Genesis Chapter 10
Genesis chapter 10. We begin a new section now of the book of Genesis. Remember, that signaled for us that Moses divides it up under these various generations remarks. Chapter 10, verse 1: “These are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Sons were born to them after the flood.”
Let’s begin with prayer. Our Father, this is your word. This is intended for us. It is intended for our understanding and instruction, and we thank you for it. We pray that you’ll give us an understanding of it, that your spirit would minister to us, and we pray that by it we’ll have a greater appreciation for your great purpose in world history and the centrality of the Lord Jesus Christ. May we be better worshipers because of this, we pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
All right, so chapter 10 verse 1 signals the new section. These are the generations of Noah, the sons of Noah, and he names the three of them. And if you want to look back at chapter 9, verses 18 and 19, we’re told the sons of Noah—remember we saw that that passage at the end of chapter 9 is something of a transition to this next section. Verses 18 and 19: “The sons of Noah who went forth from the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Ham was the father of Canaan. These three were the sons of Noah. And from these, the people of the whole earth were dispersed.” And then verses 24 to 29, we have Noah’s prophecies concerning his three sons, who they would be and some a curse involved with regard to the descendants of Canaan.
And so now we come to chapter 10 and here we have the families of Noah’s three sons, the people groups of the world that dispersed from the three sons of Noah: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. So chapter 10 verse 1, are the descendants of Japheth. Look at verse 2: “The sons of Japheth, Gomer, Magog, Madi, Yavan, Tubal, Meshach, and Tiras.” Then verse 3, sons of Gomer and sons of Yavan. Verse 6, descendants of Ham, sons of Ham, and he names them: Cush, Mitzrayim (or Egypt, depending on which translation you have), Put, and Canaan. And then it starts listing them. Verses 7 to 12, we have the sons of Cush. Verses 13 and 14, sons of Mitsrayim, or Egypt. Verses 15 to 20, sons of Canaan.
And then we come back, verse 21, the sons of Shem. So verses 1 to 5, we have Japheth. Verses 6 to 20, we have the descendants of Ham. And now, verses 21 to 31, we have the descendants of Shem. “To Shem also, the father of all the children of Eber, the sons of the elder brother of Japheth, children were born. The sons of Shem, Elam, Asher, Arphaxad, Lud, and Aram.” And then it selects some of them. Verse 23, sons of Aram. Verse 24, sons of Arphatshad. Verse 25, sons of Eber. Verses 26 to 30 then goes another generation down, the sons of Yachten.
And then chapter 11, we have in verses 1 to 9, the Tower of Babel. And we’re going to look at that in the morning service today. And then chapter 11, verses 10 and following, he resumes again with the descendants of Shem. Here he gives more detail. We have his descendants: Shem, Arphaxad, Shelah, Eber, Peleg, Ruru, Serug, Nahor, Terah, Abram, and then his three sons, Abram, Nahor, and Haran.
So there’s a structure to the passage. We have it introduced at the beginning: these are the three sons of Noah and their families. And then verses 1 to 5, Japheth and his descendants. Verses 6 to 20, we have Ham and his descendants. And then verses 21 to 31, we have Shem and his descendants, which is resumed again in chapter 11, verses 10 and following.
A Table Of Nations
Now what’s important to notice here is that this is not chapter 5. This is not a mere genealogy. What we have here is a table of nations. The point here is not just to say he had a son, he had a son, he had a son, he had a son. The point here is to trace the development of family groups and clans and nations that came from the three sons of Noah. It is from these, we were told in chapter 9, it is from these the nations of the world were dispersed. So we’re tracing now in chapter 10; it’s known as a table of nations. It’s not just a genealogy. And we’re signaled to that, that it’s a development of the various people groups after Noah. We’re signaled to that in chapter 9, verses 18 and 19: “These were the sons of Noah. From these, the people of the whole earth were dispersed.”
That’s made explicit for us in chapter 10. If you’d like to notice a couple of the signals for it, verses 4 and 5. Verse 5: “each with his own language by their clans in their nations.” And you have the mention here of the Kittim and the Dodonim. These are tribal names. We don’t know who the Dodanim were. These are tribal names. Verses 13 and 14, we have the Ludim, the Ananimim, the Lehabim, the Naphtalim, and all these other “Im.” These are Gentile names. Same with the “Ites” of verses 16 to 18. These are the ones that Canaan fathered. And you’ll notice in verse 18, the “afterwards, the clans of the Canaanites disperse.” So it’s in view here—or clans and nations and people groups that have come from the children of Noah.
