is louder than the sound of battle” (لا صوت يعلو على صوت المعركة).

The ultimate irony in this is that Jewashing, far from succeeding in its desperate attempts at Judaising the Palestinian Arabs while denying the Jews their sole identity only manages to prove that Palestinism is discount Zionism for Arabs.

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This is the second part of our series exploring the genetic aspects of anti-Israel propaganda and the way in which its core claims are articulated through the misuse of genomic data, both ancient and modern.

Canaanwashing

Canaanite cosplay is such a central theme of Paliprop and the Palestinian Arabs’ historical narrative revolves around it so completely in order to project legitimacy into the past and maintain the illusion of demographic continuity over millennia that a single post such as this cannot do the topic justice, it deserves at least another in-depth post, and I shall be writing one such post soon enough.

Still, it is impossible to overlook how thoroughly canaanwashed a lot of the appeals to the Palestinian Arabs’ alleged genetic purity (always contrasted with the Jews’ genetic impurity) are becoming.

It should be obvious to all by now that beyond Vahaduo distance charts, G25 admixture graphs and (rarely) a few shoddy qpAdm models, genetic Palestinism doesn’t have much to show for when it comes to buttressing its indigeneity claims.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the kind of evidence put forth in the framework of Paliprop inevitably falls short.

The greater irony here is that in its relentless quest to portray the Palestinian Arabs as overwhelmingly Canaanite in origin so as to shape foreign perceptions of the conflict in a nativist framework, Paliprop has effectively created a very strong taboo over the presence of Arabian ancestry in Palestinian Arabs - clearly a substantial component among them - and this is reflected in the exclusion of specific Palestinian Arab groups that have much lower chunks of Canaanite-related ancestry (and therefore fail the canaanwashed purity test) from the models meant to demonstrate the Palestinian Arabs’ supposedly autochthonous status.

Regarding the first aspect of this taboo, this goes well beyond the autosomal data and encompasses the uniparental data where the Peninsular Arab input sticks out like the proverbially sore thumb.

I’ve spoken about this at length in my Deep Dive on J-FGC1722’s Palestinian Arab branches but it bears repeating that going off J-P58 alone at least one third of all Palestinian Arab patrilineages are certifiably of Peninsular Arab origin (the majority of which arrived with the Arab conquerors during the second half of the 1st millennium CE), adding all the other Y-Chromosomal lines brings this estimate up to about ~55% and that includes Christians (if they are removed or if Jordanians are added, the estimate increases further to about 60%).

In order to fully grasp what is at stake here, we must make an attempt at picturing the opposite scenario for a moment, namely Ashkenazi Jews carrying a majority of Y-lines that are of Hellenic, Italic, Slavic, Germanic, Khazarian extraction and what have you, with only a smattering of local Canaanite, Aramean, Amorite, Hurrian and other Levantine or Near Eastern lines… Would the practitioners of genetic Palestinism miss such an opportunity to spam this information all over the place?
Of course not, in fact this exactly what has happened with Costa et al.’s 2013 paper on Ashkenazi Jewish mtDNA haplogroups (an outdated study that was clearly flawed from the moment it got through peer review), a paper that is still making the rounds from time to time.

This is why you’re unlikely to ever see Paliprop using Y-Chromosomal data to make a point. All the more so because Palestinian Arab society is a tribal society, a patriarchal environment where patrilineal descent does matter quite a bit and clans that are keenly aware of their genealogy pride themselves in being descended from famous figures in Arab and/or Islamic history.

The few times when you do see such arguments, they run the risk of being counterproductive and harming the credibility of the narrative they are peddling.
An excellent example of this would be the use of Netanyahu’s Y-DNA results (obtained via his brother Iddo, and his son Yair’s FTDNA profiles, I should know since both of them show up in my matches).

Netanyahu’s terminal clade has been public knowledge for quite some time, I remember discussing it as early as 2018, and yet all we’re left with here is a shadowy reference to R-M198 (AKA R1a1a), a lineage that arose in Eastern Europe during the Mesolithic period roughly 8500 years ago and spread out (mainly through its most successful branch, R-M417) with early Indo-European dispersals from the Pontic-Caspian steppe.

That in itself does not tell us much beyond the fact that Netanyahu’s paternal ancestors were living in Eastern Europe in remote prehistoric times. Luckily, because of R-M417’s involvement in Indo-European dispersals since their earliest stages, the haplogroup’s phylogeny mirrors the Indo-European language tree to a great extent (though as with other haplogroups where the phylogeny mirrors linguistic trees, the correlation is never 1:1), allowing us to pinpoint with relative accuracy the origin of major branches and sub-branches in time and space.

A radical fault line under R-M417 is to be found between Z283 and Z93 (both immediately downstream from R-Z645):

The former comprises the absolute majority of the European branches of R1a, which are further subdivided into clades that are circumscribed to certain branches of the Indo-European family (R-Y2395 is very likely tied to the development of the Germanic languages, Proto-Slavic likely has its roots in a group that was rich in R-M458 lines, R-Z92 seems to be more broadly Balto-Slavic, and so on), however there are always exceptions, R-YP4858 for instance is an example of a Z283 branch that was ostensibly involved in Indo-Iranian dispersals.

The main correlate for the Indo-Iranian branch however is clearly Z93, which was found in samples from archeological horizons normally attributed to the Proto-Indo-Iranians such as the Fatyanovo, Abashevo, Srubnaya and Sintashta cultures.

Here too, one can find European samples thanks to the historical migrations of East Iranian-speaking nomads such as the Scythians and the Alans. Some sub-branches (R-FGC56408) also comprise clusters that were swept up in later Turkic dispersals, to say nothing of R-L657 which is the primary Indo-Aryan marker.

It is under that same Indo-Iranian branch that the Ashkenazi Levites, whose Y-DNA signature Netanyahu carries, are nestled. Those insinuating otherwise could have saved themselves the embarrassment by simply looking up Behar et al.’s 2017 study on Ashkenazi Levites. The Ashkenazi Levite line is R-Y2619, a subclade of CTS6, a seemingly Western Iranian sub-branch found in Yazidis, Zaza Kurds, Iranian Azeris and Iranians from Kerman province (I am also aware of at least one Bukharan Jewish Levite under CTS6, and potentially an individual of Palestinian Christian descent on the paternal side as well).

CTS6 in turn is a sub-branch of F1345, which comprises a cluster of Palestinian Arabs (Sunni Muslims) from the Galilee, which has at least one individual with a tradition of Mamluk descent (with the paper trail and family name to support this claim).
It could be that the line has an older presence, F1345 however does seem to be more tied to Iranian groups including Eastern Iranian ones and so the scenario of a Mamluk origin for the Palestinian Arab cluster is still very much on the table.

Coming back to the Ashkenazi Levites, while their lineage does not seem particularly likely to have been present in the Levant in First Temple times (Iron IIB-C) - despite one low coverage sample from LBA Megiddo (that city-state had a class of rulers bearing Old Indic names) being R-M417* - it is almost certain to have been present in Judea by the Second Temple period (roughly the second half of the 1st millennium BCE), and was probably picked up in Achaemenid times among Babylonian exiles (the branch could be tied to the Medes), it is even possible that its bearers might have been Magi because its distribution and association with Levitical status otherwise becomes hard to explain. Of course one could propose more exotic scenarios, but these remain unconvincing for the time being.

“Eastern European”, “Polish” or “Slavic” just isn’t going to cut it, and for the record R-Y2619 isn’t the only case of a major Ashkenazi line that is bound to be of Iron Age Iranian provenance (there are at least two other candidates for such an association). And so once more, genetic Palestinism works wonders only as long as you do not delve too deeply into the data and don’t start asking too many questions, a skeptical mind is all it takes to infirm most of its asinine claims.

As for the second aspect of the taboo mentionned above, Negev Bedouins being wholly of Peninsular Arab descent makes them unfit for canaanwashing, hence they are quite often nowhere to be found in most of the Vahaduo charts and graphs churned out by Paliprop.
Gazans too tend to be excluded as they carry a lot of Egyptian admixture (most of it being recent), this can be extended to many Palestinian Arabs from the coastal plain as well as to Afro-Palestinians. This is despite all of those groups otherwise featuring quite prominently in Paliprop’s indigenist narrative (think of all the talk about the “Naqab”).

Some of the shoddier models remedy this by using EMBA Levantine samples as a Canaanite proxy, so as to canaanwash as much of the Peninsular Arab and Egyptian components as possible, which should also be kept in mind.

Much like Semitewashing, canaanwashed claims are deliberately meant to mislead, genetic Palestinism’s tactics and arguments are almost always fallacious and presuppose intimate knowledge of the data that disprove those claims (which are therefore discarded). More than anything, much of this sophistry relies on popular ignorance of the data and methods in use.

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For all the villainisation of Israel enabled by the use of terms such as “pinkwashing”, “greenwashing” and the like, very little is made of the simultaneous portrayal of the Palestinian Arabs as “the real Semites” and present-day Jews as genetic aliens in anti-Israel agiprop (AKA Paliprop), a phenomenon he called “Semitewashing”.

After giving it some thought, I’ve reached the conclusion that this brand of genetic sophistry takes three major forms nowadays. This is by no means a new phenomenon, but the deluge of Paliprop in the wake of the Palestinian Arabs’ unprovoked massacres on Oct. 7th 2023 offers us a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to scrutinise and decorticate the reinvention and reshaping of anti-Israel propaganda to fit new constraints and expectations (in the context of the popularisation of genomic data).

In this series of posts, we shall be examining each of the three major forms taken by genetic Palestinism. Before we begin this journey, I would like you to read and keep in mind the following quote as we explore the genetic aspects of Palestinian Arab supremacist discourse and anti-Israel agitation…

« As of today, no study based on anonymous DNA samples has succeeded in identifying a genetic marker specific to Jews, and it is not likely that any study ever will. It is a bitter irony to see the descendants of Holocaust survivors set out to find a biological Jewish identity: Hitler would certainly have been very pleased! »

-Shlomo Sand (in response to Atzmon and Behar et al.’s genetic studies on Jewish groups published in 2010)

Semitewashing

In its basic form it is by far the most widespread version of genetic Palestinism, mainly used as a cheap rhetorical trick to dismiss accusations of antisemitism by delving (ever so slightly and never too far as we shall soon see) into race science.

Because the “antisemite” label has lost much of its allure and has now become the Jew-hater’s kryptonite (ironical for people who spend much of their time “naming the Jew”), this kind of sophistry is a miraculous remedy allowing them to turn tables by becoming defenders of “the real Semites” and labeling the Jews antisemites.

As I’ve said above, this isn’t a new phenomenon, and one can easily find older iterations of this dishonest argument predating Israel’s independence, for instance here’s what Lord Moyne had to say in his June 9, 1942 speech to the House of Lords:

« It is very often loosely said that Jews are Semites, but anthropologists tell us that, pure as they have kept their culture, the Jewish race has been much mixed with Gentiles since the beginning of the Diaspora. During the Babylonian captivity they acquired a strong Hittite admixture, and it is obvious that the Armenoid features which are still found among the Sephardim have been bred out of the Ashkenazim by an admixture of Slav blood. »

A much more recent example would be the following statement made by Michael Moore on Apr. 29 2024:

But this isn’t a post about Semitewashing’s unchanging nature, rather we want to focus on its newest mutations so to speak. And the main address for that in this day and age is population genetics. Speaking of which…

What you’re seeing in the infographic above is the updated, genetics-savvy and semitewashed version of the older Khazar hoax (once the preferred consensus position among Semitewashers, the genetic evidence is slowly but surely making it obsolete). This variant of Semitewashing is something you’re likely to encounter online nowadays, especially coming from people with a limited degree of genetic literacy.

Beyond the historical illiteracy and self-aggrandising nonsense which I’ll also be addressing (if you’re not careful enough, Semitewashers will have you believing this conflict is between Shlomo the Roman & Ahmad the Canaanite), let us assume for the time being that the above is entirely correct. That the G25 distance tables here prove that “Zionists”, an ethnic group more commonly known as Jews, are Roman converts and that therefore they are “not Semites” because “Europeans are not Semites”.

In which case, the question that must be asked is whether there are any differences at all between those “Zionists” (invariably Ashkenazim, an all-time favourite target) and their South Italian or Roman brethren to begin with, and if so whether these can be ascribed to local substructure.

A simple look at a G25 PCA (Global 25 values are PCA coordinates after all) suggests a different story altogether, something which becomes a bit more obvious when looking at a 3D plot rather than the usual 2D ones.

While there indeed is a lot of overlap between AJs and South Italians, which isn’t by any means a happy coincidence (there’s reason to suspect a sizeable chunk of the Aegean component in Western Jews was picked up in the Mezzogiorno), something isn’t quite right here if we are to believe the “Zionists” are just a bunch of Italian 3rd cousins, wholly non-Semitic in origin.

This is because the Jewish populations are clearly shifted towards the MLBA & IA Levantines to the right of the plot, a pull which is to some extent shared with the Maltese (incidentally, speakers of Siculo-Arabic, or in simpler terms “Semites”), while the other South Italian groups share more affinity to the LBA & IA Greeks (South Italians tend to be their closest modern population for a reason).

Taking a step back, despite their striking resemblance to the Italians and the Greeks, Ashkenazim can still be distinguished on most West Eurasian PCAs and usually end up being part of a chain of Western Jewish groups comprising Sephardic, Italian, Romaniote and North African Jews as opposed to overlapping completely with South Italians. Here too, their shift towards the Levant (Samaritan and MLBA Canaanite samples above) is noticeable.

This greater affinity to the Levant can also be visualised on G25 heatmaps:

In certain dimensions, it is therefore possible to clearly distinguish between Western Jews and other Eastern Mediterranean populations, this is especially the case using tools that were made to underline regional diversity such as Davidski’s Mediterranean PCA below (non-G25 and designed for the purpose of highlighting this kind of allelic substructure).

Pay attention to how Western Jews are cleanly separated from other East Meds here and how, amongst the latter, the Maltese (and West Sicilians to some degree) once more come closest to them because of shared Levantine drift (relative to the position of the Samaritans on the plot). Just as telling is how the Cypriots are likewise clearly distinct from Romaniote & Syrian Jews with whom they should otherwise overlap, shared Western Jewish vs Anatolian drift has a lot to do with this as well.

And in case you’re wondering, this stays unchanged when we add Roman era Imperial and Late Antique samples from Italy, despite what you’d normally see on a G25 PCA (much more overlap). All the while, contemporary South Italians overlap almost completely with these Roman samples.

This theory according to which “Zionists” (whichever group of Western Jews is meant by this) are just a bunch of Roman-era converts who magically lack any Semitic input isn’t looking too good, and this is just by focusing a little bit more closely on the same autosomal data upon which said theory is entirely reliant.

