Genesis Chapter 10 Part 2: The Line of Shem and the Road to Abraham

Most people read Genesis 10 and see a list of unpronounceable names.

They are missing one of the most important chapters in the entire Bible.

In this lesson we finish the table of nations and arrive at the line that matters most for the rest of the story.

The line of Shem.

And buried inside that line is a name that changes everything.

Eber.

From Eber comes the word Hebrew. From Eber comes the identity of God’s covenant people. From Eber comes the line that leads through Peleg, through Reu, through Serug, through Nahor, through Terah, all the way to a man named Abram who will become Abraham.

The genealogy of Jesus runs directly through this chapter. Luke 3 traces the family line of Christ back through every name in Genesis 10. The table of nations is not background noise. It is the family tree of the Savior of the world.

We also look at one of the most intriguing phrases in all of early Genesis. Peleg, whose name means division, who lived in the days when the earth was divided. What does that mean? We lay out the two major interpretive positions honestly and let you decide.

And we step back and look at Genesis 10 as a whole and answer four questions Moses is answering with this entire chapter.

Does God govern the nations?

Is all humanity one family?

Where did Israel come from?

And who are the nations supposed to reach?

The answers will change how you read your Bible and how you understand the world you live in.

We also look at what modern genetics has confirmed about human origins, how the three major language families of the ancient world correspond to the three sons of Noah, and why the table of nations in Genesis 10 is the most historically comprehensive document of its kind in all of antiquity.

And we close with the great multitude of Revelation 7 standing before the throne. Every nation. Every tribe. Every people. Every tongue.

The nations that scattered in Genesis 10 are the nations gathered in Revelation 7.

The same God who set their boundaries is the One who brings them home.

Watch the full lesson at the link below and share it with someone who thinks Genesis 10 is just a list of names.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

