Josephus gives an account of the nation of Cush, son of Ham and grandson of
Noah: "For of the four sons of Ham, time has not at all hurt the name of Cush; for the
Ethiopians, over whom he reigned, are even at this day, both by themselves and by all men in Asia, called
Cushites" (
Antiquities of the Jews 1.6). The identity of this woman has been widely debated in biblical scholarship. In the
Book of Exodus, Moses's wife is named as
Zipporah, daughter of
Jethro, the priest of
Midian (Exodus 2:15–21). Midian is traditionally located in the northwest
Arabian Peninsula, not in the region of Cush, which is generally understood in biblical geography to lie south of
Egypt, corresponding to
Nubia or ancient
Sudan. Some commentators interpret "Cushite" in Numbers 12:1 as figurative or descriptive, referring to
Zipporah’s skin tone or foreign status, while others argue it may refer to a second wife of Moses, distinct from
Zipporah. An important
Hellenistic Jewish source,
Ezekiel the Tragedian’s Exagoge (2nd century BCE), offers an alternative version of
Zipporah’s origin. In fragment 60–65, preserved in Eusebius’s
Praeparatio Evangelica (9.29.7–8), Zipporah describes her homeland as
Libya, a Greek term broadly used for regions west and south of Egypt. She refers to her father as ruler of a land inhabited by "Aethiopians, dark men": This dramatic retelling reimagines
Zipporah as hailing from an African kingdom populated by Ethiopians (Greek:
Aithiopes), a term often used in antiquity to refer to
Nubians or dark-skinned peoples of the
Upper Nile. Scholars view
Exagoge as an example of how
Hellenistic Jews integrated biblical narratives with Greek geographical and ethnographic understandings, possibly offering a literary attempt to reconcile “Cushite woman” in
Numbers with Moses’s wife. In the Jeremiah story, when the Babylonians and Judahites were in conflict and Jeremiah was giving prophecies of doom for the Judean king, Jeremiah's princely adversaries cast him into a Jerusalem cistern. "Ebed-melech the Cushite" became the hero of the story by approaching the king and getting permission to extricate the prophet from his prison. (Jer 38: 4–10) During the 5th century AD,
Aramean and
Assyrian Christian writers sometimes described the
Himyarites of
South Arabia as
Cushaeans and
Aethiopians. Explorer
James Bruce, who visited the
Ethiopian Highlands c. 1770, wrote of "a tradition among the Abyssinians, which they say they have had since time immemorial", that in the days after the Deluge, Cush, the son of Ham, traveled with his family up the Nile until they reached the
Atbara plain, then still uninhabited, from where they could see the Ethiopian table-land. There they ascended and built
Axum, and sometime later returned to the lowland, building
Meroë. He also states that European scholars of his own day had summarily rejected this account on grounds of their established theory, that Cush must have arrived in Africa via
Arabia and the
Bab-el-Mandeb, a
strait located between
Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula, and
Djibouti and
Eritrea on the
Horn of Africa. Further, the great
obelisk of Axum was said to have been erected by Cush in order to mark his allotted territory, and his son
Ityopp'is was said to have been buried there, according to the
Book of Aksum, which Bruce asserts was revered throughout Abyssinia equally with the
Kebra Nagast. Scholars like
Johann Michaelis and Rosenmuller have pointed out that the name
Cush was applied to tracts of country on both sides of the
Red Sea, in the
Arabian Peninsula (Yemen) and Northeast Africa. Professor Francis Brown suggested that the Cushites referred to both African and Asiatic peoples, with the latter being identified as the
Kassites. Brown believes that the Cushites in the Book of Genesis, such as
Nimrod, were Asiatics based on contextual information. The Asiatic theory has been supported by archaeologists such as
Juris Zarins. ==References==