It also does nothing to explain the genetic homogeneity of Western Jews (who are ~80% identical on average) nor the IBD segments that they share, the use of the “European” label only serves to obfuscate the fact that Eastern Mediterraneans tend to cluster much closer to Near Eastern populations than to the bulk of European ones (the label can only work in a primarily geographic sense, not a genetic one, see the second PCA posted above) thereby giving the impression that Ashkenazi Jews are a very alien population. For that matter, the use of “Italian” as a label isn’t particularly helpful either considering how Italy is one of Europe’s most genetically-diverse countries with sharply defined substructure running between North, Central and South Italians (to say nothing of Sardinians or even Corsicans).

And of course, it absolutely fails in explaining the predominance of Levantine Y-Chromosomal lineages among Jews, the overall proportion of lineages such as J-P58, T-L208, E-M84, E-L791, E-PF2025 and the like in Ashkenazi Jews for instance being more comparable to what is seen in Lebanon than to the distribution of paternal lineages seen in Italy or even Cyprus. In fact slightly over 35% of all subclades found in Ashkenazi Jews have a very high likelihood of deriving from branches carried by the earliest Semites, this alone should highlight the desperation inherent to the claim that Jews are supposedly non-Semitic in origin.

In any case, the repeated presence of ostensibly Semitic Y-lines in several of the Roman samples shows that even if we were to assume that Ashkenazim are wholly descended from Roman converts they would indeed still have inherited Semitic input from those same converts (though insufficient to account for what we see nowadays).

Last but not least, semitewashed Paliprop ignores that the Semites themselves (by which we mean the speakers of the Proto-Semitic tongue) ceased to exist as a society approximately 5500 years ago. Because they were contemporaries of the Indo-Europeans, claiming that Ashkenazi Jews are “not Semites” makes about as much sense as the claim that the Greeks or the Armenians are “not Indo-Europeans”, something you seldom if ever see (even though an even more convincing case for their non-”Indo-Europeanness” may be built).
Or indeed, this claim becomes relevant only if the Maltese are excluded on similar grounds, an exclusion that can easily be extended to many Ethiosemitic groups (to say nothing of some of the many divergent Arabic-speaking ethnic groups).

Likewise an appeal to purity falls short for the Palestinian Arabs considering that Yemenite Jews and other Peninsular populations (such as the Mehri) would invariably constitute “purer” Semites, not that this means much either considering that the Proto-Semites were an obscure prehistoric population that existed somewhere between the emerging centers of civilisation in Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley during the Chalcolithic period and whose religious beliefs, society, language and lifestyle are accessible to us only through the comparative method and archeology (once more, much like the Proto-Indo-Europeans).

Finally, there is a certain irony to the Semitewashers’ repeated insistence in denying the Semitic label to the Jews, considering that the man who coined it (Ludwig von Schlözer) chose to base the language family’s name on a character of the Hebrew Bible (Shem, son of Noah) from whom the Israelites claimed descent.
In other words, without the Jews’ epic and sacred texts, there would simply be no “Semites” to begin with and we’d be using another label - possibly geographic (such as Syro-Ethiopian) - altogether.

It is worth remembering that the sole objective behind Semitewashing is not to speak the truth but to provide the Semitewashers with a sense of moral comfort and self-righteousness while promoting hatred of the Jews, this is of course explicitely stated only in Palestinism’s inner track propaganda (in Arabic) and only rarely makes it into the outer track propaganda (designed for foreign consumption). A very good and recent example of this would be the following post from Reddit (my translation).

« On what basis am I an antisemite if I hate the Jews? And on what basis have European and Ethiopian Jews become Semites? We Arabs are the original Semites. »

It is also worth noting that the focus on Ethiopians is self-defeating considering that Ethiopia is home to one of the most ancient Semitic cultures with a rich literary tradition of its own going back to Antiquity. The argument is wholly racial: European Jews cannot be Semites because they are “white” and likewise the Ethiopian Jews cannot be Semites because they are “black” (ergo not because they are mostly of Agäw descent). These are the same people who insist that “Zionism is racism”.

Legitimising the hatred of the Jews through a racial lens is the only reason why Semitewashers engage in this kind of semantic sophistry and increasingly resort to adducing genetic arguments so as to perpetrate the false narrative of the “non-Semitic Jews”, whether in its older form (Khazar hoax) or its updated version (Roman converts).

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In all of those cases we are dealing with lineages that have no external correspondence to the wider Indo-European family (for which R-M269 and R-M417’s branches are the main correlates) and were incorporated in-situ once early IE tribes made their way to Eneolithic Scandinavia and the BA Aegean. This is also fairly straightforward considering the presence of an easily identifiable pre-IE substrate in both branches of the IE family (which are sometimes described as being the “least Indo-European” despite this being very misleading language).

I do not wish to engage in monomaniacal discourse surrounding J-P58, its origins, spread and the like, it is not “the” Semitic marker in any case but rather one out of many, however the J lineages that are so common in Semitic-speaking groups both modern and ancient seem to be a similar case and deserve a serious explanation.

Those lineages essentially comprise branches of J-P58, J-Z1853 is the main correlate as well as the most successful branch of the lot and its phylogeny mirrors the Semitic language tree closely enough in both time and space for it to be a Proto-Semitic marker though it must be stated that it is not the only P58 branch that is a Semitic marker, many others such as BY111, L860, ZS5383 and P56 (which is not P58) are every bit as likely to have been carried by the earliest Semitic speakers. In fact all of P58 except for one or two smaller branches can be seriously viewed as a Semitic marker.
To this we must add branches of J-M205 which is very common among the inhabitants of Soqotra and consistently shows up in ancient remains tied to Semitic-speaking cultures all the way back to the Early Bronze Age, often alongside J-Z1853…

And yet, there seems to be no straightforward explanation for the presence of those J lineages which otherwise have no clear ties to the other branches of the Afroasiatic macrofamily of which Semitic is but one branch (and for which E-M35’s branches - especially those under E-M34 as far as Semitic is of concern - are the best correlates).
Surely, if these lineages ultimately originated in a non-Afroasiatic setting, their forebears must have left traces of their old tongue in Semitic?

After adding the ancient Georgian samples from Skourtanioti et al. to the ancient J-P58 map, the deep-rootedness of those lineages in the Southern Caucasus and its immediate surroundings is becoming hard to ignore.

The sheer ubiquity of J-Z1828 and especially its CTS1460 subclade in EBA (Kura-Araxes) and later Hurrian and Urartian samples as well as at least one Caucasian Albanian sample makes it quite clear that the relationship between Hurro-Urartian and Northeast Caucasian (to which Chechen, Ingush, Lezgin, Avar and about thirty more obscure languages belong) is a genetic one and that there’s no escaping the fact that the Alarodian phylum put forth by Starostin is looking increasingly real, it is almost impossible to explain what we’re seeing without some sort of genetic relationship being involved.

Alarodian might well be one of the first cases where a somewhat controversial (not to say daring) linguistic hypothesis finds itself tremendously strengthened by the ancient genomic evidence. Indeed while the linguistic argument behind Alarodian always was a bit wobbly, thanks to the often less than compelling methods espoused by the Moscow school, the theory of a genetic relationship between Northeast Caucasian and Hurro-Urartian was never unconvincing.

Again, this is despite our inability to confirm Alarodian’s existence with the normal tools of linguistic comparison at our disposal. This might not sound like a big deal, but it must be stressed that it absolutely is, we might effectively be witnessing how ancient genomic data has the power to redefine not just issues of internal classification but to provide important clues and avenues for future research in the classification of languages that are usually thought of as isolates.

Coming back to the J lineages, despite the branches now firmly entrenched among Semitic-speaking groups (chiefly under P58 and P56) and those found in ancient Hurro-Urartian samples and present-day NEC-speaking groups having their most recent common ancestor some 17,000 years ago, they stand out even more now considering the lack of any plausible external relation that would anchor those lineages in an Afroasiatic setting while we have cause to suspect some kind of relationship to the ancestor of both Northeast Caucasian and Hurro-Urartian.

The families included within the Alarodian family, namely Northeast Caucasian and Hurro-Urartian, share a very specific typological feature that was once widespread in ancient Near Eastern languages such as Hattic and Sumerian.
These languages all have ergative-absolutive alignment whereby the subject or agent of a transitive verb is marked with a special case (ergative) while the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb take the same case (absolutive, usually unmarked in those languages).

This might be surprising to some but it has long been known that an ergative substructure can be discerned in the polysemic nature of Akkadian, Eblaite, Geˁez, Hebrew, Mehri and even Aramaic statives, especially in the suffix conjugation (see C.H.P. Müller, “Ergative Constructions in Early Semitic Languages”; 1995).
This has sometimes been compared to Egyptian statives (notably by Loprieno). Likewise Sasse (1984) reconstructed an absolutive case *a for Proto-(East) Cushitic and Proto-Berber, which fits nicely with Semitic’s position within Afroasiatic as those two are its closest relatives, because of this Macro-Cushitic (the ancestor of Semito-Berber and Cushitic) could have had a marked nominative system, on the other hand a hypothetical ergative case for a Pre-Proto-Afroasiatic stage is hardly retrievable.

The absolutive case is also retained in diptotic plurals as the accusative or oblique case. If the accusative -a preserves an older absolutive function, the nominative -u should embody the ergative. This correspondence between the accusative -a and an absolutive function is most clearly visible in Amorite personal names where the theophoric element ends in -a as well as in Amorite loanwords in both Akkadian and Egyptian sources. This is in-keeping with the archaic properties preserved in personal names. In other words, the early Semitic accusative takes up several functions of the absolutive case which marks the subject of an intransitive verb or the object of a transitive verb.

Because the East Semitic and Northwest Semitic branches underwent sustained contact with languages of the ergative-absolutive type such as Sumerian and Hurrian, it is preferable to focus on branches that were not in immediate contact with such languages in order to verify the validity of those features.

Traces of the absolutive survive in Arabic’s verbal sentences comprising kāna “to be” and its “sisters” (laysa, ṣāra, ˀaṣbaḥa, bāta, ẓalla, mā zāla, etc) whereby the predicate is in the accusative case -an, as in al ˀamr-u muˁaqqad-un > kāna (a)l ˀamr-u muˁaqqad-an.

In Geˁez ሃ -hā is the accusative marker used for personal names (e.g. Dawit walada Salomon-hā) while the accusative case is normally -a, the latter is also applied to the predicate of the verb kona “to be” (e.g. kona kahēn-a) which mirrors what we see in Arabic with kāna and its “sisters”. There are similar traces of the absolutive case in Mehri as well as other MSA languages.

The appearance of those features in Arabic, Ethiopic and Modern South Arabian enables us to push their existence all the way back to their common West Semitic ancestor, furthermore their sheer isolation from languages of the ergative-absolutive type means that the identity between the absolutive quality of the accusative in these languages and in Akkadian (and Amorite) further confirms the presence of this absolutive case in Proto-Semitic.

Some (Satzinger) have explained these features as leftovers of an older marked nominative system (AKA nominative-absolutive), especially considering that this kind of typological alignment is cross-linguistically rare, by and large restricted to the Afroasiatic and Nilo-Saharan families. One must keep this possibility in mind, Semitic’s nominative-accusative system could have arisen out of a marked nominative one in Semito-Berber and Macro-Cushitic before that.

While the retention of the absolutive case all the way back from Afroasiatic is possible, a more plausible explanation in my view is that the shift from a marked nominative system to the nominative-accusative one was a fuzzy process and that this was driven by language contact, in which case we are not dealing with an internal development but rather with the leftovers of a language related to or even derived from the Caucasic or Alarodian stock.

As a rule of thumb, and this counts for most reconstructed languages out there (Proto-Indo-European included), what was lost is generally greater than what has come down to us. The language we call Common Semitic or Proto-Semitic was not uniform and the appearance of its reconstruction owes a lot to the dialect clusters that thrived most, the language itself must have been riddled with contradictory elements, and that would have included different degrees of typological alignment from an older (presumably AA) marked nominative one to one which was more pristinely of the nominative-accusative type but preserved aspects of an ergative system the further back we go in time.

If we look closely enough, one can indeed discern traces of a non-AA Near Eastern substrate language of the ergative-absolutive type scattered throughout the earliest layers of Semitic speech, I could go into more detail and highlight how this is a more convincing option based on the form of the ergative case but the linguistics would invariably bore an unaccustomed audience. Needless to say, this provides a much better fit for the predominance of the J lineages among early Semitic speakers than an explanation appealing to internal derivation for those bizarre features, one which has the advantage of making the linguistic and the genetic evidence correspond and would therefore explain their intrusive nature.

This shows that while the J lineages were almost certainly not part of the Afroasiatic milieu from which Semitic branched off, the antiquity of those features having already been present in at least some of Common Semitic’s early dialects - and reconstructible in part because the success of this language family was largely accompanied by the spread of J lineages, older variants of Proto-Semitic might’ve lacked them altogether - suggests they were not “Semitised” either but already well-entrenched among the Proto-Semites and therefore that the accretion of those lineages was already well underway when the Semitic Parent Language was still spoken.

Finally the conspicuous situation of Semitic, a language family about as old as Indo-European, which came to be associated chiefly with a paternal lineage that does not reflect Common Semitic’s Afroasiatic past beyond the immediate Pre-Proto-Semitic stage should serve as a cautionary tale.
So here’s some food for though: While I am supportive of the notion that R-M269 and R-M417 alongside EHG (as the accompanying strand of ancestry) are the best candidates for Proto-Indo-European’s deep linguistic past, we must keep an open mind considering the presence of other lineages in early IE remains such as R-V1636, Q-L933 and especially I-L699 in Sredny Stog as well as J-L283 in a Yamnaya sample from Moldova (this should put to rest the debate over L283’s involvement in early IE dispersals, we’re clearly dealing with an IE marker, just like J-M205 is a Semitic one), the fact of the matter is that this kind of patrilineal heterogeneity leaves the door open to a variety of scenarios in the absence of any clear-cut information on IE’s external or high-level relationships, this of course applies not only to PIE but to every major phylum which displays that kind of heterogeneity.

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According to the Hebrew Bible’s patriarchal narratives, Israel was 50% Aramean and in turn his offspring was no less than 75% Aramean on average (with the possible exception of four of his sons born to handmaidens).

Regardless of those narratives’ historicity, which is not the topic of discussion here, such an accumulation of Aramean admixture would make Israel’s tribal ancestors a genetically Aramean nation via the repeated taking of Aramean wives (both Bethuel and Laban are labeled “Aramean”) and should give one pause, to say nothing of the famous passage referring to Israel as a “wandering Aramean” (Deut. 26:5).