And welcome back to our study of the book of Genesis. As I told you before, we're going to walk through as much of the scripture as we possibly can. The next book after Genesis, we're going to go directly into Exodus. But now we're going to continue in Genesis chapter 10 and lesson two of this chapter. Now, the last time we worked through the first 20 verses of Genesis chapter 10, and we saw the 70 nations spreading from the three sons of Noah. We met Japheth's descendants spreading to the coastlands, to the Indo-European world. We met Ham's descendants spreading through the ancient Near East and North Africa. And we spent a significant amount of time with Nimrod, the first empire builder, the mighty hunter before the Lord, whose kingdom at Babel sets up everything that happens in Genesis chapter 11. And today we come to the line that matters most for the rest of the Bible. And this is the line of Shem. And I want to say something here before we read this. Shem's genealogy is not the longest section in Genesis chapter 10. Japheth gets five verses. Ham gets 15 verses, including the Nimrod section. Shem gets 12 verses. But in terms of what it means for the rest of Genesis, and really for the rest of the Bible, Shem's section is the most important because buried inside of his line is the name Eber. And Eber comes from that word comes the word Hebrew. And from Eber comes a man named Peleg or Pelag, I'm going to say Peleg, in whose days the earth was divided. From Peleg comes a line that leads through 10 generations directly to a man named Abram, who will one day become Abraham. And the entire story of redemption hinges on that line. And this is also the lesson where we step back and look at Genesis chapter 10 as a whole. And we ask questions like, what is Moses doing in this chapter? What does this mean theologically for us? What does it have to say to a world that is forgotten to God who set the nations in their places? And so let's read the text, and we're getting into this. We're going to read verses 21 through 32 in chapter 10. Again, I will caution you. There are some very difficult names and places to pronounce in here. And I have, I was born and raised in Louisiana, so I do have a little bit of a southern accent. And so I would ask that you be gracious in my translation as I read these or pronunciation as I read these names. Let's start in verse 21. Also to Shem, the father of the children of Eber, to the older brother Japheth, children were born. The sons of Shem were Elam and Asher and Arkbeshad and Lud and Aram. The sons of Aram or Aram were Uz and Hul and Gether and Mash. Arkbeshad became the father of Shelah, and Shelah became the father of Eber. The two sons were born to Eber. The name of the one was Paleg, for his days, for in his days the earth was divided. That's a very important verse. And his brother's name was Jochttim. Joghtham became the father of Almadad and Sheleph and Hazarmavath. Hazarmavetheth. Let's go with that. And Jerah. And Hadaram and Uzal and Diklah, and Obal and Ambiel, and Sheba, and Ofer and Havel, Havliah, and Jobab, all these were the sons of Jotkin. Now their settlement extended from Mesha as you go towards Sephar, the hill country of the east. These are the sons of Shem according to their families, according to their languages, by their lands, according to their nations. These are the families of the sons of Noah, according to their genealogies, by their nations. And out of these the nations were separated on the earth and after the flood. So again, thank you for being patient with me as I tried my very best to pronounce those names, even though I probably messed a lot of them up. I would highly recommend you read along and do your best to pronounce them as well. It's a lot of fun as long as no one's listening. These 12 verses that we just read focus on one family line. And in there, one name changes everything. So I want to introduce you to a couple of things in the line of Shem that are that are unusual and worth noticing. It says also to Shem, the father of all the children of Eber, and the older brother of Japheth, children were born. Now, Shem is introduced in two ways. First, he's called the older brother of Japheth, and this establishes the birth order. Shem was older than Japheth. And most scholars understand the order of the sons as Shem, Ham, and Japheth, from the oldest to the youngest, through the order in which their lines are listed in Genesis chapter 10, Japheth is first, Ham is second, and Shem is third. That reversal is significant because Moses is saving Shem for last, not because he is least important, but because he is the most important. Remember that in writing, the climax comes last. And second, the second thing I want you to see, and this detail matters the most, Shem is called the father of all the children of Eber. Moses identifies him not by his own achievements, but by his most significant descendant. Not Shem the great warrior or the city builder or the famous man, but the father of all the children of Eber. Now, the defining thing about Shem is who comes from him, Eber. And that's really important because from Ebru we get the word or the title Hebrews. And the five primary sons of Shem, or listen to this. The first are Elam, where we get the Elamites of southwest Persia. Second is Asher, the ancestor of the Assyrians. Third is Arkbeshad, which is a strange name, but that's the ancestor through whom we get the line of Abraham, which is really, really important. And then there's Lud, associated with Asia Minor and possibly North Africa people. And then there's Aram, the ancestor of the Armenians, which is where you get the Aramaic language, the language that Jesus spoke, and it takes its name from that name, Aram. Now, just