1And this is the lineage of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Sons were born to them after the Flood. 2The sons of Japheth: Gomer and Magog and Madai and Javan and Tubal and Meshech and Tiras. 3And the sons of Gomer: Ashkenaz and Riphath and Togarmah. 4And the sons of Javan: Elishah and Tarshish, the Kittites and the Dodanites. 5From these the Sea Peoples branched out. [These are the sons of Japheth,] in their lands, each with his own tongue, according to their clans in their nations. 6And the sons of Ham: Cush and Mizraim and Put and Canaan. 7And the sons of Cush: Seba and Havilah and Raamah and Sabteca. And the sons of Raamah: Sheba and Dedan. 8And Cush begot Nimrod. He was the first mighty man on earth. 9He was a mighty hunter before the LORD. Therefore is it said: Like Nimrod, a mighty hunter before the LORD. 10The start of his kingdom was Babylon and Erech and Accad, all of them in the land of Shinar. 11From that land Asshur emerged, and he built Nineveh and Rehoboth-Ir and Calah, 12and Resen, between Nineveh and Calah, which is the great city. 13And Mizraim begot the Ludites and the Anamites and the Lehabites and the Naphtuhites, 14and the Pathrusites and the Casluhites, and the Caphtorites, from whom the Philistines emerged. 15And Canaan begot Sidon, his firstborn, and Heth 16and the Jebusite and the Amorite and the Girgashite 17and the Hivvite and the Archite and the Sinite 18and the Arvadite and the Zemarite and the Hamatite. Afterward the clans of the Canaanite spread out. 19And the border of the Canaanite was from Sidon till you come to Gerar, as far as Gaza, till you come to Sodom and Gomorrah and Admah and Zeboiim, as far as Lasha. 20These are the sons of Ham according to their clans and their tongues, in their lands and their nations. 21Sons were born, too, to Shem, the father of all the sons of Eber, the older brother of Japheth. 22The sons of Shem: Elam and Asshur and Arpachshad and Lud and Aram. 23And the sons of Aram: Uz and Hul and Gether and Mash. 24And Arpachshad begot Shelah and Shelah begot Eber. 25And to Eber two sons were born. The name of one was Peleg for in his days the earth was split apart; and his brother’s name was Joktan. 26And Joktan begot Almodad and Sheleph and Hazarmaveth and Jerah 27and Hadoram and Uzal and Diklah 28and Obal and Abimael and Sheba 29and Ophir and Havilah and Jobab. All these were the sons of Joktan. 30And their settlements were from Mesha till you come to Sephar, in the eastern highlands. 31These are the sons of Shem according to their clans and tongues, in their lands and their nations. 32These are the clans of the sons of Noah according to their lineage in their nations. And from these the nations branched out on the earth after the Flood.
CHAPTER 10 NOTES
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As elsewhere, genealogy is adopted as a means of schematizing complex historical evolution, and thus the terms “father of” and “begot” are essentially metaphors for historical concatenation. The total number of figures in the Table of Nations (excluding Nimrod) comes to seventy, the biblical formulaic number for a sizable and complete contingent of any sort. It should be observed that representing the origins of nations as a genealogical scheme preserves a thematic continuity with the divine injunction after creation to be fruitful and multiply and sets the stage for the history of the one people whose propagation is repeatedly promised but continually threatened.
In keeping with the universalist perspective of Genesis, the Table of Nations is a serious attempt, unprecedented in the ancient Near East, to sketch a panorama of all known human cultures—from Greece and Crete in the west through Asia Minor and Iran and down through Mesopotamia and the Arabian peninsula to northwestern Africa. This chapter has been a happy hunting ground for scholars armed with the tools of archaeology, and in fact an impressive proportion of these names have analogues in inscriptions and tablets in other ancient Near Eastern cultures. The Table mingles geographic, ethnic, and linguistic criteria for defining nations, and the list intersperses place-names and gentilic designations (the latter appearing first in plural forms and beginning with verse 16 in singular forms). Some analysts have argued for a splicing together of two different lists of nations. One may infer that the Table assumes a natural evolutionary explanation for the multiplicity of languages that does not involve an act of divine intervention of the sort that will be narrated in the next episode, the Tower of Babel.
5. the Sea Peoples. The probable reference is to the migrants from the Greek islands (“Javan” is Ion, or Greece) who established a foothold in the coastal region of Palestine during the twelfth century B.C.E.
These are the sons of Japheth. These words do not occur in the Masoretic Text, but the scholarly consensus is that there is a scribal omission here, as this is part of the formula used in verse 20 and verse 31 to summarize the list of the descendants of each of Noah’s other two sons.
8. He was the first mighty man on earth. The Hebrew, which says literally, “he began to be a mighty man,” uses the same idiom that is invoked for Noah’s planting a vineyard. The implication, then, is that Nimrod, too, was the founder of an archetypal human occupation. The next verse suggests that this occupation is that of hunter, with his founding of a great Mesopotamian empire then introduced in verses 10–12 as an ancillary fact. Perhaps his prowess as hunter is put forth as evidence of the martial prowess that enabled him to conquer kingdoms, since the two skills are often associated in the ruling classes of older civilizations. Numerous Neo-Assyrian bas-reliefs depict royal lion hunts or royal bull hunts. Nimrod has been conjecturally identified with the thirteenth-century B.C.E. Tukulti-Ninurta I, the first Assyrian conqueror of Babylonia.
10. all of them. This translation adopts a commonly accepted emendation wekhulanah, instead of the Masoretic Text’s wekhalneh, “and Calneh.”
24. Eber. He is the eponymous father of the Hebrews, ʿibrim. Whatever the actual original meanings of the names, there is a clear tendency in the Table to intimate exemplary meanings in the names of these mythic founders: elsewhere, “Eber” is explicitly linked with the term that means “from the other side” (of the river).
25. Peleg . . . in his days the earth split apart. The three consonants of the name Peleg, which as a common noun means “brook,” form the verbal root that means “to split.” It is a stronger verb than “divide,” the term used by most English translators. Rabbinic tradition construes the splitting here as a reference to the Tower of Babel, but it is at least as plausible to see it as an allusion to an entirely different epochal event of “division,” such as a cataclysmic earthquake.
32. branched out. Literally, the Hebrew verb means “separated.” The whole Table of Nations is devised to explain how the many separate nations came into being. The immediately following verse, which begins the tale of the Tower of Babel, announces a primeval unity of all people on earth. This seeming flat contradiction might reflect a characteristically biblical way of playing dialectically with alternative possibilities: humankind is many and divided, as a consequence of natural history; and, alternately, humankind was once one, as a consequence of having been made by the same Creator, but this God-given oneness was lost through man’s presumption in trying to overreach his place in the divine scheme.