It does say something about the Ancient Israelites’ self-perception, how they understood their own kinship in relation to neighbouring peoples and sheds a rare light on the nature of those relations which weren’t necessarily negative or hostile (a cliché if there ever was one). It also testifies to the prominence the Arameans held in their cultural universe and collective unconscious.

As of late, the Arameans have become a topic of discussion beyond the realm of dry academic debates and the Assyrian-Aramean naming controversy, primarily in the context of heated exchanges surrounding the contemporary identity issues of Levantine Arabs. It isn’t exactly rare to see people claim the Phoenicians spoke Syriac for instance, and Aramaic as the “the language of Jesus” or “the ancestor of Arabic & Hebrew” are among the platitudes one can easily encounter online nowadays.

So who were the Arameans, and what do we owe them exactly?

The earliest attestation of the Arameans goes back to the Aḫlamû (a term derived from the ǵ-l-m root and possibly meaning “youths”, cognate with the Hbr. ˁelem & Arb. ġulām) mentioned in Middle Assyrian texts (11th century BCE) where they are described as semi-nomadic agropastoral groups who occupied much of the area between the Euphrates and Orontes valleys in what is now Northern & Eastern Syria. “Aram” seems to have only rarely seen use as an endonym, it was a geographical label for the most part (as seen in the Sefire treaties, c. 8th century BCE).

In truth, their origins are very much shrouded in mystery, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. By the beginning of the 1st millennium BCE, the Arameans constitued themselves in separate polities in much of the area where the Aḫlamû are assumed to have been active.

From an archeological standpoint, these polities find their source in small settlements that appeared rather suddenly at the end of the Late Bronze Age and increased drastically in number during the Iron I (~1200-1000 BCE) and were characterised by a distinct material culture which featured a shared rural economy alongside an “egalitarian” structure and architecture. If any of this sounds oddly familiar, it is because the exact same process is seen in the highlands of Judea-Samaria during the same tumultuous period and leads to the emergence of the Proto-Israelites and later Hebrew kingdoms.

In both cases, reshuffling of the earlier LBA population seems to be involved in the formation of the new ethnic polities, in this particular case we’re mostly dealing with what was left of the Amorites in the area (while Canaanites are the main agent behind this in-situ reshuffling process in EIA Israel). Because of the strongly multi-ethnic character of Syria’s demography during the LBA, it is no coincidence if the emergence of the Aramean kingdoms went hand in hand with that of the Neo-Hittite states.

The picture obtained from the linguistic evidence for Aramaic’s early stages is much more ambiguous. What really is at stake here isn’t so much the Central Syrian koiné from which Old Aramaic would later emerge as the international language of its age, but rather the classification of the more obscure languages that are at first glance very similar to Aramaic but appear to preserve archaic features that seemingly bring them closer to either Canaanite or Ugaritic.

Sam’alian (AKA “Ya’udic”), the language of the mid-8th century statue at the beginning of this post which bears Panamuwa I’s dedicatory inscription to the storm god Hadad, is arguably one of the best examples. This language continues to frustrate most attempts at classification, in no small measure because of its internal diversity which exhibits varying degrees of similarity to the Central Syrian dialects of Old Aramaic and the earlier use of Phoenician (Tyrian) as the prestige language in 9th century inscriptions (and this apparently spilled over into the local language).

Sam’alian is sometimes seen as a mixed Canaanite-Aramaic dialect (whereby a local Phoenician-speaking population was ruled by an Aramaic-speaking elite), a divergent dialect of Old Aramaic or a distinct Northwest Semitic language (the latter being Huehnergard & Pat-El’s view). The latter view relies largely on the retention of the nominative and oblique case distinction in masculine plurals, as well as the presence of a (reconstructed) N-stem form.

Factually speaking, neither really warrant classifying Sam’alian as a distinct NWS language on its own, first because it was spoken on the periphery of the Semitic world (the -uwa ending for instance is a hallmark of Luwian i.e. Anatolian personal names) and so archaic traits are to be expected and secondly because while it is true that Aramaic is characterised by a rigid verbal structure consisting of six stems (three active and three passive/reflexive) the use of such stems is seldom useful in classifying languages at such a granular level and in this case we are really dealing with an argument from silence based on a reconstructed form (which, if correct, can still be understood as an archaic trait). Regardless of those subtleties I for one would argue that the Sam’alians’ devotion to the storm god Hadad, whose worship constitutes a shared religious and cultural trait throughout the Aramean world of the first half of the 1st millennium BCE, further strengthens the case in favour of a closer relationship to Old Aramaic.

An even more convoluted debate surrounds the classification of the Deir Alla plaster texts, to make a long story short my understanding is that we might be dealing with a divergent Ammonite dialect that was closer to Aramaic within the NWS dialect continuum. But until more texts in this language come to light, this will inevitably remain a controversial stance. It should be remembered that in the narrative arc from the book of Numbers, the seer Balaam b. Beor (the main character of this inscription which therefore constitutes one of the most ancient extra-Biblical attestations of a character from the Pentateuch) is described as coming from “Petor” in Aram-Naharaim (Num. 22:5) which is usually identified with the town of Pitru (known from Middle Assyrian texts, situated quite close to Sam’al & visible on the map of Aramean polities above).

While Pat-El & Wilson-Wright’s Aramaeo-Canaanite subgroup is quite convincing (the common innovations uniting Aramaic and Canaanite are sound), to which I would adduce several other innovations especially in the realm of shared irregularities, the situation might actually be closer to the “Aramoid” subgroup put forth by Kogan (2015). It must be kept in mind that the early 1st millennium NWS speech area was for all intents and purposes a dialect continuum and that many of the traits seen as common innovations could have spread areally much like the definite article did (indeed, within Canaanite, several isoglosses bring Hebrew-Moabite-Ammonite closer to Aramaic for example).
Another theory worthy of mention might be Peter Stein’s hypothesis positing a closer relationship between Aramaic and Sabaic, also on the basis of interesting similarities in both languages’ derived stem system (and glaring dissimilarities when compared to other Old South Arabian languages), an interesting theory considering Sayhadic’s problematic internal classification issues, it might well be that Sabaic represents a linguistic type closer to NW Semitic which arrived in SW Arabia by the end of the second millennium BCE (possibly bringing the Musnad along with it) though such a theory needs more than mere parallels in the derived stem system to work.

Pinpointing the origin of the Arameans to a specific area, if there ever was a single departure point, seems to be a rather pointless endeavour. A well-known passage in Amos 9:7 famously downplays the Israelite Exodus from Egypt by comparing it to Yahweh having brought Philistines from Caphtor (Crete) and, more importantly, the Arameans from the "land of Qir”.
This area seems to have been in the Euphrates valley, possibly close to the city of Hīt in present-day Iraq, which is in-keeping with the description of the Aḫlamû of Middle Assyrian texts.

The ancient genomic evidence might on the other hand suggest an origin closer to the Levant, as many of the LBA-EIA samples for which an association with early Arameans is likely point towards the western part of the Fertile Crescent.
Beyond the singleton from Abel-beth-Maacah (I2201) which is known to have been part of a chain of Aramean kingdoms in the Hula valley and Golan (Geshur is another example of one such kingdom, Bethsaida most definitely is an Aramean site), several samples from Lebanon, SE Turkey and Northern Iraq are also bound to be of Aramean descent.

The Middle Assyrian sample from LBA Nemrik 9 (I6441) carried J-FGC15940/Y6094, a sub-branch of YSC76 that also made an appearance in Iron III Beirut, this branch has long been a prime contender for an association with the Arameans and is found in present-day Assyrians. YSC76 comprises other sub-branches that are likely to have Aramean associations as well, it seems to have been quite successful in the Syrian desert and so that makes it a prime contender regardless of the finer details.

Another similar branch would be E-FGC18401, which was found in Iron Age Anatolia (NEV030 from Nevalı Çori). This sample also finds itself at the right place and at the right time for such an association to work, the branch’s distribution and phylogeny resembles what is seen with FGC15940.

Yet another Y-line which can convincingly be tied to the Arameans would be T-FGC80981 and its Y7794 subclade in particular which proves to be a very close fit in time and space tracking Aramean dispersals despite lacking the ancient data to verify the correlation (I2201 from Abel-beth-Maacah also clusters underneath T-CTS2860, which slightly increases the odds that the correlation is correct).

One should also remember that because of the multi-ethnic context in which the Arameans emerged, much of their territory having been the heartland of the Mitanni kingdom and later part of the Hittite empire immediately prior to their emergence during the LBA, some Y-lines that were not originally tied to NWS groups (let alone Semitic-speaking ones) might have re-expanded with them as well, this could hold true for branches like R-L945 if we assume a broadly Anatolian (Luwian?) background for this line beforehand, but this is much harder to prove at this stage. This inherent complexity extends to the leftovers of other ethnic groups (Hurrians, Indo-Aryans, etc) that once coexisted with the Amorites in LBA Syria.

What made Aramaic great was not the military prowess of the Aramean polities in Central Syria that nurtured it into a chancellery language, but rather the lingering shadow cast over it by the Neo-Assyrian (and later Babylonian and Persian) empire.

The Arameans formed a coalition that saw the kingdoms of Israel, Aram-Damascus, Hamath, Ammon, the Qedarite Arabs (under the leadership of Gindibu, technically the first mention of the Arabs in the historical record) and the smaller Phoenician and Syro-Hittite states join forces and put an effective halt to Assyrian expansionism at the battle of Qarqar circa 853 BCE. Instead of using the momentum to enshrine their gains, the Levantine coalition quickly dissolved and returned to its usual quarrels.
Infighting ensued with the kingdom of Aram-Damascus establishing its own empire and eventually occupying much of Israel (and destroying Eqron in the process around 830 BCE) under Hazael’s reign (to whom the Tel Dan stele, which famously mentions the “House of David” and boasts of having defeated both of the Hebrew kingdoms and killing their respective kings, is usually attributed).

The Assyrians would return a century later and effectively assert control over the entire region from the mid-8th century onwards. The unintended consequence of their steady conquest of the Aramean kingdoms, coupled with earlier waves of Aramean migration to Mesopotamia proper and their imperial policy of forced resettlement, was the increased use of Aramaic not only as a spoken language but as an administrative one as well.

In many ways, the Assyrian empire provides striking parallels to the Roman empire. From its humble beginnings in Northern Mesopotamia as an Amorite kingdom to the presence of an earlier native people which profoundly impacted its civilisation (the Sumerians provide an interesting if warped parallel to the Etruscans) and the inability of its enemies to thwart its expansion despite scoring victories (much like how Pyrrhus’ eponymous victories in southern Italy were more of a nuisance to Rome’s enemies and nothing more than a temporary setback to Rome’s growth). In the grand scheme of things, the Aramaisation of the Neo-Assyrian empire can be compared to how Greek culture slowly crept into and irreversibly infected the Romans’ old Latin culture after the takeover of Magna Græcia. To paraphrase Horace, conquered Aram took captive its Assyrian conqueror and wove its language into the very fabric of Mesopotamian imperialism.

The adoption of the Central Syrian Aramaic koiné and its meteoric ascent was also a conscious choice of Assyrian linguistic policy. Its close linguistic proximity to the Canaanite dialects by virtue of its being part of a broader Northwest Semitic continuum and the similarity of its consonantal script to the other variants of the Phoenician script in use in the Levantine kingdoms made it a weapon of choice so to speak. Another parallel to the Roman empire might be how the disappearance of the Canaanite dialects owes much to Aramaic’s similarity to those dialects, every bit as much as Gaulish, Celtiberian, Ligurian, Lusitanian and Brittonic’s decline owed much to their similarity to Latin. The main difference is that the Romans were imposing their own language in Gaul, Hispania and Britain, while Aramaic is a very peculiar case of a language riding the wave of foreign conquest.

Speaking of the Phoenician script, matres lectionis or the use of consonantal signs for long vowels (Heh 𐤄 for /ā/ & /ē/, Waw 𐤅 for /ū/, Yodh 𐤉 for /ī/) are an Aramean innovation, the spelling of Phoenician is otherwise almost completely defective (vowels are rarely if ever indicated) and remained that way throughout the first half of the 1st millennium BCE, whereas matres lectionis are present in the earliest Old Aramaic inscriptions. The use of matres lectionis spread to Hebrew and Moabite (where Heh 𐤄 is used for the 3rd masc. sg. possessive clitic -ō), though only partially and the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible conserves a lot of the defective consonantal spelling typical of early inscriptions (this is much less true of the Samaritan Pentateuch, which makes more extensive use of matres lectionis, so despite using the Paleo-Hebrew script the spelling is less archaic).
It is possible that this Aramaic innovation is what eventually led to the appearance of vowel signs in the Archaic Greek alphabets (also derivates of the Phoenician script), as there are a number of correspondences between the letters used to signify long vowels in the Old Aramaic script and vowel signs in the Western and Eastern Greek alphabets (including the Euboean variant which would give rise to the Italic alphabets).

Little wonder then that by the time the Assyrians besieged Jerusalem in 701 BCE, the Judahite elite was already fluent in Aramaic (see 2 Kings 18:26). This policy of Aramaisation would continue unimpeded under the Babylonian empire, and was enshrined by the Achaemenid empire.

The practical brand of imperialism embraced by the Persians saw the creation of a new literary standard for the language, Imperial Aramaic. This was accompanied by the institutionalisation of the cursive script used by Aramaic-speaking scribes.

It is under Achaemenid rule that the native cuneiform tradition of Mesopotamian scribal culture would be utterly eclipsed by the Aramaic one. From Egypt to Afghanistan, Imperial Aramaic was the language of trade, taxes, imperial edicts, proclamations and private correspondence, it is during this period that Aramaic became a truly international language. The language would outlive this empire as well and take on a life of its own outside the realm of chancellery and administration.
The official Aramaic language of the Achaemenid empire has come down to us in the form of numerous documents, Egypt being where most of those documents (such as the Elephantine Papyri) were found thanks to the dry climatic conditions which enabled their preservation, it is also the language in which the books of Daniel and Ezra were written (the language is often labeled “Biblical Aramaic”, though it really is Imperial Aramaic).

The Imperial Aramaic script, a cursive version of the Phoenician script where the upper part of the letters is shorn off, would fare just as well and its derivates would be used not only to write down the local languages spoken in the Fertile Crescent (from Hebrew to Arabic alongside a slew of local Aramaic languages) but Middle Persian and the language of the Parthians (Pahlavi script) as well as the languages of the Indian subcontinent (Brahmic scripts). Arabic, Hindi, Persian, Tamil, Hebrew, Tibetan and many other languages all use writing systems that sprang from the Aramaic script.

By the turn of the millennium, Aramaic already was a language family subdivided into two clearly distinguishable branches, an Eastern (or Mesopotamian) one and a Western (or Levantine) one. This stage is better known as “Middle Aramaic”. After the fall of the Achaemenid empire, Aramaic was no longer regulated by any single imperial authority and began to diversify without any constraints.