a side note for those of you who know me well, I've told a lot of you, my favorite book of the Bible has been for a long time and still is the book of Job. Now, this is interesting because the sons of Aram include us, the land where Job lived. What that means and why that's significant, that means that the table of nations is quietly placing the setting of the book of Job within the broader family of humanity. Now, the key genealogical line of Shem's section runs like this. First, you have Arkbeshah, who became the father of Sheila, and Shela became the father of Eber. Three names. And the third one is the pivot of Shem's entire section, where we pivot to the name Eber. Again, the name Eber in Hebrew comes from the root Abar, meaning to cross over, to pass through, to go beyond, one who crosses over or one who comes from the other side. And from this name Eber comes again the word Hebrew. And the word Hebrew applied to Abraham in Genesis chapter 14, verse 13, is where he is called Abram the Hebrew. It all traces back to this man, Eber. Now, Eber is Shem's great, great grandson. And so when God calls Abraham out of Ur, the uh of the Chaldeans and begins the story of the chosen people of Israel, that people will be identified by a name that traces all the way back to this genealogy: the Hebrews, the children of Eber, the line of Shem from Noah. Now Moses is showing us that Israel didn't just appear out of nowhere, that Israel has a family history that runs back through Abraham, through Eber, through Arkbishad, through Shem, through Noah, through the flood, all the way back to Adam himself. And so the people of God in the Old Testament are rooted in the family of all of humanity. They are not a separate species. They are a branch of the human family through whom God chose to work. Now, here's something that the Jewish tradition has preserved that most Bible, uh, Christian Bible teachers have never heard or never taught. Several ancient Jewish sources, including the Midrash and various rabbi commentators, taught that Eber was one of the men who refused to participate in the building of the Tower of Babel. And as a result, when God confused the languages of Babel, Ebra's household was spared the confusion and retained the original language. The original language, according to this tradition, is the language of Hebrew. And because Ebra's family preserved it, Abraham was taught in that language. And the language became the vessel of God's revelation, which is the Old Testament. Now I want to be careful here. This is Jewish tradition. This is not explicitly taught in the Bible. The Bible does not state that Hebrew was the original language or that Ebra preserved it. But the tradition is ancient and is internally consistent with the text, and it explains why Moses introduces Shem specifically as the father of all the children of Eber. Eber was significant enough that Shem is defined by his relationship to him. Now, we come to one of the most important or one of the most intriguing and most debated phrases in all of Genesis chapter 10. It says, Two sons were born to Eber. The name of the one was Peleg. As some translations I've heard say Peleg, but that just sounds weird, so I'm going to Peleg. For in his days the earth was divided, and his brother's name was Jochtan. Now, Peleg, his name in Hebrew comes from the root meaning to divide, to split, to separate. Keep that a man. Peleg equals division or splitting. And the text immediately tells us why he was named this. If you remember, in in these times, sometimes a person's name was our what they were called was actually what they were doing or what they were responsible for. And this is why it was named this, because it said, in his days, the earth was divided. Now what does that mean? There's two major interpretations that are held by careful scholars here. Interpretation number one is that it's talking about the division at Babel. And this is the most widely held interpretation among conservative scholars. The division of the earth refers to the confusion of languages and scattering of people at Babel in Genesis chapter 11. Peleg lived during the time of the Babel event, and his name commemorates that great division of humanity that took place in his lifetime. Now, this fits the context perfectly of Genesis chapter 10 and Genesis chapter 11 because they are closely connected narratives. Now, Peleg's name is a living historical marker placed in Shem's genealogy to anchor the Babel event to a specific generation. That means he was alive when the nations were divided, and his name was meant to remember that. Now, interpretation number two is this: that a geological or geographical division, a smaller number of scholars, including some who hold a young earth creation view, understand the division of the earth as a reference to the physical division of the continents. Now, under this reading, in the days of Peleg, the single landmass that existed after the flood was divided into the continental configuration that we know today. This interpretation is possible, but it faces the challenge that the Hebrew verb for Peleg elsewhere refers to dividing people and territories rather than physical land masses. Now, the the Babel interpretation fits the language more naturally in the context and more precisely. Either way, Paleg's name is one of the Bible's most fascinating, embedded historical markers. And I would encourage you to read that carefully and do a little studying into him, into his name and those things that happened. A man named Davision, who lived in the time of the greatest division in human history at Babel. Now, next we read that Eber had two sons, Peleg and Jochin. Now we know that the line of redemption runs through Pele, but