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Japheth ( Yép̄eṯ, in pausa Yā́p̄eṯ; ; ; ) is one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis, in which he plays a role in the story of Noah's drunkenness and the curse of Ham, and subsequently in the Table of Nations as the ancestor of the peoples of the Aegean Sea, Anatolia, Caucasus, Greece, and elsewhere in Eurasia. In Middle Ages and early modern European tradition he was considered to be the progenitor of the European peoples.Javakhishvili, Ivane (1950), Historical-Ethnological problems of Georgia, the Caucasus and the Near East. Tbilisi, pp. 130–135 (in Georgian).
Following the Flood, Japheth is featured in the story of Noah's drunkenness. Ham sees Noah drunk and naked in his tent and tells his brothers, who then cover their father with a cloak while avoiding the sight; when Noah awakes he curses Canaan, the son of Ham, and blesses Shem and Japheth: "Blessed be the Lord God of Shem and may Canaan be his slave; and may God enlarge Japheth and may he dwell in the tents of Shem, and may Canaan be his slave!". Chapter 10 of Genesis, the Table of Nations, describes how earth was populated by the sons of Noah following the Flood, beginning with the descendants of Japheth:
From the 19th century until the late 20th century, it was usual to see Japheth as a reference to the Philistines, who shared dominion over Canaan during the pre-monarchic and early monarchic period of Israel and Judah. This view accorded with the understanding of the origin of the Book of Genesis, which was seen as having been composed in stages beginning with the time of King Solomon, when the Philistines still existed (they vanished from history after the Assyrian conquest of Canaan). However, Genesis 10:14 identifies their ancestor as Ham rather than Japheth.
The Sefer haYashar ("Book of Jasher"), written by in the 17th century, attributed some new names for Japheth's grandchildren which are not found in the Hebrew Bible, and provided a much more Japhetites. In the Jewish tradition, Abraham's wife Keturah is sometimes considered a descendant of Japheth.
William Shakespeare's play Henry IV, Part II contains a wry comment about people who claim to be related to royal families. Prince Hal notes of such people,
The Georgian historian and linguist Ivane Javakhishvili associated Japheth's sons with certain ancient tribes, called (Tabals, in Greek: Tibarenoi) and (Meshekhs/Mosokhs, in Greek: Moschoi), who claimed to represent non-Indo-European and non-Semitic, possibly "Proto-Iberian" tribes that inhabited Anatolia during the 3rd-1st millennia BC.
In the Polish tradition of Sarmatism, the Sarmatians, an Iranian peoples, were said to be descended from Japheth, son of Noah, enabling the Szlachta to believe that their ancestry could be traced directly to Noah. In Scotland, histories tracing the Scottish people to Japheth were published as late as George Chalmers's well-received Caledonia, published in 3 volumes from 1807 to 1824.
In the Islamic tradition, he is usually regarded as the ancestor of the Gog and Magog tribes. Islamic tradition also tends to identify the descendants of Japheth as including the Turkic peoples, Khazars, Chinese people, Mongols, and Slavs. According to Abū'l-Ghāzī who wrote the 17th-century ethnographic treatise Shajara-i Tarākima ("Genealogy of the Turkmen"), the descendants of Ham went to Africa, Shem to Iranian plateau, and Japheth went to the banks of the Volga and Ural River rivers, and had eight sons named Turk, Khazar, Saqlab, Rus, Ming, Chin, Kemeri, and Tarikh. As Japheth was dying he established Turk, his firstborn son, as his successor.
According to the 18th-century Hui people writer Liu Zhi, after Noah's flood, Japheth inherited China as the eastern portion of the Earth, while Shem inherited Arabia as the middle portion, and Ham inherited Europe as the western portion. Some Muslim traditions narrated that 36 languages of the world could be traced back to Japheth.
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