This is when languages such as Palmyrene, Hatran and Nabatean Aramaic arose. One of these, an Edessan dialect better known as Syriac (and a close relative of Palmyrene and Hatran), became a classical language that would produce a rich literary, poetic, scholarly and liturgical tradition of its own that forms the basis of the Eastern Churches’ rite.
Because of the Christian context in which Syriac thrived, Greek also had a substantial impact on the language’s lexicon. For this reason, it is mainly through Syriac that much of Classical Antiquity’s surviving literature was translated and transmitted to an Arabic-speaking audience.

The Eastern branch to which Syriac belongs is heavily coloured by earlier layers of Assyrian and Babylonian speech (both dialects of Akkadian) alongside a Persian superstrate. This holds true of the two other Eastern Aramaic languages which produced a rich literary tradition of their own, namely Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, the language of the Babylonian Talmud, and Mandaic which is the language of the last surviving gnostic religion (both are derived from Late Babylonian Aramaic, it is also likely that the Mandæans are at least in part of Judean descent).

The Western branch in comparison tends to have an important Canaanite substrate (not true of all varieties however, think of Nabataean Aramaic), and for the literary languages that arose from it either a Hebrew or Greek superstrate. Unsurprisingly it is mainly Jewish Palestinian Aramaic (JPA; the language of the Jerusalem Talmud) and Samaritan Aramaic that have a Hebrew superstrate while Christian Palestinian Aramaic (CPA; a descendant of Judean Aramaic) has a very pervasive Greek component.

This brings us to Jesus’ language. As should be clear by now, there no longer was a unitary Aramaic language in the 1st century CE, but rather a set of dialects or languages belonging to two fairly distinct branches with varying degrees of mutual intelligibility. Jesus’ everyday language would have been Galilean Aramaic, a dialect that developed into JPA (despite its name, the Jerusalem Talmud was not written in Jerusalem but in the Galilee, which was the main area of Jewish settlement after the Bar Kokhba revolt).

The centuries which preceded the birth of Jesus saw a constant decline in the use of Hebrew, a phenomenon that was slowed down by the re-emergence of Hebrew nationalism in the wake of the Maccabean revolt and the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty with the rise of the Hasmonean kingdom. Hebrew was by no means a dead language, Mishnaic Hebrew (Rabbinic Hebrew) is now known to have been a spoken variety of Late Biblical Hebrew - albeit heavily influenced by Aramaic - and would remain that way until the 4th century. Jesus should then have been familiar with Hebrew alongside his own native Galilean Aramaic, even if Hebrew is likelier to have survived as a spoken language in the Judean desert and in Peræa than in the Galilee (Rendsburg’s theories about Mishnaic Hebrew being a Galilean dialect notwithstanding). Hebrew would also be boosted for nationalistic purposes during the Bar Kokhba revolt, roughly a century after Jesus’ death.

Such was the prominence of the Western Aramaic dialects in 1st century Judea that when Flavius Josephus speaks of “our tongue” he refers not to Hebrew but to Judean Aramaic (his first draft of The Jewish War was also in that language), clearly demonstrating that Aramaic’s Judean-Samaritan-Galilean dialect(s) had become the majority language(s).

To claim that “Jesus spoke Aramaic”, while correct in a broad sense, muddies the waters to a great extent. To assume that a present-day speaker of Turyoyo or even Ma’louli Aramaic (one of the few surviving Western Neo-Aramaic dialects) speaks “the language of Jesus” would be tantamount to imagining that Tamerlane and Beyazid I could converse in the same Turkic language.
More importantly, because of Late Biblical Hebrew’s survival and its prestigious status as the ancient language of the nation, it is no surprise if many of his sermons make sense only if they were delivered in Hebrew (which gives meaning to the double-entendre and quips used in those sermons, a feature not only of Biblical discourse but of Rabbinical [especially Haggadic] literature as well, many of those nuances are simply lost in Aramaic).

Aramaic’s eastern and western dialects would continue to be spoken for many centuries, in the Levant it remained the majority language well into the 10th century CE and survived later still in Lebanon and Syria’s mountaineous terrain (as in Ma’loula, where an unwritten variant of Western Aramaic remains the spoken language). In Mesopotamia the language fared even better, to this day Sureth (which is not a descendant of Syriac despite its name, although it might be descended from a very close relative) alongside a slew of Neo-Aramaic dialects remains spoken by hundreds of thousands if not over a million speakers (essentially Assyro-Chaldeans) despite considerable loss in diversity and repeated attempts at forced Arabisation, Kurdification and Turkification of its speakers over the years (the Jewish dialects have practically vanished for similar reasons).
Here too, this is hardly surprising considering that the early Arabian Muslims were in the habit of calling Mesopotamia’s rural population “Nabateans” because of the shared use of Aramaic vernaculars.

Similarly to how Aramaic’s close similarity to its NW Semitic sister languages hastened the latter’s demise, Arabic’s resemblance to its far-flung Central Semitic cousin doomed Aramaic to a slow and agonising death.
Much is made of the Aramaic substratum in spoken Levantine Arabic, and indeed the claims that Levantine Arabic isn’t Arabic but rather Aramaic or even Canaanite in an Arabic guise (“Neo-Canaanite” according to a famous dilettante from Amioun) are particularly grotesque, nevertheless anyone with even a passing knowledge of Classical Syriac or Targumic Aramaic would be able to notice the old tongue’s lingering influence.

To cite only a few examples:

• The 3ps. masc. pl. personal pronoun henne (Syriac hennen)

• The 2nd and 3rd ps. masc. pl. clitics -kon, -(h)on (compare Syriac -ḵon & -hon)

• The confusion between ˀilā “towards” and ˁalā “upon, on” (also a feature of Israelite Hebrew in the Book of Kings).

• Prepositions such as ǧuwwa “inside” (Syr. gawwā) and barra “outside” (Syr. barrā).

• The use of l(a)- as a directive, accusative and genitive marker.

• Loss of endings in possessive pronouns, qualitative vowel moved backwards (laka > lak/laˀelak).

• The shift of /ṯ/ > /t/, /ḏ/ > /d/ and even /ṣ/ > /z/ (ṣaġīr > zġīr), the deletion of vowels in opening syllables (such as the /a/ of ṣaġīr) corresponding to an Aramaic schwa.

Some of these, especially in the realm of sound changes, should be viewed with caution as the plosive-spirantised realisation of stops (more on that below) so typical of post-Official Aramaic dialects is nowhere to be found in spoken Arabic.

Where Aramaic’s influence on spoken Levantine Arabic is most keenly felt however is within the verbal system. The system of complex inflections inherited from Classical Arabic underwent a complete overhaul and was replaced with a system that closely follows what is seen in Aramaic, consider for instance the opposition between katabet “I wrote” and katbat “she wrote” (compare Syr. keṯbeṯ & keṯbaṯ) or the loss of the dual as a productive category.
The increased use of the active participle as a regular present (as in ˀanā ˁāref “I know”) is another plausible sign of Aramaic influence on Levantine Arabic.
Classical Arabic’s rich system of derived stems is also subjected to the influence of Aramaic’s symmetrical 6-stem system (three active, three passive), for instance the passive of ˀakal “he ate” isn’t ˀukil(a) as would be expected in Classical Arabic but ˀittākal (compare Syr. ˀeḵal [Pe.] > ˀeṯeḵel [Ethpe.]), likewise the passive of ˀalġā “he cancelled” isn’t the expected ˀulġiy(a) but ˀiltaġā.

Naturally, such features are not limited to Levantine Arabic alone and can be found in Mesopotamian, Egyptian and even North African Arabic. Within Levantine Arabic itself we are likelier to encounter those features in the areas where Aramaic survived the longest (in short, rural and northern Levantine dialects).

If you think the above is impressive, you might be shocked to discover just how far Aramaic’s influence goes in Hebrew.
For a start, much of Hebrew phonology, down to the tiniest details of pronunciation, is firmly rooted in Aramaic as it was spoken starting from the 3rd century BCE.
Take the plosive-spirantised realisation of the six stops mentioned above, those stops being /b/, /g/, /d/, /k/, /p/ & /t/ whereby these become /ḇ/, /ġ/, /ḏ/, /ḵ/, /f/ & /ṯ/ (AKA Begadkefat) under certain vocalic constraints such as the presence of a silent or mobile schwa. This rule is what lies behind the Ashkenazic /t/ > /s/, even though the full range of the spirants has been diminished to /b/ > /ḇ/, /k/ > /ḵ/ and /p/ > /f/ in Israeli Hebrew.
This is a hallmark of Aramaic phonology and can be found in a very similar form in Classical Syriac (there are some key differences however, the stops remain plosives after diphthongs such as /aw/ and /ay/ for instance, which is a mark of clitics in plural nouns). This spirantisation process remained productive in Assyrian Neo-Aramaic where /w/ and /u/ are now allophones of /ḇ/ (ḥaḇrā > ḫawrā > ḫōrā “friend”).

A similar development occurred in Samaritan Hebrew, we know from Samaritan grammarians that this rule affected five consonants /b/, /p/, /d/, /w/ and /t/ but not /g/ nor /k/. This still holds true to a very large extent for /p/ which has been levelled to /f/ in virtually all positions and /w/ which is realised as /b/ or /f/ in many cases, presumably from an earlier /ḇ/ (the name of the Samaritan Waw is Bå for that matter). So despite its very archaic phonology which isn’t just a facade (SH preserves geminated -imma/-inna afformative endings in 2nd & 3rd ps. pl. clitics and personal pronouns as well as the ending -tī in 2nd f. sg. perfect forms and in the 2nd f. sg. pronoun åttī, all archaic traits) its phonology was once much more aligned with Tiberian Hebrew’s standards.
Furthermore, the rules regulating the shift of Waw from /w/ to /u/ (behind /b/, /w/, /m/ & /p/) or the mutation of Schwa to Hiriq (/ə/ > /i/; think of how we say lirˀōt instead of lərˀōt, liḵtōḇ and not ləḵtōḇ, etc) is another example of inherently Aramaic vocalism setting boundaries in Hebrew, those rules tend to be identical to the ones found in Targumic Aramaic for that very reason, most of these rules also have equivalents in Samaritan Hebrew.
The ending of 3ps. masc. sg. possessive clitics on plural nouns in /aw/ (as in ˀăḇōṯāw “his forefathers”) is another feature of Aramaic phonology which spilled into Hebrew. The levelling of /ḫ/ and /ḥ/ to /ḥ/ and /ś/ > /s/ are also features of Aramaic phonology, /w/ > /v/ might also be an Aramaic sound change, though some theories ascribe this shift to contact with Greek (we do know that Waw was realised as /v/ in Tiberian Hebrew), a similar theory of Greek contact-induced change exists for the loss of gutturals in Samaritan Hebrew.

Regarding the verbal system, the active participle is the normative form of the present tense in Hebrew, once more as in Aramaic. Hebrew kōṯeḇ “writes/writing” and Aramaic kāṯeḇ are therefore squarely identical from this point of view, moreover this state of affairs clearly predates Late Biblical Hebrew.
And even though Hebrew was to a large extent successful in preserving Canaanite’s system of derived stems, the existence of Nitpaˁel is a very good example of a mixed stem (Nifˁal + Hitpaˁel) that arose under Aramaic influence in Mishnaic Hebrew and was carried over into later Hebrew (had the revitalisation of Hebrew endorsed Mishnaic Hebrew as the standard, Israeli Hebrew would be an even more Aramaic-like language).
In Samaritan Hebrew, the number of verbal stems increased from 7 to 9 (mostly via gemination of existing stems) as a reaction to the internal passive stems Hufˁal and Puˁal receding under the influence of Aramaic’s simpler 6-stem system.

Yet another area where Aramaic had a profound influence is Hebrew syntax, two examples:

• The possessive pronoun šel- arose by analogy to Aramaic dil-, a contraction of dī- “of, which” and l- “to, for” (hence še [< ˀašer] + l-), compare Hbr. šelḵā to Syr. dīlāḵ; Hbr. šelāhem to Syr. dīlhon and so on.

• Double possessive forms (smikhut kfula), as in ˀaḫiw šel habaḥur, are also analoguous to Aramaic constructions that can even be seen in ordinal structures such as Syr. nahrā ḏəṯlāṯā “the third river” (lit. “river of three”).

One could also point out the pervasive influence of Aramaic in Hebrew vocabulary, especially in semantic fields relating to religion and law, as a general rule the higher the register the more Aramaic lexicon we encounter. For that matter, even the words for “dad” and “mom” in Hebrew are Aramaic loanwords, namely ˀabbā & ˀimmā (to be contrasted with the formal Hebrew ˀaḇ “father” & ˀem “mother”). To say nothing of Aramaic expressions and sentences that crept into the language.

The truth is that I’m barely scratching the surface here, to make a very long story short Hebrew would be a very different language without all of its Aramaic baggage.
It must be kept in mind that the complex nature of the relationship between both languages, their common background as NWS dialects and prolonged contact over millennia often makes it exceedingly difficult to tell whether shared traits are retentions from an intermediate stage (Aramaeo-Canaanite), cases of parallel development, convergence or direct influence.

Regardless, the revivalists’ attempts to purge Aramaic influence from Hebrew was a losing battle if there ever was one (to say nothing of the square script, which displays the closest resemblance to the Imperial Aramaic script).

Three thousand years after its first appearance in Upper Mesopotamia on the lips of the marauding Aḫlamû of the Late Bronze Age, Aramaic remains the common language of the Assyrian people, a language that has since been infused with a large amount of loanwords and calques chiefly from Akkadian and Persian (as well as Arabic and Turkish to a smaller extent) and which underwent radical change as one would expect of a language spoken continuously over such a long period of time.
Aramaic is a rags to riches and back to rags story, from a set of dialects spoken by elusive semi-nomadic tribes and obscure Iron Age kingdoms vanquished by the Assyrians to being the lingua franca of its age (there was a time when speaking Aramaic meant being a man of the world) and enjoying a status similar to that of Akkadian in the Bronze Age it became a minority language confined to churches, synagogues and dwindling minorities dispersed throughout the world.

No, Aramaic is not the common ancestor of Arabic and Hebrew, that would be Proto-Central Semitic, a prehistoric language spoken more than 4500 years ago, and the Phoenicians most certainly did not speak Syriac, first because they predate the emergence of this Edessan dialect of Aramaic by many centuries and secondly because their language was a very close relative of Hebrew (or, as an astute Israeli friend of mine called it, “funny Hebrew”).
Aramaic is not “the language of Jesus” either for the simple reason that Aramaic no longer was a single language by the time he was born but rather a language family and that he spoke one of the Western dialects (Galilean Aramaic) which has been extinct for quite some time, surviving only in the form of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic (JPA) while the vast majority of present-day Neo-Aramaic languages belong to the Eastern branch (with the exception of Western Neo-Aramaic, a set of unwritten dialects, that are not descendants of Galilean Aramaic in any case).

