StrongerBible

yephet

יֶפֶת

HebrewH3315Proper Noun“Japheth”

Appears 11 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Gen 5:32Gen 6:10Gen 7:13Gen 9:18Gen 9:23Gen 9:27Gen 10:1Gen 10:2Gen 10:211Ch 1:41Ch 1:5
Root family
Word studyResearch-gradeYEH-fetproper noun

What yephet means

Japheth: one of Noah's three sons, and the forefather from whom the peoples of the north and west are traced.

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

Japheth is a person's name, and the Bible uses it in only one way: for the third son named in Noah's family lists. He appears eleven times, always in company with his brothers Shem (שֵׁם) and Ham (חָם). Whenever all three are counted together the order never varies, Shem first and Japheth last, and that order reflects the story's priorities rather than who was born when.

The name's fame rests on a single line. In Genesis 9:27 Noah blesses him with a play on sound: God will "make wide" for Japheth. The Hebrew verb there, "to open wide" (פָּתָה), chimes with the name. Whether that chime is where the name actually came from is a separate question, and most specialists think it is not. The blessing is poetry making the most of a name that may well have entered Hebrew from outside it.

Genesis 10 then turns the man into a map. "The sons of Japheth" heads a list of seven peoples, among them Javan (יָוָן), the Greeks. Taken together the names sweep from the highlands of Media in the northeast, across Asia Minor, through the Aegean and Cyprus, and west along the Mediterranean. Nothing on the list lies south of the mountain rim of southern Turkey. The three brothers divide the known world between them:

  • Japheth's descendants fill the coastlands and highlands of the north and west.
  • Ham's descendants fill Africa and its outposts along the eastern Mediterranean.
  • Shem's descendants fill the central Fertile Crescent, the world Israel itself came from.

One further puzzle hangs on the name. Genesis 10:21 is worded so that "the elder" can describe either Shem or Japheth, so the text never quite settles which brother was firstborn, and the ancient translations already disagreed about it.

Nuances

1aNoah's son as an individual: the man who comes through the flood in the ark, stands with Shem to cover their father, and receives Noah's blessing.
Gen 5:32Gen 6:10Gen 7:13Gen 9:18Gen 9:23Gen 9:27Gen 10:1Gen 10:211Ch 1:4
Gen 9:27

Who is the subject of "and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem" in Genesis 9:27: Japheth, or God?

  • majorityJapheth is the subject. He is the nearest antecedent, and the three-part oracle of verses 25 to 27 takes each brother in turn, so the line promises Japheth a share in Shem's territory or life.; G. J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15, WBC 1 (Waco: Word, 1987), 202-3; C. Westermann, Genesis 1-11: A Continental Commentary, tr. J. J. Scullion (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1984), 491-94; E. A. Speiser, Genesis, AB 1 (Garden City: Doubleday, 1964), 61-63; V. P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, Chapters 1-17, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 325-27
  • minorityGod is the subject. He will cause his presence to dwell in Shem's tents, so that Japheth may be enlarged while the divine presence remains with Shem.; Targum Onqelos to Genesis 9:27, in A. Sperber, The Bible in Aramaic (Leiden: Brill, 1959), 1:12; Rashi on Genesis 9:27; b. Yoma 10a
Gen 10:21

Whether Genesis 10:21 makes Japheth or Shem the eldest of Noah's sons, since the adjective "the elder" can attach to either name.

