Genesis 10:1

PART TWENTY-THREE:
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS

(Genesis 10:1-32)

1. The Families of Noah (Genesis 10:1).

Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah, namely, of Shem, Ham, and Japheth: and unto them were sons born after the flood.

It seems that Noah gave to Shem and Japheth, by prophetic insight of course, the names that would be descriptive of their respective destinies: Shem (name, renown, because Yahweh would be his God in a special sense), Japheth wide-spreading, enlargement, with widespread occupancy of the earth and accompanying civil power, and by sharing ultimately the spiritual blessings of the Line of Shem. As for Ham, his name is usually rendered dark-colored; however, the etymology is said to be uncertain. As a matter of fact, it is difficult to identify the various ethnic groups that were, or are, associated with this progenitor and his name. Anthropological classifications in our day do not recognize a specific Hamitic Line. It is noteworthy, however, that a surprising number of the names listed in Chapter x. have been reliably identified, as we shall see below.
2. The Table of Nations

This is the name usually given to the content of this chapter. The word nation is best defined as a specific ethnic group or people. Hence, we are correct in speaking of the United States as the melting-pot of nations.

Note well (JB, 25): In the form of a genealogical tree this chapter draws up a Table of Peoples; the principle behind the classification is not so much racial affinity as historical and geographical relationship. The sons of Japheth inhabit Asia Minor and the Mediterranean islands, the sons of Ham people the lands of the south, Egypt, Ethiopia, Arabia, to which is added Canaan in memory of the time when she was Egypt's satellite. In the regions between these two groups live the sons of Shem: Elamites, Assyrians, Aramaeans, and the ancestors of the Hebrews.. This table sums up such knowledge of the inhabited world as Israel would possess in Solomon's time and asserts the unity of the human race which, from a common stock, has split up into various groups, Pfeiffer (BBA, 37): The Table is arranged in climactic form. The first reference is to the Japhetic peoples who occupied Europe and parts of Asia. These were the people most remote from Biblical Israel. The Hamitic peoples of Asia and Africa were given second place. Many of these had close contacts with the Israelites. Semitic history, of which the family of Abraham is a conspicuous part, is presented last.
3. The Trend of the Narrative

It is evident that the writer of Genesis (Moses), in setting forth the account of man's original temptation and fall, and his degeneracy into universal wickedness as a result of the intermingling of the pious Sethites with the irreligious Cainites, was not only leading up to the narrative of the Flood, but also was pointing the finger of inspiration to another pivotal event in the unfolding of the Scheme of Redemption, namely, the giving of the Law. This purpose becomes more apparent in the ninth and tenth Chapter s of the book. The ninth chapter gives us the story of the beginning of the new world-order, and specific mention of the laws against the eating of blood, and against murder. The tenth deals with the dispersion and settlement of the descendants of Shem, Ham and Japheth, which followed of course the confusion of tongues at Babel the account of which appears in the eleventh chapter. Then every event, from the call of Abram to the Exodus, points forward clearly to Sinai. The Apostle Paul states the case tersely in these lines: What then is the law? It was added because of transgressions, till the seed should come to whom the promise hath been made (Galatians 3:19). In the same chapter (Galatians 3:16) the Apostle writes: Now to Abraham were the promises spoken, and to his seed. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ. Thus the true Seed. Messiah, became the fulfillment of the Genesis oracle (Genesis 3:15) and of the Abrahamic Promise (Genesis 12:3; Genesis 22:18; Genesis 26:4; Genesis 28:14; Acts 3:25; Luke 1:44; Romans 4:13-16; Romans 9:1-5). Thus the internal unity of the Biblical revelation as a whole is again demonstrated beyond all possibility of reasonable doubt.

4. Problems of the Table of Nations

This Table presents some difficulties for which no solution has been found, up to the present time at least. Note the following facts, in this connection: (1) The account is that of the peopling of the earth after the Flood (Genesis 10:32), and the area in which this began to take place must have been relatively small; therefore we must depend on subsequent history to trace the continued diffusion. (2) Some of the names which might be known to us in their native forms may seem unfamiliar because of having been vocalized incorrectly in the Hebrew tradition, by which the purely consonantal text has been supplied with vowel signs. Kraeling (BA, 47): Thus Gomer should have been Gemer, Meshech should have been Moshech, and Togarma should have been Tegarma according to the evidence of the Assyrian inscriptions. (3) Apparently, the same, or very similar, names occur in separate Lines of descent. (Of course this may be accounted for on the ground that a particular people may have occupiedby conquest or by infiltrationan area already held by another and taken over the established geographical name of the prior ethnic group (as, for example, the English became known as Britons, and the Germanic peoples as Teutons, etc.). (4) The greatest difficulty, however, is that of the intermingling of individual with national (tribal) names. Smith and Fields et al (ITH, 46): Now this is really of little consequence, since, with a few exceptions, as that of Nim-rod (Genesis 10:8-9), the purpose is clearly to exhibit the affinities of nations. The record is ethnographical rather than genealogical. This is clear from the plural forms of some of the names (for example, all the descendants of Mizraim), and from the ethnic form of others, as those of the children of Canaan, nearly all of which are simply geographical. The genealogical form is preserved in the first generation after the sons of Noah, and is then virtually abandoned for a mere list of the nations descended from each of these progenitors. But in the line of the patriarchs from Shem to Abraham the genealogical form is strictly preserved, since the object is to trace a personal descent, Here it becomes Messianically oriented.