Nevertheless, billions of people now write their language in a variant of the Aramaic script, if you can read Farsi, Malayalam, Thai, Urdu, Arabic, Sinhala or Khmer you owe your current writing system to the Arameans (courtesy of the Achaemenid empire’s linguistic policies). It is also plausible that the very concept of using signs for vowels is due by and large to the Arameans.
The major differences between spoken Arabic (Levantine, Mesopotamian and Egyptian Arabic in particular) and the Classical standard owe much to the Aramaic substrate present therein, Aramaic dialects having remained the spoken language of the Fertile Crescent well into the 10th century. The religious lexicon of Islam is also influenced by Aramaic, words such as lāhūt, malakūt or ǧabarūt are all Aramaic loanwords, Arabic’s reputed wealth in vocabulary also owes much to the accumulation of Aramaic substrata.
The rich liturgy of many Eastern Churches has its root in the Syriac tradition, and the study of Greek classics is deeply indebted to the preservation of the Classical corpus in Syriac translations (that were later translated into Arabic). While the preservation of Greek literature in the Arab empires is quite exaggerated, what was indeed preserved in the Arab cultural milieu had earlier been transmitted via Syriac.
It can even be argued that beyond being a mere product of the Nabatean script, the Syriac script was a defining influence on the morphology of the Arabic abjad’s signs (one needs not be an expert in order to notice the similarity which should be obvious just by looking at some of the manuscripts posted above).

At the beginning of this post, I said that if we were to take the Hebrew Bible’s patriarchal narratives literally, Ancient Israel must be seen as a genetically Aramean nation. While unlikely for reasons I won’t get into it is quite clear that those narratives do preserve a sense of historical truth and that the further north one went, the likelier one was to encounter people of Aramean descent, this is verified by the presence of some of the Y-lines I mentioned in Jews of all stripes alongside the minority groups mentioned in this post. Aramaic became the second national language of the Hebrew people and is firmly imbedded in its cultural, legal and religious tradition. The first translations of the Torah were made in Greek (Septuagint) and in Aramaic, Targumic literature was born out of the need to make the Hebrew Bible understandable at a time when Jewish and Samaritan audiences were far more familiar with Aramaic than with Hebrew (as a matter of fact, the current Samaritan priestly class is descended from a Levitical clan that was tasked with translating the Torah into Aramaic as it was read aloud), for this reason Targumic Aramaic straddles and blurs the lines between Eastern & Western Aramaic (the Targum Jonathan and Samaritan Targumim are inherently Western however). For many generations, Aramaic was the language of the household, it eventually became the language of prayer (still its primary function among the Samaritans, Kol Nidrei is an Aramaic prayer), marriage and mourning for Jews (hence why Ketubot and the Qaddish are in Aramaic). This long coexistence had a very profound impact on the Hebrew language of both the Jews and the Samaritans, without which it would be a different language altogether. In turn, this influence pervaded not only Hebrew but many Jewish languages of the diaspora, from Yiddish and Ladino to Yevanic and Baghdadi Jewish Arabic, all have their fair share of Aramaic loans, expressions and so forth. And of course, Hebrew (with the important exception of Samaritan Hebrew) owes its square script to Imperial Aramaic.

Last but not least, while the Arameans did not manage to maintain their identity and survive as a distinct ethnic group (present-day Maronites in northern Israel and Syriac Christians who have chosen the Aramean monicker for themselves invariably do so for reasons rooted in Church politics and not because this identity was transmitted through millennia, their liturgical use of Syriac does help legitimise the label in a roundabout way) - it is even doubtful they ever constituted a single ethnic group - their blood still runs through the veins of many today, not just the Levantine Arabs now living in their homeland (which corresponds more or less to present-day Syria along with chunks of Iraq, Turkey and Israel) but amongst many minority groups such as the Assyro-Chaldeans (with whom they blended almost completely, both willingly and forcibly), Mandæans, Maronites, Alawites, Druze and further beyond still in Italy proper and even in many parts of the former Roman empire where they were resettled.

As you can see, this post is longer than usual, I had to exercise restraint because there is a lot more to be said on the subject, it is no easy feat to summarise the history of a people and the language they have left us when there are at least three millennia of history involved. But the Arameans and their language are well worth the effort.

While my posts on Palestinian Arab ancestry have tended to focus on the Arabian component present among them (which is being downplayed for political reasons), another prominent component that is overlooked in the anti-Israel activists’ perpetual quest to max out Canaanite ancestry among the Palestinian Arabs is the Egyptian one.

In my last article I highlighted how Ancestralbrew’s models reduced not only the Arabian component but the Egyptian one as well to the bare minimum (reaching a maximum of about 10%). In the meantime I’ve had access some of the averages for which models were produced in that video, and I can confirm that from the fits I obtained the portion of Egyptian ancestry is much closer to ~25% with a clear increase in that type of admixture from north to south (Gaza scores the highest amount of Egyptian, around 40%, essentially making Egypt the primary source of ancestry).

All by themselves however, a handful of fits (even if obtained from a fairly solid model) do not mean all that much unless there is additional evidence supplementing the results as one could still make the argument that something else is being picked up or that this is chance resemblance as should be expected for neighbouring populations.

One issue here is that unlike Peninsular Arabs (who are oversampled), Egyptians remain severely undersampled to this day and it is therefore significantly harder to support such models using uniparental or even IBD data. Speaking of uniparental data, an example of this are the lines under E-V22, this is bound to have been a major marker in Lower Egypt since prehistorical times, for instance among Palestinian Arabs we have the Priestly Samaritan branch E-FT161981 which comprises a large Nabulsi cluster under Y270751 and there is no reason to doubt that this branch indeed has its roots in Samaritan Levites and was extant in Iron Age Israel in turn making it firmly local (even though I would argue that FGC62854, from which this branch stems, ultimately is of Egyptian origin). There is a similar amount of uncertainty when dealing with the lines under E-V12 which should be the main Upper Egyptian marker.

One could also make an argument from silence and point out that M78’s branches remain elusive in the Iron Age and Bronze Age datasets from the Levant, but this is an argument based on negative evidence and the current sample count does not really allow us to draw such conclusions (I am even reluctant to use that kind of logic for areas for which we have a large amount of ancient samples, such as the British Isles or Hungary). Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

In such circumstances, one might find the endeavour utterly pointless… And yet, a recent Palestinian Arab sample might turn the tables in a surprising manner:

This tweet from the Palestine DNA Project announces the results of FTDNA kit n°1009441, belonging to a member of the Al-Asfar family from Jaffa. This individual is J1-ZS241, the same branch I spoke of in the last post and which was found in an Iron Age sample from Megiddo.

Nevgen predicts the SNP as being Z18271, which would make it a priestly line therefore Israelite by definition. Looking more closely at the STRs, this is based on three values only one of which is reliable (DYS448=21). In other words this sample might still be xZS227.

So why am I bringing this up? First of all, this isn’t our first ZS241/Y3081 sample from Jaffa, we already have a YSEQ kit with paternal roots in Jaffa (lists country of origin as Jordan):

Secondly, the family’s origin itself. While the Al-Asfar family has roots in Jaffa, it migrated there from Shweika (a suburb of Tulkarm), and more to the point the family’s earliest known paternal ancestor was an Egyptian officer who arrived with Ibrahim Pasha’s army in the 1830s and settled in Tulkarm, this officer came from Mansoura in Egypt’s Eastern Delta.

These are all crucial details because BY143137 (the branch carried by the other individual from Jaffa), despite being quite rare, has at least three modern testers hailing from that same part of Egypt, with roots in towns and villages in Mansoura’s vicinity such as Mit Dafir.

This area is also where the 15th Dynasty of Egypt (the so-called “Hyksos”), which was of Amorite origin, established its capital Avaris and it is quite likely that BY143137 arrived in the area during the Middle Bronze Age with “Asiatic” migrants considering that ZS241 was found in a MBA sample from Megiddo, a site which shared the same material culture as Avaris.

I do not believe in coincidences, and this is a bit too much to be mere coincidence, while I could be wrong I’m enclined to trust the family’s genealogy. I would say the odds are in favour of this sample being BY143137 as well. Even if I am mistaken and the Al-Asfar family is Z18271, this still puts the presence of BY143137 in Jaffa under a new light, indeed the coastal plain of what is now Israel was heavily settled by Egyptian migrants following Ibrahim Pasha’s campaigns in the Levant.

The major series of Egyptian migration waves are associated with the time of Muhammad Ali’s Syrian campaign. The original wave took place in 1829, about two years before the invasions, and ended in early 1841, with the forced retreat of the Egyptian army.5 The historical circumstances that brought about the Egyptian migrations are presented briefly below. The migrations had profound demographic and socioeconomic impacts. They contributed to a population increase that more than counterbalanced the loss of life caused by the harsh rule of the Egyptians.

The Egyptian invasion was caused, at least partly, when the ruler of Syria and Palestine refused to obey Muhammad Ali’s demand to repatriate the Egyptians who had escaped from the forced labor projects in the Nile Delta. But, ironically, the regime’s later Syrian-Palestinian development projects were accompanied by the import of Egyptian forced labor into the conquered land. The termination of Muhammad Ali’s Syrian administration resulted in another wave of Egyptian migrants. The demographic impacts of Egyptian rule in Palestine occurred thus during the period that preceded it (1829), during the period of its administrative control (1832-1839), and during its termination phase (1840-41).

[…]

At any rate, the Egyptian population that remained in Palestine after the retreat of the army made up the largest migration that the country had known during the nineteenth century. One of the contributions of this wave was the emergence of Jaffa and its rural hinterland, although the new neighborhoods that they established were mostly slums, built of adobe bricks and other unsorted, locally available materials.

-David Grossman, Rural Arab Demography and Early Jewish Settlement in Palestine; p. 45-46 (2011)

Even though it isn’t easy to quantify the waves Egyptian settlers in raw numbers, in large part because of the tumultuous era and lack of accurate data, those facts are nevertheless well known to Palestinian Arab genealogists, for instance this is what Hazem Bakri (himself a genealogist) has to say about the Egyptian input in the area (translation is my own):

Obviously, this is the kind of information the “Palestinians = Arabised Canaanites” crowd would much rather not have you know anything about, but I digress.

The point here is that this Palestinian Arab line, under a branch which is currently ~90% Jewish and was present in the Levant amongst the earliest Northwest Semitic-speaking groups replete with ancient samples to support this and for which a local origin going back to the Early Bronze Age should be totally uncontroversial, might well be of Egyptian origin for millennia all the way back to the Middle Bronze Age and have made its way back to the Levant only in the 19th century (after ~3600 year-long stay in Egypt).

If an Egyptian pedigree can be expected for one of the few salient pre-Arab lines found in Palestinian Arabs, the possibility of a significantly more recent arrival for other lines via Egypt must always be kept in mind, for instance some of the lines under J-FGC1722 which are ostensibly Arabian might also have been mediated by later Egyptian arrivals and might therefore be Peninsular up to a certain point in time (to say nothing of the branches of E-V22, E-V12, E-V32 and so on).

It is likely we are merely scratching the surface here and that without further sampling from Egypt we are just looking at the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

EDIT: Josh has informed me in the comments that the Al-Asfar sample has a GD of 3-4 with two J-BY55414 individuals, in this case Z18271 should be a foregone conclusion (and not BY143137, though the point regarding this marker still stands for the singleton). The question then becomes whether an Egyptian Jewish origin via FT157560 is to be expected, or whether we’re dealing with something different and more remote in time (the Southern Delta was home to a Jewish Temple in Leontopolis in Second Temple times, so this need not be a recent exit either).

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Recently however the following video caught my attention:

Before reading this post, I strongly encourage you to watch this, so as to understand what we’re dealing with here.

From the very beginning, the narrator asks a seemingly innocent but very charged question: Which populations in the Middle East are the most genetically similar to the ancient Israelites?

Before answering that question, the video offers a cursory glance at two Iron Age samples from Agranat-Tamir et al.’s 2020 study on the BA Southern Levant, I2201 from Abel-beth-Maacah and I4517 from Megiddo, that are labelled Israelite and used as proxies for IA Israelite ancestry.

I’ll get back to the Y-DNA lineage I highlighted above in a moment, but first one thing needs to be said. The labeling of I2201 as Israelite is somewhat problematic. Ma’akhah was an Aramean kingdom which ruled over much of the Golan, the site of Abel-beth-Maacah is situated in the Hula valley in close proximity to Tel Dan:

So while this individual might well have been a subject of the kingdom of Israel, it is unlikely that he was Israelite in the narrower ethnic sense. We are then left with I4517, who is in my view a more serious contender for the Israelite label, but here too this is dependent on whether or not we adopt a minimalist approach to the history of the Hebrew kingdoms (Finkelstein, the main excavator at Megiddo, considers Stratum VI to have been part of a “New Canaan”, making an Israelite ethnic affiliation for I4517 doubtful). The truth is that neither site lies within the core area of Proto-Israelite settlement, though of the two Megiddo is much closer in both time and space to the Iron I Israelites.

The narrator then begins a short overview of the samples’ ancestral components. Ubaid is put forth as the vector for Mesopotamian ancestry in the Levant during the Pottery Neolithic-Chalcolithic period, while possible Halaf is an equally plausible source if not more so. There’s also talk of “Early Bronze Age Canaanites”, which is an anachronism since the Canaanites emerged as a distinct group during the Middle Bronze Age.

We are then told that Assyrian & Babylonian dominance of the Levant is responsible for the presence of a ”North West Asian Iron Age” component among present-day Jews, a purposefully vague label for Iron Age Iranians. We are also told that monotheism was a product of the Babylonian exile, though in truth by the time of Josiah’s reforms Iron II Judahite cult must have been officially monolatric at the very least.

At this point in the video, the question that was asked at the beginning is finally answered, a G25 distance table is shown for both samples.

Leading to the conclusion that the Samaritans are the closest modern population to the Israelites. While this is absolutely correct, such appeals to genetic distance can quickly get sketchy. In this case, Samaritans as the closest extant population to the Iron Age Israelites makes perfect sense as they are a Hebrew-speaking group that has maintained the Israelite tribal system and has its own version of the Mosaic faith - the narrator overstates their distinctiveness from the Jews & despite their tradition placing the split from the Jews in the time of Eli the priest the fact of the matter is that the split probably occurred between Persian and Hellenistic times prior to which they practiced a form of Iron IIC Judahite religion - and so they have preserved not only the genetic makeup thanks to tribal endogamy but the language, identity, religion and tribal pedigrees as well. This specific combination of genetic, linguistic, religious, tribal and identity-based factors makes them the Jews’ closest relatives.