Chapter 10 verses 10 to 12, we have Nimrod. It’s mentioned again that from the beginning of his kingdom was Babel and Erech and Achad and Calna. And he notes here that it’s a great city and a kingdom that came from after Nimrod. Verse 20: “These are the sons of”—this time it’s Ham—”by their clans, their languages, their lands, and their nations.” Verse 31: “these are the sons of Shem by their clans, their languages, their lands, and their nations.”
So the point here is not, it’s not just a genealogy. It’s a descent of the nations and where the people groups have come from, descending from Noah and his three sons. Some of the names in this list—and we’ll go back through some of them in a little bit—but some of the names are a little more obvious to us. Verse 1, Shem, that’s the Semitic people, including Israel. Verse 6, Kush, that’s Sudan—either Sudan or Kish, which is a Mesopotamian city, we’re not sure. Egypt, if you have the New American Standard Bible or the King James, it’s Mitsrayim. That is the word for Egypt, and so it’s translated in the newer versions just “Egypt.” That’s Lower Egypt and Africa. Then there’s Put, that’s Libya. And then there’s Canaan, and that’s the Canaanites that we saw last time and we’ll see more of today. Verse 22, Asher, that’s Assyria. Aram, that’s the Aramean people. That’s where we get the word Aramaic. And then verse 21, Eber. That’s where we get the word Hebrew, the Hebrew people. So they descend from Eber.
So what we have here in chapter 10 is the dispersion of the nations after Babel. It’s an account of their original individual origins. So this table is a brief overview of history of the development of the nations after the flood. It’s not systematic. It’s not exhaustive. But it is a framework for the development of the nations after Noah. Genesis is a book of the beginnings, we’ve noted that, and this is the beginnings of the nations. This is a fascinating document, chapter 10. Even secular and critical scholars have just scratched their head over this and somehow they find it remarkable that the Bible, such an ancient document, could have so much so right. Not a surprise to us, of course, but this is a remarkable document for all the detail and the accuracy, the detail of the development of the ancient world in their various people groups. And so the purpose of the passage is to show us the development of the nations after Noah from his three sons.
So note, by the way, then, that chapters 10 and 11 are somewhat out of order chronologically. In chapter 9, at the end, we have the prophecy of Noah’s three sons. Chapter 10, then, we have the development of the nations from Noah’s three sons. And then chapter 11, verses 1 to 9, we back up with a note of how that dispersal of the nations came about with the account of the Tower of Babel. And we’ll look at that in the next hour. Now, the timing, the time frame of this is hinted at for us in chapter 10, verse 25, where it’s mentioned Peleg, who is the fourth from Noah, “in his days the earth was divided.” So here we have a hint of what’s coming in chapter 11 a few verses later. And then we have chapter 11 verses 10 and following, we have the further development of the line of Shem and his family all the way to Abraham. So what we have in chapters 9 to 11 is a logical progression, but not necessarily entirely chronological. Chapter 11 verses 1 to 9 back up and show us how the nations of chapter 10 came about in their various origins.
Identifying The Nations
Now then, one of the things of interest, I think—I hope this is of interest to you—is to try to identify the nations in the table. He lists all of these sons of Noah’s three sons and from them now we are to identify the various people groups and nations that have come from them and how the world has developed into its various nationalities since.
To do this, let me just give a brief note. When you study historical linguistics, and that’s going to be important here in a second, what is important for you to note in historical linguistics is the stability of the consonants in words. And in names, vowels, they can come and go and they can change. They’re not important, but the consonants stay stable as a word migrates from one language to another, to another, and so on. And so you can identify them that way. And so what archaeologists do when they uncover inscriptions and different things, they find a note of, like for example, I mentioned earlier, Kish. Is that the Kush—the same consonants you see, same consonants, they remain stable—is that the Kush of what we have here, or is that Kush Sudan, or is that Kish of Mesopotamia? Sometimes you have to do some work to figure those things out. But it’s the consonants that stay stable, and I’ll show more of that as we go.
