A genealogical list traces the nations descended from Shem, Ham and Japheth, accounting within the narrative's own logic for the spread of peoples known to the ancient Near East.
Further context
3 min readSeventy names, arranged as a family tree and functioning as a map. Fourteen fall under Japheth, thirty under Ham and twenty-six under Shem, and a great many of them are transparently peoples and places rather than individuals.
Several can be located with confidence. Mizraim is the standard Hebrew word for Egypt and stays that way throughout the Hebrew scriptures. Cush is the region south of Egypt, in what is now Sudan. Canaan's entry lists Sidon, the Hittites, the Jebusites and the Amorites, and then draws a border running from Sidon towards Gaza. Madai are the Medes of north-western Iran. Javan corresponds to Ionia and stands for the Greeks; his sons include Kittim, associated with Cyprus, and Tarshish, a western trading destination whose location is still argued about. Ashur is Assyria. Elam is the kingdom east of the Tigris with its capital at Susa.
Four verses break off from the lists to describe Nimrod, a son of Cush, called a mighty hunter before the LORD. His kingdom begins with Babylon, Uruk and Akkad in Shinar, which is southern Mesopotamia, and extends north to Nineveh and Calah. These are excavated sites rather than legendary places: Uruk is Warka in southern Iraq, one of the oldest cities in the world; Nineveh lies opposite Mosul; Calah is Nimrud, which still carries a form of the name. No Mesopotamian record identifies anyone called Nimrod, and proposed equations with Sargon of Akkad, with the Assyrian king Tukulti-Ninurta and with the god Ninurta have all been argued at length without any of them winning general agreement.
The total of seventy is unlikely to be an accident. The number recurs elsewhere whenever the nations of the world are in view, and it stands behind the seventy sent out on a mission in one of the Gospels.
One feature confirms that descent here is a way of describing relationships rather than strict biology. Sheba and Havilah each appear twice, once among the sons of Cush and again among the sons of Joktan, and Dedan likewise turns up in more than one branch. Trading peoples of the Arabian peninsula had connections in several directions and are placed accordingly. Genealogy was the standard ancient framework for expressing political alignment, commercial contact and shared language, and reading it as a family tree in the modern sense misses what it was built to do.
The list also reflects the world as known when it was compiled rather than a snapshot taken shortly after a flood. The Philistines appear in it, and the archaeological evidence for their settlement on the Levantine coast, including distinctive Aegean-style pottery at Ashdod, Ashkelon and Ekron, points to the twelfth century BC. A list that includes them is describing a political geography of the second millennium at the earliest.
What the seventy names do for everything that follows is establish scope. The story is about to narrow to one family, and this is the population that family will eventually be told it exists for.
The arrangement of the three branches is also doing something. Japheth's descendants are listed first and briefly, and they occupy the northern and western rim: Anatolia, the Aegean, the coasts. Ham's come next and cover Egypt, Nubia, Arabia and Canaan, which is to say the south and the immediate neighbours. Shem's come last and longest, and the list runs down through Arphaxad towards Terah and Abram. The order is the reverse of the interest: the further a branch is from the story about to be told, the sooner it is dealt with and the faster it is dropped.