It should be kept in mind however that such arguments based wholly on genetic distances can easily produce erroneous or illusory results ripe for misuse. In my first post on Substack I gave the counterexample of how Western Jews are invariably closer to the Iron I Philistines than the Palestinian Arabs are thanks to a common Aegean profile. A host of similar examples could be invoked, let’s take the Middle Bronze Age samples from Armenia for instance.

One could naturally conclude that Georgians and Azeris are closer to Armenia’s Bronze Age inhabitants and therefore that both have inalienable national rights over present-day Armenia which “override” and take precedence over that of the Armenians. The truth however is that this North Caucasian-like profile that once existed in Armenia is by and large due to the hypothesised relationship between the Hurrians and Nakho-Dagestanian groups, in other words this cannot be taken as proof of descent from MBA Armenians and we’d have to go much further back in time (well over a millennium) to pinpoint gene flow from the area of present-day Armenia to the North Caucasus. It goes without saying that the Armenians have more exogenous sources of ancestry in comparison to North Caucasians as they were scattered over much of Eastern Anatolia and Cilicia, which is why their profile is more akin to that of Mesopotamian populations (Assyrians, among others).

Coming back to the Samaritans, the video refers to two “recent” papers in order to highlight uniparental links to other populations, namely Shen et al. (2004) and Oefner et al. (2013) neither of which qualify as recent in the world of population genetics. The narrator then states that a majority of Samaritan males “have Y-DNA markers which are shared by the Jewish priestly class known as Kohanim”. I find this curious for two reasons:

1. The Samaritans are made up of four clans (Kohen, Danfi, Tsafari & Marhiv) which means that they carry only 4 Y-DNA lineages (E-FT161981, J-Y27539, J-PF5169 & J-Z642 [most likely > BY202929]). This information is easily available online.

2. None of the Samaritan clans carry the branch tied to the Cohen Modal Haplotype, which is J-Z18271 (though it is extremely likely their priests once did, for reasons I won’t get into here). More importantly, Z18271 is a subclade of ZS241, the branch carried by I4517 (the IA sample from Megiddo), this was one of the study’s major finds as it helps anchor the branch’s origin in the Levant.

This takes us back to the point I raised in older posts about uniparental lineages being left out of such discussions on purpose. My basic assumption is not that the content creator is ignorant of those facts but rather that he purposefully omits them and is acting in bad faith. The objective here, as we shall soon discover, is not to offer an unbiased overview of the data but to promote a narrative of indigenous rights for Palestinian Arabs based on genetics and in doing so to downplay the Jewish connection to the Levant.

Tellingly, this case falls apart when a mere glance at uniparental frequencies among Palestinian Arabs reveals an abundance of lines tied to the Arabian conquerors of the 7th century CE onwards and a dearth of Canaanite and Amorite lines among them. All the while local pre-Arab lines tend to be overwhelmingly Jewish, ZS241 for instance is ~90% Jewish and has but a vestigial presence in the Levant nowadays in what should be seen as a clear case of population replacement (more Italian and Portuguese carriers than Palestinian or Syrian Arabs for example).

Continuing, the narrator explains that because of their genetic proximity to the ancient Israelites, the Samaritans will be used to proxy Israelite ancestry and that this is somehow “consistent with qpAdm models”, it’s unclear what is meant here as ancients can and are indeed used in qpAdm models.

Slides with G25 models for Palestinian Arab averages are then shown:

We are simultaneously told that the “choice and labelling” of the models is meant to “reduce overfit”, but as we can see here the models tell a very different story.

First off, we are not shown any of the distances for those fits, which is odd considering how the Samaritans are used as a source based on genetic distance. Another striking thing here is the multiplicity of averages, we do not know what the sample count is nor the provenance of those averages.

Many of the labels are enigmatic, take “Iron Age Indo-Iranian” which “includes Turkic like admixture”, my educated guess here is that the reference used isn’t from the Iranian plateau but rather from Central Asia proper. This is very clearly designed to deflate the Iranian component, as the Palestinian Arabs have recent and significant chunks of ancestry most notably from Kurdistan, not Central Asia (in so doing, the amount of Samaritan is kept to the maximum). Meanwhile, both the Arabian and Egyptian components are reduced to the bare minimum, reaching a maximum of only 13.2% & 12.5% respectively, calling this unrealistic would be a major understatement (having seen several Palestinian Arab results from areas such as Jaffa and Gaza, I can tell you that some are overwhelmingly Egyptian).

Most importantly, there’s a striking omission. We are shown models for Christians (North & Central), Nablus, Acre, Tulkarem, Nazareth, Haifa, Safed, Jenin, Tiberias, Beisan, Jaffa, Ramallah, Ramle, Jerusalem, Hebron and Gaza… But Negev Bedouins (BedouinA & BedouinB) are nowhere to be found. Several of these averages are made up of Palestinian Arabs that come from areas within Israel (Nazareth, Haifa, Safed, Tiberias, Beisan, Jaffa, Ramle, Jerusalem) so this cannot be an excuse, the Bedouins also identify as Palestinian Arabs so this is no excuse either.

The only plausible explanation as to why the Negev Bedouins are left out is to make the Palestinian Arab dataset seem more homogenous than it truly is, as the Bedouins’ profile is much more significantly Peninsular (entirely so in BedouinB’s case) and the kind of models used here would either show that or fail to produce realistic fits (as the configuration will inevitably make Samaritan absorb a chunk of the Arabian ancestry, this is the risk when mixing ancient and modern populations).

The conclusion that Palestinian Arabs are anywhere between 60-80% Israelite should be taken with a few kilos of salt (the Christians being the only major exception).

The content creator then turns to the Jewish groups:

Notice that the labels become even more obscure, “Southern European Iron Age” is especially bizarre as IA samples from Southern Europe can be quite dissimilar depending on whether we’re dealing with samples from Greece, the Balkans, Italy or the Iberian Peninsula. The Palestinian Arab models for instance have “Ancient Greek”, a component that should make its appearance here. Likewise, I’m curious as to what “Northern European Iron Age” embodies. The use of “Anatolian Iron Age” is also inflating the latter, and after having seen the latest paper on the Roman era Balkans the theory of a large Anatolian component amongst Jews is debatable at best.

I am not going to go too deep into modelling here, especially as Jews (Ashkenazim in particular) are amongst the most well-researched ethnic groups out there. The actual proportions of ancestry among Ashkenazim are closer to ~40% (±5%) Israelite, ~35% (±5%) Hellenic & Italic, ~12% (±3%) Northern European (Slavic & Germanic) with the remainder being made up of smaller components such as North African and East Asian (Chinese & Turkic). The finer details can of course be debated, overall however there is little doubt that the models in this video are way off the mark.

Most telling in my view is the “North West Asia Iron Age” reference. If I had to guess, this is a population from the Western parts of the Iranian plateau, either Hasanlu_IA or HajjiFiruz_IA. This is all the more interesting because most of the non-Mizrahi groups here do not have recent ancestry from the Iranian plateau, unlike the Palestinian Arabs for whom such a reference would have been preferable as it can be used to proxy Kurdish ancestry.

To highlight how those models here are entirely designed to diminish the Samaritan component as much as possible, I attempted to replicate one of them:

Pay attention to how the G25 fit obtained above matches the initial values very neatly. We encounter once more the same “North West Asian Iron Age” reference, my educated guess is that this is Hasanlu_IA. Once Hasanlu_IA is removed the Samaritan component increases fivefold. The inclusion of Hasanlu_IA offers only a marginal statistical gain in distance, the fit overall is a poor one (a likely explanation as to why the statistical distance for the fits isn’t indicated in any of the models). To make things short there is no valid reason for including Hasanlu_IA in the model as Yemenite Jews aren’t known to derive large amounts of ancestry from Iran, certainly not recently, and while there probably was some gene flow between Yemenite and Mesopotamian Jews this does not warrant Hasanlu’s inclusion either. The only reason that reference is used is to make the Samaritan component fall from ~25% (which is the Yemenite average) to ~5%.

Also worthy of note is the model for Ethiopian Jews, as they score more Arabian than any of the Palestinian Arab references despite not being Ethiosemitic speakers to begin with (they are essentially of Agew stock i. e. Central Cushitic). If you’re going to include Ethiopian Jews, then an effort to include Afro-Palestinians should also be made for comparison, as expected however there is no such population despite the multiplicity of Palestinian Arab groups, which is all the more puzzling as they score some Sub-Saharan African at a rate of about ~5% on average.

All of this of course brings us to the following claim: ”Jewish groups as a whole are quite genetically diverse, and do not constitute as a single genetic profile.” But how true is that really?

Overall, yes, Jewish groups are diverse, but to say they do not constitute a single genetic profile muddies the waters considerably and overstates the case quite a bit. Jewish populations are mainly divided into three clusters:

1. A Western Jewish one comprising most European (Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Italian, Romaniote), North African and Syro-Lebanese Jews. This cluster plots in the Eastern Mediterranean in close proximity to South Italians and Aegean Greeks, it likely reflects the Greek-speaking part of the diaspora.

2. A Mizrahi one comprising Iraqi, Kurdish, Iranian, Georgian, Juhuri and Bukharan Jews. This cluster plots in Mesopotamia and resembles Assyrians, Mandaeans, Armenians, Pontians and Kurds very closely and is bound to reflect the Aramaic-speaking part of the diaspora.

3. A Yemenite Jewish cluster that plots firmly in Arabia, with high similitude to neighbouring Yemeni populations and a substantial Israelite component.

By and large, each cluster can be viewed as a single population, meaning that Moroccan and Polish Jews are part of one and the same population (genetically-speaking) while the same can be said of Iraqi and Mountain Jews. This does mitigate quite a bit the claim that Jews do not constitute a single genetic profile, and this claim should fall apart once more ancient results demonstrate significant continuity for each cluster.

Those clusters can be visualised below in the G25-based East Med PCA I’ve made highlighting Jewish populations (Samaritans also count as a Jewish population). Another major omission in the video’s models would be the Karaites, the reason for this barely needs to be pointed out (Egyptian & Iraqi Karaites cluster in the Levant). Another thing which is important to note is that many Israelis (if not a majority) now plot somewhere in-between the three major Jewish clusters, bringing them close to the Karaites, Druze and Alawites.

None of this is explicitely spelled out, so as to give the impression that Jewish groups are only marginally related to each other and too mixed to form distinct clusters (as the French say: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose). In fact, beyond a PCA showing I2201 & I4517, no PCA highlighting the different populations modelled here is to be seen throughout the video which is interesting considering that G25 values are PCA coordinates.

This makes the closing statement about how DNA should only be used to unite people and not to divide them all the more cynical. A more accurate assessment of what we’re seeing is that DNA is indeed being used to divide Jews as much as possible while passing Palestinian Arabs as a homogenous whole, this is achieved through overfitted models with poor statistical distances that are conveniently hidden, the exclusion of certain populations (most notably the Bedouin) and the strict avoidance of a comparison in uniparental lineages. The only thing this video gets right is that the Samaritans are living fossils, otherwise not much else is correct. Fittingly, the video ends with advertisement for “Deep ancestry services” that are little more than a scam.

In conclusion, not everything is positive when it comes to the popularisation of population genetics, this video is a very clear example of how easy it is to misuse and misrepresent the data so as to promote a specific narrative. Personally, the more time passes by the more I get the impression that the kind of information on population genetics I’ve spoken of here is fast becoming forbidden knowledge, it isn’t just the data on Jewish groups that is being drowned in a tsunami of propaganda but a lot of the data on Palestinian Arab groups that cannot be shoehorned into the “Palestinians = Indigenous” mold as well.

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There is however one area where Arabic has diverged quite a bit from reconstructions of Proto-Semitic, and this might come as a surprise to many: The basic vocabulary.

Because of its reputed wealth in vocabulary (which is a source of great pride to many Arabs), anyone with a background in Semitic philology is accustomed to treating Arabic as a wellspring from which potential cognates are to be drawn. Much of that wealth in vocabulary however is really due to the numerous layers of substrates that coexist within the language and are often difficult to untangle.

The core vocabulary itself, that is to say the words most in use and which carry the most basic meanings, is more resistant to change and can potentially prove useful in providing lexical isoglosses that allow further delineation the language family’s internal structure.

Even when compared with an Old South Arabian language such as Sabaic, Arabic’s basic vocabulary constitutes a very significant departure from the Common Semitic core. The very distinctive nature of Arabic’s basic vocabulary has already been noticed by the past (Rubin 1975; Corriente 2006; Kogan 2015) but is otherwise seldom discussed. There is a pervasive paucity in etymological dictionaries of Arabic and even papers, studies and articles dealing with the subject. In the next few lines I shall offer a (necessarily restrictive) comparison of Proto-Semitic lexemes with their Arabic equivalent, restricting myself to the basic lexicon so as to highlight how pervasive the phenomenon truly is.

To get things started, let’s look more closely at the words for which an early Semitic etymology should be uncontroversial, all of the following words displaced their basic PS equivalent but such an occurrence is hardly restricted to Arabic:

• Fire: PS *ˀiš(-āt)- & Arb. nār-; From PS *nūr- “light”. A similar displacement of the PS lexeme for fire by the word for light took place in Aramaic. No extant Arb. cognates for the PS lexeme.

• Grass: PS *daṯˀ- & Arb. ˁušb-; Cognate with Hbr. ˁēśeḇ “herb”, probably from an earlier Proto-Central Semitic *ˁVśb-. The PS lexeme has no clear Arb. cognates.

• Beard: PS *ḏaḳan- & Arb. liḥya(t)-: From PS *lVḥy-(at)- “cheek”, the PS word for beard underwent a semantic shift to “chin” in Arb. ḏiqn.

• Foot: PS *paˁm- & Arb. qadam-; From the PS *ḳdm “to precede”, a pretty common shift that affected most Central Semitic dialects where *rigl- also ousted the PS word for “foot”, with the exception of Ugaritic pˁn “foot” and possibly the northern/Israelite dialects of Hebrew which retainted it as the basic word for “foot”, Hbr. páˁam underwent a semantic shift to “time” (traceable back to PCS). No Arb. cognates.

• Woman: PS *ˀVnṯ-at- & Arb. ˀimraˀa(t)-; The Arb. root being m-r-ˀ, a link to PS *marˀ- “man, son, lord” seems certain (this root yielded Sabaic mrˀt '“lady” and Akkadian mārtu- “daughter”), but caution is advised considering the vestigial cognates of *marˀ-. The PS term is preserved in the pl. form nisāˀ- “women” and ˀunṯa(t)- “female”. Attested in Safaitic, Hismaic and Dadanitic as mrˀt “woman”.