Maybe some examples will help, some things that are familiar to you. The Greek word kuryakon, which means “belonging to the Lord,” that’s where we get our word “church.” Kuryakon, church. Now the K has softened to the CH, but it’s the carryover of that where we get our word church. Now when you get to a Scottish language, it’s “kirk,” and the K has remained stable. One that’s probably more familiar, it’s my favorite illustration of this, is the Roman “Caesar.” You put that in German, and it’s “Kaiser.” You put that in Russian, and it’s “Tsar.” But you see the consonants remain stable throughout. And we’re going to need to know that when we go through some of these names in this list.
So verses 1 to 25, we can’t, by the way, identify all of these names, but we are able to get the big picture. Verse 2, verses 1 to 5, we have the sons of Japheth, and this is primarily Indo-Europeans. So verse 2, sons of Japheth, and he names them: Gomer, Magog, Madai, and so on. Gomer: GMR. It can be GMR. It can be another guttural CMR or KMR. So the Gimmeri people are known in the ancient world in north central Turkey. Probably them. Magog, we don’t know who that is. Some popular teachers, prophetic teachers have tried to make that something associated with Russia. We don’t know that at all. Magog simply means the land of Gog, and we don’t know who Gog is, so that’s that. Madai, that’s the Medes, so that’s Iran. Now notice, by the way, that Iran is not a Semitic people, like the rest of the Arab races are, Arab nations are. Iran is a Japhethic people from Japheth, a son of Madai.
Yawan: this is probably something that shows up in inscriptions that archaeologists have uncovered by Ionia, I-O-N-I-A. This is extreme western Turkey. It’s from them. Some of them migrated west to found Greece. And we have some inscriptions in Greece that tell us that this guy was the ancestor of the Greeks. So evidently now, this son of Noah, the son of Japheth, moved northward and westward as well, and moved into, eventually, even Greece. Tubal: we find them in some other documents. Tabal, that’s in Asia Minor. Mishek: now again, some prophetic teachers pick this up in Ezekiel and want to make that Moscow, Russia. But notice it’s S-H, not S in the middle. It’s not Moscow. It’s Mishek. In the classics, we have this referred to as the area of the Phrygians. This is Central and Western Asia Minor. It’s not Moscow. Tiras, that’s the Etruscans. Have you studied about them at all in your ancient history, the early inhabitants of Italy? The ancient Egyptian records have record of this Tiras as well.
Verse 3, we have the sons of Gomer: Ashkenaz, Rifath, Togarmah. Ashkenaz, that’s the Ashkuzai that we find in some other documents. And these are simply the modern Ukraine and southern Russia. So this has gone way north now. Togarmah, that’s extreme eastern Turkey. Well, I don’t have to go through all of these. Tarshish, verse 4, the sons of Yavon. Tarshish, that’s an island west of Italy. The Kittim, it’s another part, verse 4, it’s a part of Cyprus. The modern city of Larnaca in Cyprus has an inscription calling it Kittim.
So here we have them. We have verses 6 to 20, the sons of Ham, which are Cush, Mitzrayim (or Egypt), Put, and Canaan. So here we have pointed not now to Indo-Europeans primarily, but primarily to the inhabitants of Mesopotamia and also minority Egypt and in Africa. So Kush, as I mentioned, there’s some question here: is this Sudan or is this the area of Mesopotamia, one or the other? Mitzrayim, or Egypt, that’s obvious enough. Put is Libya, that’s pretty obvious. Canaan, that’s further identified for us in verses 16 and following. And all of these “ites,” these Gentile names that are listed after Canaan. Sidon is mentioned there; it’s a famous Phoenician city. Others of these are Israel’s notorious enemies that developed and were finally defeated by Joshua, then by David. And we saw that that was a fulfillment of the curse on Canaan from Noah.
