1 Chronicles 1:5-23

The "Genealogy" of the Nations

The table which follows is taken from Genesis 10:2-29. In the A.V. several variations between Gen. and Chron. occur in the spelling of proper names. In the R.V. the spelling has been made uniform.

The table is geographical rather than ethnological, i.e. neighbouring nations are regarded as having the same descent. The world, as known to the writer, is divided into three zones, of which the Northern is assigned to the Sons of Japheth ( 5 7), the Southern to the Sons of Ham ( 8 16), and the Central to the Sons of Shem ( 17 23). Had the arrangement been according to descent the Semitic Zidonians and the (probably Mongoloid) Hittites would not have been equally described as the offspring of Ham (cp. Sayce, Higher Criticism and the Monuments, p. 122).

It must be noticed, moreover, that the passage contains a general table with two appendices. The General Table is derived from the so-called "Priestly" narrative (PC) of the Hexateuch, while the appendices have been inserted by a Redactor from an earlier narrative, the "Prophetical" (J) (cp. Driver, Introduction, p. 13). Thus we get the following scheme:

1 Chronicles 1:5-9.

PC

(General Table of the descendants of Japheth and Ham). 10 16.

J

(Appendix to the descendants of Ham). 17.

PC

(General Table of the descendants of Shem). 18 23.

J

(Appendix to the descendants of Shem).

It must be further noted that though the Priestly source is assigned in its main stock by critics to "the exilic or early post-exilic period," some elements in it belong to pre-exilic times. This table of the nations in particular agrees with the state of the world as referred to by Ezekiel, and is probably to be assigned to a date anterior to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Chaldeans. (Sayce in Hastings" Dictionary of the Bible, i. 347, suggests that the table is as early as the period of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Egyptian dynasties, when Palestine was under Egyptian suzerainty.)