• To drink: PS *šty & Arb. šariba; In Arb. the PS verb “to drink” is completely absent. Proposed cognates include Akk. sarāpu “to sip” & Ge’ez śaraba “to drink”, possibly from an earlier PS *śrp “to sip”. Attested as s²rb in Safaitic (SIJ 997).

• To be pregnant: PS *hry & Arb. ḥamala; Same root as “to carry”, id. ḥ-m-l, could nevertheless stem from PCS *ḥabal- “to conceive” where /b/ > /m/, ultimately from PS *ḥibl “umbilical cord”.

• To be far: PS *rḥḳ & Arb. baˁida; From Proto-West Semitic *baˁada “after”, this root displaced the basic PS r-ḥ-ḳ to such an extent that it left no cognates in Arabic.

• To suck: PS *ynḳ & Arb. maṣṣa; Related to Hbr. maṣáṣ, Amh. mäṭmäṭä, Mehri məṣ, probably from a Proto-West Semitic form *mṣṣ. Arb. nāqa(t)- “she-camel” is often seen as deriving from PS y-n-ḳ but the arguments put forth are unconvincing, this root did not leave any descendants in Arb.

While the above possibly provides us with important isoglosses, what is more interesting is the multitude of Arabic words that simply lack a convincing etymology:

• Green: PS *waraḳ- & Arb. ˀaḫḍar; Unknown etymology. Colours can seldom be reconstructed in PS, this is one of the few exceptions. Bulakh (2004) proposes a parallel with Hbr. ḥāṣīr “hay”, the latter finds a much closer parallel in the Ugr. ḫṯr “winnowing fan”. The PS term almost certainly meant “greenish-yellowish”, it yielded Arb. waraqa(t)- “leaf” and might find a cognate in Egyptian wꜣḏ “green” (Loprieno 1995).

• Root: PS *šurš- & Arb. ˀaṣl-/ǯiḏr-; Obscure etymology. The former has no cognates throughout Semitic, the latter is sometimes derived from PCS *gadr- “enclosure, wall” which yielded Arb. ǯidār- “wall” via spirantisation of /d/ > /ḏ/ but this is tenuous at best and the semantic displacement remains unexplained. The PS lexeme survives in dialectal Levantine Arabic širš, almost certainly a loan from Canaanite or Aramaic (compare Hbr. šōreš; Syr. šeršā).

• Tree: PS *ˁiṣ́- & Arb. šaǯara(t)-; Uncertain etymology. Sometimes derived from an earlier CS *šgr “to sprout, shoot forth” which yielded Hebrew šigger “to launch”, the phonological correspondences are lacking. Theories ascribing this word to an Aramaic or Akkadian loan are even more unconvincing. The PS lexeme yielded Arb. ˁaṣā “stick, cane”. Attested in Safaitic s²grt “tree” (WH 1902).

• Stone: PS *ˀabn- & Arb. ḥaǯar-; Obscure etymology. Could stem from PCS *ḥgr “to gird”, a semantic shift “to surround” > “to build an enclosure with stones” might have given rise to the lexeme but a derivation from *ḥrg with metathesis could just as easily work. There is no straightforward explanation. The PS term left no descendants in Arb. despite yielding the main word for “stone” in most Semitic languages (Aramaic is an exception, though it too has a cognate form). Attested in Safaitic as ḥgr “stone” (AAEK 109).

• Heart: PS *libb- & Arb. qalb-; Displaced the PS lexeme’s Arb. descendant lubb- “core”, some have proposed an internal derivation with a prefixed *qa, the semantic relationship to the q-l-b root (to turn, revolve) is unclear, the latter might be related to Egyptian ḏnb “to turn” (Loprieno 1995).

• Star: PS *kabkab- & Arb. naǯm-; Unknown etymology. Utterly displaced the PS lexeme which yielded Arb. kawkab- “planet” instead. Attested in Safaitic as ngm “Virgo (constellation)" (WH 3053).

• Moon: PS *warḫ- & Arb. qamar-; No known etymology. The PS lexeme yielded Arb. tārīḫ- “history, date”, through a semantic shift of “moon” to “month”, though likely a borrowing from Epigraphic South Arabian (Safaitic has yrḫ for “month”, word-initial /w/ > /y/ shift also makes a NWS borrowing unavoidable). Arb. badr- “full moon” is attested in Safaitic bdr (C 1240).

• Fruit: PS *piry- & Arb. fākiha(t)-; No known etymon or cognates. The Arb. root f-k-h relates broadly to amusement, so semantically the replacement of the PS term seems pretty straightforward. The PS lexeme itself has no descendants in Arb.

• Lion: PS *labiˀ-/*ˀarway- & Arb. ˀasad- “lion”; Unknown etymology. Despite the oft-cited plethora of synonyms in Arb., the first PS lexeme survives only in the f. labuˀa(t)- “lioness”, which gave rise to dialectal Egyptian lábwa (a term charged with sexual connotation), while the second one has no descendants at all in Arb. Attested in Safaitic ˀs¹d “lion”.

• Locust: PS *ˀarbay- & Arb. ǯarāda(t)-/ǯundub-; Unknown etymology. The second Arb. word is attested in the PN Gindibu [gi-in-di-bu-ˀi] from the Kurkh monoliths, so unlikely to be a later loan.

• Honey: PS *dibš- & Arb. ˁasl-; Unknown etymology. The PS etymon survives in Arb. dibs “syrup” though this could ultimately be a loan from Eastern Modern South Arabian *dəbs “date syrup”.

• Skull: PS *ḳVdḳVd- & Arb. ǯumǯuma(t)-; Sometimes derived from PS *gulgul-at- “skull” but there is a fundamental phonological mismatch making this unconvincing. The only cognates to be found are in MSA.

• Face: PS *pan(ay)- & Arb. waǯh-; Unknown etymology. The Arb. lexeme almost completely replaced the PS etymon, which survives only in the word fināˀ- “courtyard”. The semantic shift could be due to the f-n-y root’s meaning “to face, turn”, interestingly enough w-ǯ-h covers exactly the same semantic range. There are no known cognates for the latter.

• Sweat: PS *ḏVˁ-at- & Arb. ˁaraq-; Unknown etymology. Likewise, no known cognates, potential descendants of the PS lexeme are controversial at best.

• Long: PS *ˀVrk- & Arb. ṭawīl; The Arabic root ṭ-w-l might be related to Egyptian dwn “to stretch out” (Loprieno 1995). No known cognates within Semitic.

• New: PS *ḥadVṯ- & Arb. ǯadīd; Unclear etymology. While the PS term did yield the adj. ḥadīṯ “recent”, the ǯ-d-d root ousted ḥ-d-ṯ as the main root for “new”.

• To know: PS *ydˁ & Arb. ˁalima/ˁarafa; Unclear etymology. The first verb’s cognates are entirely restricted to the “South Semitic” area in the form of ESA s¹tˁlm “to acknowledge” and Ge’ez ˁallama “to write, seal”. The second one has no obvious cognates, but is attested in Safaitic ˁrf “he knew”. The PS verb left no descendants in Arabic.

• To lie down: PS *škb & Arb. raqada/ḍaǯaˁa/istalqā; All three Arb. verbs lack any credible Semitic etymology. The PS verb is wholly absent from Arb.

• To sit: PS *wṯb & Arb. ǯalasa/qaˁada; No reliable etymology. The PS verb was completely displaced, its Arb. descendant waṯaba now has the meaning “to jump”. The latter verb is attested in Safaitic qˁd “he sat down”.

• To arrive: PS *mṯ̣ˀ̣ & Arb. waṣala/ǯāˀa; Uncertain etymology. Several verbs can be reconstructed with the meaning “to come, arrive” in PS, of which Arb. retained at least one (ˀatā < PS *ˀtw) as a basic verb. Those mentioned here however have no convincing Semitic cognates, despite the former being sometimes (unconvincingly) compared to Hbr. ˀéṣel “at, alongside”. Arb. waṣala is attested in Safaitic wṣl “he arrived”.

• To exit: PS *wṣ́ˀ & Arb. ḫaraǯa; Unknown etymology. Theories of an Aramaic and Akkadian reflex of PS *hlk via a Persian loan are unconvincing.

• To go: PS *hlk & Arb. ḏahaba; The semantic shift from Proto-Central Semitic ḏahab- “gold” is obscure, if a link to that lexeme exists to begin with. In Arb. PS *hlk yielded the verb halaka “to destroy” and with the preposition ˁan it can take on the meaning “to go away” but this is fairly marginal (rare enough for this form’s use in the Qur’an to be clarified in the tafsir). There is a potential attestation of the root ḏ-h-b in a lone Safaitic inscription.

• To give: PS *ntn & Arb. ˀaˁṭā; Etymology is unclear. The PS verb has no descendants in Arb. The PWS *whb “to give” however does have an Arb. reflex in the verb wahaba “to gift” (which is attested in Safaitic; Dunand 244).

• To bite: PS *nṯk & Arb. ˁaḍḍa; Unknown etymon. The PS verb has no Arb. cognate.

• To be thirsty: PS *ṯ̣mˀ & Arb. ˁaṭiša; While the latter did leave a (somewhat marginal) synonym in the form of ẓamiˀa “to suffer from thirst” ˁ-ṭ-š is the main root relating to thirst in Arabic, its etymology remains enigmatic (*ˁṭš meant “to sneeze” in PS), Eilers (1972) proposed to view it as an Iranism.

• To be wide: PWS *rḥb & Arb. wasiˁa; Displaced the PS verb’s descendant raḥiba which is now a marginal synonym, might be related to Egyptian wsḫ “to be wide” < Afroasiatic wsɣ (Loprieno 1995), no known Semitic cognates.

As stated above, this is a necessarily limited (and superficial) treatment of the subject, many more entries could be added, verbs in particular. Regardless, this begs the question of how and why Arabic diverged and lost so much of the fundamental Proto-Semitic vocabulary.

A few things ought to be noted. First of all, several of these words with perplexing or enigmatic etymologies are attested in Safaitic and Hismaic, both Old Arabic dialects, which increases the likelihood that those words had already ousted their PS equivalent and were part and parcel of Proto-Arabic’s basic vocabulary.

Secondly, some of those words seem to have Afroasiatic (especially Egyptian) parallels with fairly regular phonological correspondences despite having no cognates among other Semitic languages. The existence of an unknown branch of Afroasiatic in the Arabian Peninsula remains an open question, the Egyptian parallels however are interesting as Semitic isn’t closely related to Egyptian within an Afroasiatic context, the existence of such a branch should at the very least be considered as an alternative source.

Finally, some of those words find plausible cognates only in South Arabia or Ethiopia and therefore might still be retentions from Proto-Semitic, the issue here however is that they might also belong to a set of substrate languages - as can be seen on the map above Old Arabic hardly was the only language spoken in the Arabian Peninsula - and that the sound shifts to which those roots might be subjected are unknown to us, further complicating our enquiry.

The answer to Arabic’s drift away from Common Semitic core vocabulary almost certainly lies in early Arabic’s complex dialectal background. Regardless of how we wish to approach the topic, this perplexing issue is bound to keep philologists busy in the foreseeable future, and makes the composition of any etymological dictionary of the Arabic language a formidably daunting task.

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The above map (courtesy of Phylogeographer), chiefly based on the results of commercial DNA tests, shows the frequency of a lineage known as FGC1722/S21237, a branch of J1-FGC11. Its MRCA [Most Recent Common Ancestor] estimates place the last common ancestor during the 2nd millennium BCE (FTDNA’s estimates ascribe a Middle Bronze Age ancestor, somewhat more realistic in my view), the lineage’s main expansion starts during the Late Bronze Age. Most importantly, as can be seen on the map, it is the main Arab paternal line (but not by any means the only one, even if it is the most prominent), a marker tracking Arab dispersals from the period of Proto-Arab unity to mediaeval times. Its distribution aligns very closely with the extent of Arabic speech and the frequencies, peaking in Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Libya and Algeria, collapse suddenly at the fringes of the Arab world. As such, it is also the main lineage used by Arab genealogists in trying to establish, confirm or infirm the validity of tribal pedigrees, its subclades are therefore strongly correlated with certain tribes and clans and the phylogeny reflects this as well.

Among Palestinian Arabs, S21237 alone accounts for 25% of all samples, making it by far the most common paternal lineage. Looking further into S21237’s sub-branches, the overwhelming majority falls under FGC4415:

But before we take a closer look at FGC4415, I would first like to draw your attention to one of the three ancient S21237 samples at our disposal. Syr005 is an Umayyad-era individual found in Tell Qarassa in what is now Southern Syria (you can find the two remaining ancients labeled as “Tell Masaikh (Arab - Early Islamic)” & “Brekinjova (Balkan IA profile)” on the following map).

While this individual carried a clade which isn’t nestled under FGC4415, the sample is informative for a number of reasons, first because we are dealing with an individual affiliated to an intrusive population, something that is quite clear judging from the sample’s ostensibly Peninsular Arab profile.

In turn, considering that syr005 is certainly representative of the Arab conquerors who invaded the Levant and settled therein during the second half of the 1st millennium CE, this sample’s position on the S21237 tree can be used as a standard through which the other subclades’ relationship to the Arab conquests might be gauged. As indicated above, syr005 carried a clade of Y10887 (FGC1695 on FTDNA, which is also FGC4415’s parent branch), ZS12531:

Now the interesting thing about this clade is that while syr005 is dated 666-768 cal CE its MRCA is only slightly older, circa 404 CE. In simple terms, this enables us to determine that the temporal range for any given branch’s MRCA to be tied to the initial wave of Arab conquests falls within 400-800 CE. ZS12531 is scattered far and wide, from Sudan (Hassania tribe) to Iraq, it also has one subclade comprising a Gazan sample (Y173032 below):

With that in mind, let us return to FGC4415. The latter is commonly seen as a Maˤaddite line (that is to say, tied to the northern “arabised” Adnanite tribes), even though I will not address the convoluted ways in which tribal genealogy and genetics are intertwined in this post. Its distribution does seem to be more northerly, as it peaks in the Jazire (Upper Mesopotamia) and the Nafud desert as well as the Levant, with smaller hotspots in SW Arabia.

FGC4415 is one of the largest sub-branches under Y10887/FGC1695, and it does include clades with a relatively early spread date, that is to say prior to the Arabian conquests of the second half of the 1st millennium CE. This includes branches found among Jews, such as BY527 > FT56715, clades with MRCAs that are invariably bound to predate the migrations of the Arabian conquerors of the 7th to 9th centuries CE and therefore represent an earlier set of migrations.

What of the Palestinian Arab clades under FGC4415 then?

FGC60129 accounts for a very large portion of the Palestinian Arab clades under FGC4415, as can be seen below the MRCA predates the Arab conquests, that being said we’re already seeing a lone Palestinian Arab subclade with a MRCA that lived c. 1000 CE (there’s quite a bit of that as well).