Verses 8 and following, we have Nimrod. And this is the only brief narrative that we have in the list. It tells us a brief little bit about him. “Cush fathered Nimrod. He was the first on earth to be a mighty man. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord. Therefore it is said, ‘like Nimrod, a mighty hunter before the Lord.'” Don’t you love the way Hebrew works? “He was a mighty hunter before the Lord. Therefore it is said, ‘like Nimrod, a mighty hunter before the Lord.'” The beginning of his kingdom was Babel, Erech, Achad, Chalna, the land of Shinar. From that land, he went into Assyria, built Nineveh, Rehoboth, Ir, Qala, and Rezin between Nineveh and Qala, that is the great city, and so on. So Babel, that’s Babylon, a cluster of reed huts probably in his day, but became the great city of Babylon. In verse 10, Erek, that’s known in the ancient documents as Uruk, known by us today as Iraq. Verse 10, Akkad, that’s a region of Babylonia, that’s where we get the word Akkadian. Shinar, that shows up as Sumer elsewhere, but this is southern Mesopotamia. And then verse 11, Assyria, Nineveh—that’s Assyria as well, became the capital city, Israel’s arch enemy later. Kala, this area of Mesopotamia, is called today, guess what it’s named today? Nimrud, son of Nimrod.
All right, then we come to verses 21 and following. We have the sons of Shem, and this focuses on the Middle East. Verse 22: “to Shem also, the father of all the children of Eber, the elder brother of Japheth, children were born. The sons of Shem, Elam, Asher, Arphashad, Lud, and Aram.” So this points us basically to the Arabs, Arab nations, to the Babylonians, and today’s majority Egypt. Most of them here we can’t identify exactly, but some we can. Verse 22, Elam, that’s Persia, that’s Western Iran—the original Persians. Asher, now this gets interesting here, verse 22, Asher, that’s the father of the Assyrians. But now notice verse 11 had Assyria as a son of Ham. So we have a Hamite Asher, and now we have a Semite Asher. And it seems that he has gone to this area and given it his name. Arphakshad, that’s the father of the Jews. If you track him along, we get into chapter 11. It’s Arphakshad, then Sela, and then Eber, and then Peleg, Riu, Sarug, and then Terah, and then Abram. And then finally, in verse 22, we have Aram, that’s where we get our word, Aramaic. So again, the Arab peoples.
And then verse 32 gives us a summary: “These are the clans of the sons of Noah according to their genealogies in their nations. And from these, the nations spread abroad on the earth after the flood.” Well, that’s what we were told in chapter 9, verses 18 and 19. Sons of Noah, from these, the people of the whole earth were dispersed. And so now in chapter 10, we have a brief table of the nations that came from the sons of Noah.
So in summary, we have here Shem, that’s basically tied to the Middle East. That’s the Arab peoples, that’s the Babylonians, today’s majority Egypt. Then you have Ham as well, that’s Egypt. That is the Coptics, the true Egyptians, today’s minority Egypt. But from Ham, we have Egypt, Mithraim. We also have Kush, if that is Sudan. The earliest inhabitants then, Ham’s descendants are the earlier inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, Turkey, and in Africa as well. And then we have the third son, Japheth. From then, the Indo-European peoples have come. That’s most of us. Iran. One question comes up here is, where do the Far Easterners come from? China, Japan, whatever. And it’s not mentioned here. It hasn’t gone that far yet, of course. And most have guessed that that’s probably a Japhetic people as well. So they’ve spread far out into the east.
All right, so that’s the table of nations. Before I go further, any questions on that? It’s really a fascinating document to find something so ancient to have all of this accounting of the development of the nations. And if the ancient historians who are unbelievers think it’s fascinating, we just, okay. Yes?
“I’ve met several Muslims over the years, and they like to follow Japheth as their lineage of Muhammad. But then it sounds like Shem is still an Arab people.”
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. I don’t know about that. I’ve not heard that before. But yeah, Shem is definitely the progenitor of the Arab peoples. I don’t know what that would—who would say that and why. Everyone I’ve met says that the Semites are not that. Interesting. Interesting. I don’t know what to say. That’s news to me.
The Unity Of The Human Race
All right, some observations now from all of this. This not only gives us an account of the development of the nations, what you can’t miss in all of this is something of a biblical emphasis as well, and that is the unity of the human race. In chapter 5, Adam is the father and bears the son in his image, and so on. You go back further, God creates Adam. Luke tells us that Adam, because he was created directly by God, is the son of God, and so on. So we have Adam, and from him we have his sons. And then finally, it comes to Noah. Everybody else is wiped out. Starts all over again, and we have Noah and his three sons. And now from his three sons, all of the peoples of the world have developed. And then chapter 10, we have the table of nations accounting for all, giving a list of all of these nations and how they’ve spread out after the flood.