On the positive side of this problem, the following facts should be kept in mind: (1) As to the area from which the dispersion began to take place certainly the highlands of Armenia (the mountains of Ararat) were especially adapted to be the center from which peoples (after Babel) began to move in all directions. Thence diffusion continued at first by way of the great river systemsthe Tigris-Euphrates, the Nile, the Indus, the Hwang-ho and Weithe invention of the sail-boat having made these the arteries of transportation. Just before the beginning of the historic period the peoples began to move in several directions at once: some into India, China, and across the Bering Strait into the Americas; others toward the Mediterranean and into the Lower Nile; still other groups such as the Megalithic traversed the Mediterranean into the Atlantic and up the coast as far as the Tin Islands (Great Britain), and as the Beaker peoples who brought bronze into Europe made their way up the Danube to the Baltic areas. That Southwest Asia was the cradle of the human race seems evident from the testimony of anthropology and early history. The unity of the race is a scientific fact; as one anthropologist, Goldenweiser, puts it (Anthropology, 32): All the fundamental traits of the psychic make-up of man anywhere are present everywhere. Philology, the study of the origin of language, insofar as science has been able to penetrate this mystery, corroborates this view. (2) The geographical explanations which appear in the Table itself greatly facilitate the identification of the peoples who are named. (3) Through the help afforded by classical sources and by the ancient inscriptions which tell us so much about the world in which ancient Israel lived, a surprising number of the names in this Table of Nations have been reliably identified (Kraeling, BA, 47). (4) Note the following summary by Mitchell (NBD, 867): The names in the Table were probably originally the names of individuals, which came to be applied to the people descended from them, and in some cases to the territory inhabited by these people. It is important to note that such names could have different meanings at different points in history, so that the morphological identification of a name in Gn. x with one in the extra-biblical sources can be completely valid only if the two occurrences are exactly contemporary. The changes in significance of names of this kind are due largely to the movements of peoples, in drift, infiltration, conquest, or migration. There are three principal characteristics of a people which are sufficiently distinctive to form some nuance of their name. These are race or physical type: language, which is one constituent of culture; and the geographical area in which they live or the political unit in which they are organized. Racual features cannot change, but they can become so mixed or dominated through intermarriage as to be indistinguishable. Language can change completely, that of a subordinate group being replaced by that of its rulers, in many cases permanently. Geographical habitat can be completely changed by migration, Since at times one, and at other times another, of these characteristics is uppermost in the significance of a name, the lists in Gn. x are unlikely to have been drawn up on one system alone. Thus, for instance, the descendants of Shem cannot be expected all to have spoken one language, or to have lived all in one area, or even to have belonged to one racial type, since intermarriage may have obscured this. That this could have taken place may be indicated by the presence of apparently duplicate names in more than one list, Asshur (see Assyria), Sheba, Havilah, and Lud (im) under both Shem and Ham, and probably Meshek (Mash in Shem's list) under Shem and Japheth. Though these may indicate names that are entirely distinct, it is possible that they represent points where a strong people had absorbed a weaker. Again: It is necessary to observe that names have been adopted from this chapter for certain specific uses in modern times. Thus in language study the terms -Semitic-' and -Hamitic-' are applied, the former to the group of languages including Hebrew, Aramaic, Akkadian, Arabic, etc., and the latter to the group of which (ancient) Egyptian is the chief, This is a usage of convenience, however, and does not mean that all the descendants of Shem spoke Semitic languages or all those of Ham Hamitic. Thus the entry of Elam under Shem, and Canaan under Ham, is not necessarily erroneous, even though Elamite was non-Semitic and Canaanite was a Semitic tongue. In short, the names in Genesis 10 probably indicate now geographical, now linguistic, and now political entities, but not consistently any one alone. W. F. Albright comments that the Table of Nations shows such a remarkably -modern-' understanding of the linguistic situation in the ancient world. that it stands absolutely alone in ancient literature, without even a remote parallel even among the Greeks, where we find the closest approach to a distribution of the peoples in genealogical framework. But among the Greeks the framework is mythological and the people are all Greeks or Aegean tribes (quoted by Cornfeld, AtD, 37). Cornfeld adds: This Table is not the basis of the division of the races of mankind into the Aryan, Semitic and dark-skinned races. It knows nothing of the Far East and the Pacific and Atlantic races or of dark Africa south of Egypt. But it contains data about the geographical distribution of the ancient Near East, from the confines of Iran and Edom down to Arabia, of commercial and linguistic ties, and far-scattered tribes, -nations,-' countries and towns.

REVIEW QUESTIONS

See Genesis 10:21-32.