  • contestedJapheth is the eldest. The Masoretic accentuation binds "the elder" to Japheth, the Septuagint agrees by putting the adjective in agreement with Iapheth, and the figures of Genesis 5:32 and 11:10 leave no room for Shem to have been born in Noah's five hundredth year.; b. Yoma 10a; G. J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15, WBC 1 (Waco: Word, 1987), 201, 226; V. P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, Chapters 1-17, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 324, 347; K. A. Mathews, Genesis 1-11:26, NAC 1A (Nashville: B&H, 1996), 461-63; B. K. Waltke with C. J. Fredricks, Genesis: A Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001), 168
  • contestedShem is the eldest. A definite masculine singular adjective following a bound noun plus proper name regularly modifies the bound noun, yielding "elder brother of Japheth," and the Vulgate reads it that way.; N. M. Sarna, Genesis, JPS Torah Commentary (Philadelphia: JPS, 1989), 72, 78; E. A. Speiser, Genesis, AB 1 (Garden City: Doubleday, 1964), 66-71; C. Westermann, Genesis 1-11: A Continental Commentary, tr. J. J. Scullion (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1984), 524-26; J. Skinner, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Genesis, ICC, 2d ed. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1930), 192; R. Alter, The Five Books of Moses (New York: Norton, 2004), 55
1bThe forefather at the head of a family of nations: the name that opens the roster of northern and western peoples.
TranslatabilityDirect
Gen 10:21Ch 1:5

What scholars say about yephet

The reference literature is unanimous that Genesis 9:27 is a play on words and cautious about treating it as an etymology. BDB catalogues the eleven occurrences and cross-lists a root pth I "be wide, spacious" whose only unambiguous Hebrew attestation is the verb form in that same verse; HALOT calls the derivation uncertain and points to Aramaic peta "become wide" as the nearest cognate; DCH concedes the circularity, noting that the verb may be formed from the name rather than the reverse; Gesenius (18th ed.) glosses the derived sense as Weite, Ausbreitung and reconstructs a Proto-Semitic root, cross-listing Akkadian petu, Ugaritic pth, and Arabic fataha. Mueller in TDOT, together with TLOT and NIDOTTE, describes pth I as effectively a one-off form whose whole function is the pun on the name. The rabbinic derivation from yph "be beautiful" (Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, Genesis Rabbah 36:8, b. Megillah 9b), which underwrites the ruling that Scripture may be written in Greek because Greek is "the beauty of Japheth," survives as midrashic wordplay with no modern philological defenders. The comparison with the Hesiodic Titan Iapetos, argued since Bochart's Phaleg (1646) and revived by Gordon, Astour, Neiman, Brown, Louden, and Day, is resisted by Beekes, who classes Iapetos as Pre-Greek substrate and calls the biblical connection most improbable, and by Chantraine, who derived the Greek name from iapto "hurl"; West, who once floated the comparison, later wrote that the resemblance goes no further than the surface. On the Table of Nations, Oded argues that the threefold division is socio-cultural rather than strictly geographic, with the Japhethites as the seafaring coastland peoples, while Day surveys the fourteen Japhethite names, most of which (Cimmerians, Medes, Ionians, Tabal, Muski) are securely identified from Assyrian annals and Greek sources. Hess reports that no West Semitic name environment for the form can be established.

Where scholars disagree about yephet

Where the name Japheth comes from, and whether it carries a meaning of its own.