Israel herself now rises out of these nations—one man out of one of these nations, of whom God made one more nation, through whom all of the other nations would be blessed. We’ll talk about that later today. And Paul mentions this in Acts chapter 17, where he says that God has made from one man all the nations of mankind to dwell on the earth. So we have this clear picture of an understanding of the unity of the human race in Adam, in Noah, and in Noah’s three sons. Some of you have probably heard me quip at times when we’re asked if so-and-so and so-and-so are related, and if you go back far enough, probably were related to Japheth at least, you know, something like that. That’s one of the things you have to observe from the passage.
Now, that’s important here in another respect, and that is because it’s in striking contrast to Egyptian mythology, which has to be in the back of Moses’ mind as he’s writing this. He’s brought up in Egypt. But the Egyptians saw themselves alone as properly men. Everyone else descended from the enemies of the gods. But here, everybody’s the same. Not even Israel gets a special note. They have no special status. It’s just one man out of these nations from whom God makes another nation. The unity of the human race is in contrast, first, to Egyptian mythology.
But more importantly for us, I think, it stands in contrast to our contemporary notion of race. And a little bit of corrective here, I think, is helpful for us. I doubt that we’ll change the vocabulary properly. A race is something like a species. It’s a group that can successfully interbreed, producing fertile offspring. There’s only one human race. That’s us, all of us. Now, we use the term race today, particularly in post-slavery America. The word race has come to mean something else entirely. Race has come to mean a certain people group with certain distinctive features that set them apart from other people groups as well. But in the biblical view, there’s one human race. And all of the other distinctions within that, whether it’s skin color or various physical characteristics, are really irrelevant. They can all intermarry. They can reproduce and produce fertile offspring. There’s one race.
In fact, the evolutionary theory of human origins encourages us to think in terms of what we call today racism. It did it for Darwin. It did it for Hitler. Superior races and inferior races, some not as fully developed as other races and so on. The Bible has absolutely no room for that at all. All of us descended from Adam. All of us descended from Noah and his three sons. And so in the biblical view, all of the distinctions that we call racial distinctions, whether it’s skin color or hair or physical characteristics, all of those distinctions are just trivial and irrelevant and make no difference at all. And how those distinctions and differences among us in humanity came about is simply a question of history and biology: closed gene pools, and some environmental factors, migrations, isolations, some inbreeding—all those kind of questions come into explaining how the differences came about. But they’re trivial and irrelevant with regard to what humanity is. That’s important to note, I think, particularly in all the talk we have about race and racism today. That alone should eliminate what we call racism.
The Prominence Of Shem
Second thing to notice about this list is the prominence of Shem. The passage is structured to give prominence to Shem. He’s the ancestor of Abraham, and so the ancestor of Israel. And he’s reserved for last. And so the narrative picks up Shem at the end: Eber, the Hebrews, verse 21 and following. And then it’s resumed in chapter 11, verses 10 and following. “These are the generations of Shem,” and we have it again. Shem was 100 years old. He fathered Arphaxad two years after the flood, and so on, and so on. And we have a new “these are the generations of,” beginning with verse 10 in chapter 11.
Now that evidently is important for the bigger story. If you keep in mind—we’ve been trying to do this as we go through Genesis—keep in mind the big picture of the Bible. We have Arphatshad now, the father of the Jews, Selah, Eber, Peleg, Reu, Serug, Terah, and then Abram. And so we have chapter 10 verse 32: “these are the clans of Noah according to their genealogies. From them the nations spread out over the earth.” Chapter 12 and verse 3: “in you, Abraham, in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” That’s these families that we’ve been talking about now, chapter 10 and 11. Now in Abraham, all of these families that have been listed will be blessed.
So we’ve got the dispersion of the nations on account of their origins, a distinction of them drawn up in the table of nations. And now from them, one man is chosen out, and God says, through him, all the rest that have just been itemized will be blessed. Terah’s family is just one of the other families, one among many, but through his son, all the families of the world will be blessed. That’s chapter 12, verse 1 and following, and that’s the rest of Genesis, and that’s the rest of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and so on through the rest of the Bible, and it carries the Bible story. So Shem has a particular prominence, and it’s for a good reason, and we’ll pick that up with chapter 12 with Abram next week.
All right, any other questions?