Going further downstream, a pattern emerges, most of the Palestinian Arab clades have MRCAs that fall firmly within the range of the Arab conquests:

This also applies to more discrete Palestinian Arab clades that are not under FGC60129, such as FT350914 > ZS11083:

In a nutshell, the absolute majority of Palestinian Arab clades under FGC4415 are bound to be closely tied to the Arabian conquerors that swept into the Levant starting from the 7th century CE. This counts not only for this particular sub-branch but for much of FGC1722, including minor lines such as Y132447.

This is even true of different clusters of YSC0000080/Z1884 that are not under FGC11, YSC0000076 > ZS1585 deserves special mention since it is the main paternal line amongst Negev Bedouins:

From those J1 lines alone, 1/3 of all Palestinian Arab paternal lines can be uncontroversially tied to the Arab conquerors and are therefore utterly unlikely to have had a presence in the Levant beforehand.

Finally, it should be kept in mind that while the markers that have been discussed in this post are diagnostic Arab markers (that is to say, they are bound to have been present among the Proto-Arabs), they are not the only Peninsular lines found in Palestinian Arabs. Under J1 for example, some of the pre-Arab lines more commonly found in Southern Arabia also make an appearance in some Palestinian Arabs and while one could propose that those cases are sometimes indicative of the line’s Eneolithic-EBA Levantine origin there is much to bet that many of those were also brought by the Arabian conquerors, to say nothing of other haplogroups. Furthermore, we are only dealing with self-reported Palestinians and are not taking either Jordanians nor samples (mainly from the HGDP dataset) labeled as Israeli into account, which would inevitably increase the proportion of Peninsular Arab lines.

In short, this small excursus shows that the claims according to which Palestinian Arabs are merely Arabised in the cultural, religious and linguistic sense and otherwise have only minimal amounts of Arabian ancestry would not withstand even the most superficial form of scrutiny.

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In retrospect, it was naive not to expect the proponents of a cause that inaugurated the era of aircraft hijacking in the 1960s to hijack population genetics in order to satisfy their narrowest needs, but I’m getting ahead of myself here.

While the “Native Palestinians vs Jewish coloniser” dichotomy has existed since the conflict’s very inception and took on the mantle of peer-reviewed science on several occasions, the virulence and sheer frequency of those arguments are unprecedented in scale and recently characterised by their unanimous misuse of genetic data.

Palestinian Arabs are now increasingly depicted as wholly unadulterated Canaanites without a drop of Arabian blood, who just so happen to be completely Arabised in a very unlucky twist of fate all the while their Israeli opponents are cast as the proverbial “settler colonialists” with no biological ties whatsoever to their namesake. Using Global 25 distance tables and IllustrativeDNA models as visual aids, we are also told that the Palestinian Arabs are “genetically closer” to the Israelites/Hebrews/Judeans/Jesus/etc than present-day Jews could ever hope to be…

All hail the Palestinian master race?

For fairness’ sake, such arguments are not always used in “gotcha” moments and you can still find a more evenhanded approach that does not necessarily resort to this kind of Blut & Boden racial chauvinism, Razib Khan's recent post on this platform comes to mind, but even such treatments of the topic referring to common descent between a set of antagonists (which should not come as a surprise to any of us) remain irredeemably superficial and do beg the question:

How pertinent is all this talk about the Palestinian Arabs’ supposed indigeneity? Or, to quote one of my mentors in linguistics, how wrong is it?

Now resorting to genetic arguments can get tricky fairly quickly, population genetics having been a hobby of mine since the late 2000s I am well aware of this having witnessed numerous shifts in what was the consensus view on a number of topics. Things change in that field, and fast, think every five to seven years. In this case however, we’re dealing with a simple appeal to genetic purity.

Two things strike me as peculiar looking at this appeal to genetic purity:

1. The complete focus on autosomal DNA, to the exclusion of other forms of genetic data which are just as informative if not more so.

2. The heavy reliance on Illustrative DNA’s models.

Regarding the first point, and coming back to the inherent trickiness of such genetic arguments, while it is ultimately true that Palestinian Arabs are “genetically closer” to the Ancient Israelites than, say, your average Ashkenazi Jew, the latter is invariably “genetically closer” to the Iron I Philistines than pretty much all Palestinian Arabs put together (including the Christian minority, which has surplus Aegean ancestry)…

And so perhaps we ought to start thinking of the Jews as the real Philistines or, dare I say, the real Palestinians?

I jest of course, but this is quite literally the same sophistry at play here, just turned on its head (notice how easily this can be done). And if you’ve been paying attention, you will have noticed the tremendous amount of genetic distance on that Philistine reference between the Christian average (Palestinian_Beit_Sahour) and the Muslim ones (Palestinian and BedouinB which is Negev Bedouin). Which brings us to another crucial point: What is known as the “Palestinian people” is no genetic monolith.

The PCA above alone should make it clear that there is more going on here in terms of Peninsular Arab drift than a simple "Palestinian = Arabised Canaanite” model would allow for. Notice especially how firmly Negev Bedouins cluster within the Arabian Peninsula while the Palestinian Muslim (and Jordanian) reference is very clearly pulled in the direction of the Arabian and Egyptian populations. The only population here that can really be said to be a living relic would be the Samaritans who are by and large identical to the Iron Age samples we’ve seen from Israel, the Palestinian Christians come fairly close but they too are bound to harbour some degree of exogenous admixture including Arabian ancestry (and this is even true of Ashkenazi Jews for that matter, something I might talk about in a future post). Considering how Samaritans tend to be fiery Zionists, the anti-Israel crowd’s deafening silence on this issue is understandable.

In truth, those appeals to genetic purity rely very much on popular ignorance of the genetic data and the methods in use. And to be perfectly fair, I knew things would come to this one day, and so some years back I started keeping track of uniparental frequencies among Palestinian Arabs, Y-DNA data in particular.

Without complicating the matter too much, from observing the different Palestinian Arab results available online the portion of Peninsular Arab lines (Christians are included in the estimate, Non-Arab lines of foreign extraction are not set apart either) stands at about 55.38%, if Jordanians are added this rises to 60.74%. In simpler terms, there is a +50% chance for any given Palestinian Arab of carrying a line that is of Peninsular Arab origin in the clinical sense.

The largest Y-Chromosomal haplogroup among Palestinian Arabs should suffice to illustrate this, namely J-P58 which accounts for around ~40% of the paternal lines (and luckily, one of the haplogroups I know best, being J-P58 myself). 80% of those lines fall under two major branches of J-YSC0000080 (=Z1884), namely J-FGC1723 (accounts for 65% of the lines under J1) and J-ZS1585 (the main branch among Negev Bedouins) both of which are diagnostic Proto-Arab markers that are bound to track Arab dispersals since Old Arabic was a spoken language in the late 2nd millennium BCE.

Now you could come and say that this too is bound to have originated some time in the MBA-LBA Levant, and you’d be right. But that wouldn’t make any of it Canaanite either, what is telling is that the vast majority of Palestinian Arab lines are nestled under narrower pan-Arab subclades which have MRCA estimates going back to the mid-1st millenium CE circa 1400 yBP which corresponds very neatly with the waves of Arabian invasion and settlement, replete with the associated tribal pedigrees. So we know for a fact when and how roughly 1/3rd, at the very least, of Palestinian Arab paternal lines arrived in the Levant and this is just by looking at one haplogroup (albeit the most prominent one numerically-speaking). So much for the Palestinian Arabs being merely “Arabised”!

No one is going to make me believe that the savvy folks engaging in the kind of genetic sophistry mentioned above are somehow unaware of the fact that Palestinian Arabs are overwhelmingly of Peninsular Arab descent when one looks at their paternal (and even maternal) lines. This is detrimental to the narrative of racial purity they are peddling, and so they prefer not to talk about Y-DNA and mtDNA lineages at all so as not to mitigate their chances of promoting the myth of a completely autochthonous Palestinian people that was merely “Arabised”.

The fact of the matter is that the Palestinian Arabs are “Arabised Canaanites” in the same sense the English are “Anglicised Celts”, that is to say not at all. Like the Levant, Britain was subjected to waves of invading settlers from an area that had remained untamed by the Romans, these waves of Germanic invaders would become a constant fixture throughout Anglo-Saxon and Norse times all the way to the Norman period. The English too have a +50% chance on average of carrying a line of Germanic origin (such as branches of R-U106, I-M253, R-Z284, R-L664, R-DF99, etc), we’ve seen shifts in how the autosomal makeup was understood, some years back it was posited that only 30% of the English genome was Germanic with the rest being Brythonic, since the Anglo-Saxon study that came out in 2022 things have shifted towards an overwhelmingly AS contribution of over +60% with the rest being “French” leaving virtually no Brythonic ancestry among the English, the studies have been going from one extreme to the next in their conclusions and the truth is probably somewhere in-between. Yet another cautionary tale when it comes to such estimates, all the more so because the situation in Britain should be fairly straightforward. There is much to bet the same is true for Palestinian Arabs.

This parallel is not a personal preference, but one which is based on numerous elements. Much like the Britons in what would later become England, the Canaanites have left very little in terms of cultural, linguistic and religious material to the local Levantine Arabs (and no, dabkeh is not a Canaanite war dance). Much like Brittonic’s descendants (Welsh, Cornish and Breton) weathered out the Celts’ displacement and marginalisation on Britain’s periphery and even outside its homeland in Armorica where it was brought by British refugees in the aftermath of the Anglo-Saxon invasion, the only Canaanite language that survived throughout millennia would be Hebrew in its two standardised forms (Tiberian and Samaritan). Were the English to claim a closer relationship to the Celts than the Welsh or the Irish, they would be laughed at, all the more so if they did so while engaging in Nordicist discourse and attempted to portray the Iron Age Celts as a set of lost German tribes that came straight out of Scandinavia. And yet, the Palestinian Arabs do just that and are taken seriously, in case you weren’t aware they are taught at school that the Canaanites and the Jebusites were Arab tribes, they go even further in fact and claim that the Arameans, the Akkadians, the Phoenicians and so on also happened to be Arab tribes.

Another possible parallel would be with the North Macedonians in the southern Balkans who claim that the Macedonian Greeks were in fact of Slavic descent. Here too, we are dealing with a set of tribes, the Slavs, that migrated in Late Antiquity from beyond the area which was under Roman control and settled deep within former Roman territory. Palestinian Arabs are “Arabised Canaanites” in the same sense North Macedonians are “Slavicised Macedonians”.

I could go on and on in this way, another topic of interest might be the amount of Egyptian, Kurdish and Turkmen ancestry among Palestinian Arabs, which tends to follow a specific set of social and geographic boundaries. Likewise, Arabian ancestry among the Palestinian Muslims is usually highest among nomads (the bedouin), then urbanites and finally in the rural population, tribal pedigree also plays a prominent role here (Palestinian Arab society is a tribal one) something which is plainly obvious when looking at haplogroup J-P58’s Palestinian Arab lines for instance.

Long story short, there is much more than meets the eye here in terms of data than the simple distance tables and models used by anti-Israel propagandists online would have you believe. What these propagandists say isn’t as interesting as what they’re purposefully omitting, such as the inconvenient fact that 1 out of 2 Palestinian Arabs is a lineal descendant of the Arab-Muslim conquerors (something the Palestinian Arabs take great pride in, it is no happy coincidence if Hamas’ spokesman borrowed his nom de guerre from one such conqueror, their cultural references certainly aren’t Canaanite kings and seers).

Finally, as far as Illustrative DNA is of concern, this is a vast topic which would probably require a post of its own. This website is affiliated to the Turkish DNA Project, calling it biased when it comes to such matters would be quite the understatement. A recent example that comes to mind is how quickly people tied to both Illustrative DNA and the Turkish DNA Project rushed to extract a very shoddy model from the supplement of Olalde et al.’s last paper on the Balkans in order to promote the fallacy that present-day Greeks are about as Hellenic as the Turks are Turkic (or even less so in fact).

The people who went to such lengths in order to promote this qpAdm model as the final say on the matter of Hellenic admixture (in blue above) among present-day Greeks conveniently forgot to mention that the model itself is designed to gauge the amount of Eastern European admixture in the study’s framework, not Hellenic ancestry. Aegean Greeks, namely Cycladic, Cretan and Dodecanese Greeks, deriving no ancestry whatsoever from the Ancient Greeks is a laughable claim considering that they happen to be amongst the populations that resemble the Ancient Greeks the most (and we’re not just talking about autosomal DNA here). It’s also unclear what’s going on with the Ottoman-era Turkish sample, as Aegean Greeks have minimal Turkic ancestry at best.

This is sadly typical of the behaviour one might expect from Illustrative DNA and its affiliates. I could also go on to show how, in their models, Turks magically lack any Armenian input, even though we know that there’s quite a bit of that just by looking at the uniparental markers extant among present-day Turks. But that’ll be for another post, depending on how well this one is received. The fact of the matter is that we’re not dealing with an impartial website here, there apparently is an agenda to amplify the amount of Turkic ancestry (not a bad thing in and of itself, as many people have completely denied the existence of Turkic ancestry among present-day Turks, another untenable claim) and minimise undesirable components. In the same way, their models tend to be designed to downplay Germanic ancestry among the English and funnily enough among the French as well (they seem to be under the impression French identity relates to the Franks in much the same way Turkish identity relates to the Oghuz tribes for some reason). So the next time you see an 80% Canaanite Palestinian Arab on an Illustrative DNA model, remember that there is more than meets the eye here and that caution is of the essence.

The Palestinian Arabs’ claim to indigineity is hands down one of the lousiest out there, I won’t even bother pointing out how they and their supporters cynically and systematically deny or erase Jewish and Israelite history while robbing the Jews of that same identity and history, that deserves another post in and of its own. This attempt at portraying them as the Middle Eastern equivalent of the Navajo (while you’ve got serious contenders in the form of the Samaritans, the Assyrians or the Mandaeans, to say nothing of the Jews) is made even more preposterous by the fact that they are living in a part of the world which saw the invention of imperialism, colonisation, deportation, forced resettlement and all the jolly stuff usually associated with the predatory West, all concepts that were mastered by the successive caliphates and proved pivotal in turning the Fertile Crescent into a majority Arab-Muslim area. In other words, the Palestinian Arabs are the end result of centuries of Arab-Muslim imperialism, as opposed to some sort of local “Arabised” ethnic minority which is what they’d have naive Westerners believe, and in turn this is why their politics are entirely geared either towards the re-establishment of the Caliphate (the former muslim empire) with Jerusalem as its capital (despite this town never having been the capital of a caliphate or indeed the regional capital of the province when it was under Muslim rule) or towards the creation of a vast pan-Arab empire. There is no “Republic of Canaan” with Jebus as its capital on the menu, and that’s because they simply aren’t Canaanite to begin with.

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