  • majorityThe name is of unknown and most likely non-Hebrew origin. Genesis 9:27 plays on the sound of a Hebrew verb meaning "be wide, open," but that verb is nowhere else used of enlarging territory, so the connection is literary rather than etymological.; G. J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15, WBC 1 (Waco: Word, 1987), 202-3; C. Westermann, Genesis 1-11: A Continental Commentary, tr. J. J. Scullion (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1984), 484-507; N. M. Sarna, Genesis, JPS Torah Commentary (Philadelphia: JPS, 1989), 67; J. Skinner, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Genesis, ICC, 2d ed. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1930), 183-86; H.-P. Mueller, "pth," Theologisches Woerterbuch zum Alten Testament VI (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer), cols. 820-31; L. Koehler and W. Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (Leiden: Brill, 1994-2000), 2:500
  • minorityThe name derives from the Hebrew root meaning "be wide, spacious," as Noah's blessing suggests, so that it means something like "expansion" or "enlargement."; F. Brown, S. R. Driver, C. A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1907), 834; R. Meyer and H. Donner, eds., Wilhelm Gesenius Hebraeisches und Aramaeisches Handwoerterbuch ueber das Alte Testament, 18th ed. (Berlin: Springer, 1987-2010); V. P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, Chapters 1-17, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 325-26
  • minorityThe name is connected with the Greek Titan Iapetos, whether as a borrowing in one direction or the other or as a shared name drawn from a Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean pool; the strongly Aegean and Anatolian cast of the peoples listed under Japheth is said to support this.; B. Louden, "Iapetus and Japheth: Hesiod's Theogony, Iliad 15.187-93, and Genesis 9-10," Illinois Classical Studies 38 (2013): 1-22; J. Day, From Creation to Babel: Studies in Genesis 1-11 (London: T&T Clark, 2013); M. Astour, Hellenosemitica (Leiden: Brill, 1965); D. Neiman, "The Two Genealogies of Japheth," in Orient and Occident: Essays Presented to Cyrus H. Gordon, AOAT 22 (1973), 119-26
In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • F. Brown, S. R. Driver, C. A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1907), 834lexicon
  • L. Koehler and W. Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, tr. M. E. J. Richardson (Leiden: Brill, 1994-2000), 2:500; 3:984-86lexicon
  • D. J. A. Clines, ed., Dictionary of Classical Hebrew (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993-2016), s.v. pth Ilexicon
  • R. Meyer and H. Donner, eds., Wilhelm Gesenius Hebraeisches und Aramaeisches Handwoerterbuch ueber das Alte Testament, 18th ed. (Berlin: Springer, 1987-2010)lexicon
  • H.-P. Mueller, "pth," Theologisches Woerterbuch zum Alten Testament VI (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer), cols. 820-31theological-dictionary
  • M. V. Van Pelt and W. C. Kaiser, "pth," NIDOTTE 3:714-16theological-dictionary
  • G. J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15, WBC 1 (Waco: Word, 1987), 201-3, 226commentary
  • C. Westermann, Genesis 1-11: A Continental Commentary, tr. J. J. Scullion (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1984), 484-507, 524-26commentary
  • N. M. Sarna, Genesis, JPS Torah Commentary (Philadelphia: JPS, 1989), 67-68, 72, 78commentary
  • V. P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, Chapters 1-17, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 324-27, 347commentary
  • K. A. Mathews, Genesis 1-11:26, NAC 1A (Nashville: B&H, 1996), 421-27, 461-63commentary
  • J. Skinner, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Genesis, ICC, 2d ed. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1930), 183-86, 192commentary
  • E. A. Speiser, Genesis, AB 1 (Garden City: Doubleday, 1964), 61-71commentary
  • U. Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis, Part II: From Noah to Abraham, tr. I. Abrahams (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1964), 154-72, 218commentary
  • B. Becking, "Japheth," in Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, 2d ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 461-62dictionary
  • R. S. P. Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 1:573-74etymological dictionary
  • P. Chantraine, Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue grecque (Paris: Klincksieck, 1968), s.v. Iapetosetymological dictionary
  • M. L. West, The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 289monograph
  • B. Louden, "Iapetus and Japheth: Hesiod's Theogony, Iliad 15.187-93, and Genesis 9-10," Illinois Classical Studies 38 (2013): 1-22journal-article
  • J. Day, From Creation to Babel: Studies in Genesis 1-11 (London: T&T Clark, 2013)monograph
  • M. Astour, Hellenosemitica (Leiden: Brill, 1965)monograph
  • D. Neiman, "The Two Genealogies of Japheth," in Orient and Occident: Essays Presented to Cyrus H. Gordon, AOAT 22 (1973), 119-26article
  • B. Oded, "The Table of Nations (Genesis 10): A Socio-cultural Approach," ZAW 98 (1986): 14-31journal-article
  • R. S. Hess, Studies in the Personal Names of Genesis 1-11, AOAT 234 (Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1993)monograph
  • F. E. Greenspahn, When Brothers Dwell Together: The Preeminence of Younger Siblings in the Hebrew Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 65monograph
  • D. M. Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 141-77monograph

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of יֶפֶת

m

יֶפֶת, יָפֶת

Gen 7:13, Gen 9:23, Gen 9:27, Gen 10:2, Gen 10:21, 1Ch 1:5, Gen 5:32, Gen 6:10