Ethnic Identity language’’ would have been the natural means of communal self-expression.
But no such self-expression is perceptible to us. To the limited degree that
it is still accessible to us, the pagan world of the Near East in this period
was Greek-speaking. Instead, we can at least see the early beginnings of the
process by which the ‘‘Ishmaelites’’ of the desert were to take on the iden-
tity which both Jews and Christians came to attribute to them, and which
would lead two centuries later to the emergence of yet another ‘‘people of the
Book,’’ using a Semitic language and claiming an identity rooted in the Bible.