Jochton's line is also carefully recorded. Jochin becomes the father of 13 sons, the largest single family group in Shem's section. And their settlement is defined in verse 30. This is where his his descendants ended up. From Mesha you will go towards Sephar, the hill country of the east. And so this description places the descendants of Jochkin in the Arabian Peninsula. And several of those names, this is why that's important, several of those names can be identified with ancient Arabian ties and places. Hazar Mavath corresponds to the region of South Arabia, which is still identifiable today. Sheba, most famous for the kingdom of Sheba, in which the Queen of Sheba visited Solomon. Ofar, the or Ophir, the mysterious land of gold mentioned throughout the Old Testament, which is likely in Arabia or East Africa. Havilah, mentioned in Genesis chapter 2 in connection with the Garden of Eden and a region of gold. If you remember, it was the Queen of Sheba who traveled to hear Solomon's wisdom in 1 Kings chapter 10. She was a descendant of Jocton, a descendant of Shem, part of the broader family of the people of God's promise. And so when Jesus says in Matthew chapter 12, verse 42, that the queen of the south will rise in judgment against that generation, he is referencing a woman whose ancestry traces back to the very genealogy of Genesis chapter 10. So the chapter closes in a very interesting way when you look at all of this. It actually closes with what's what's called a double summary when it says this. It said, These are the sons of Shem according to their families, according to their languages, by their lands, according to their nations. And then the second part of that summary is these are the families of the sons of Noah according to their genealogies by their nations, and out of these the nations were separated on the earth after the flood. Now notice this, there's four categories that appear in both summary statements. There's the families, the languages, the lands, and the nations. And these four categories define the nature of human diversity as God designed it to be. You have families, the basic unit of human society, the household, the clan, the multi-generational community. You have languages, distinctive tongues through which each people express their culture, their worship, their identity. You have the lands, the specific territories that God assigned to each people group. And last, you have the nations. This is the organized communities through which human beings govern themselves and relate to one another. This is God's design for humanity, not a one-world government, not one language, not one culture that's erasing all other cultures, but families, languages, lands, nations, diverse and distinct, each under the governance of the God who placed them there. Now, the final phrase of the chapter, I believe, really is the key. It says, out of these, the nations were separated on the earth after the flood. Separated. The Hebrew word there to uh to separate means to divide or to spread out. And it's the same root as the separation of the waters back in Genesis chapter one. The same God who ordered creation is now ordering the nations and pushing them to certain spots. Now, let me back up and answer a question that I believe is worth asking. And it's simple, simply this. Why is Genesis chapter 10 in the Bible at all? It's not a narrative. It does not advance the plot in any way that like Genesis chapter 3 through Genesis chapter 6 did. It's a genealogy of 70 people. Why does Moses include it? What is he trying to teach us? Here's what I believe he's trying to teach. I believe that Moses is making at least four major theological arguments within this one chapter of Genesis chapter 10. And argument number one is this that God governs the nations. Genesis chapter 10 establishes that the nations of the world did not arise by accident. It makes the argument that they came from very specific people, they occupy specific lands, and they are all under the oversight of a God who knows their names and their origins. If you remember, Psalm 22, 28 says, For the kingdom is the Lord's and he rules over the nations. Psalm 47, 8, God reigns over the nations. God sits on his holy throne. And so you have the nations in Psalm 22 and Psalm 47. And these are the nations of Genesis chapter 10, and it says that God rules over them. He sits over them, not because they acknowledge him, but because he made them. Now, argument number two is this why Moses wrote this, or put this in the text. It's that all humanity is one family. Genesis chapter 10 makes the biological case for the unity of the human race. Every people group on earth traces back to three brothers. Every nation is family. That means that hatred and racism, it's not just morally wrong, but it's biologically absurd in light of Genesis chapter 10. The greatest apologist for human unity in the ancient world wasn't a philosopher. It was Moses writing the genealogy that traced all the way back, uh all of humanity back to one family. Now, the third argument that I believe Moses is making is this is that Israel is not a random invention. Genesis chapter 10 places Israel in the context of the whole of humanity. When Abraham appears in Genesis chapter 12, he does not come from nowhere. He is from Shem's line, all of whom are in the table of nations. God did not create Israel by bypassing human history. Instead, God worked through the family of Noah, through the line of Shem to call one man through whom he would bless all the families of the earth. Genesis chapter 10 provides the family context that makes God's choice of Abraham comprehensible. He did not choose a special species, he chose a specific family when in the broader human family. Now, the fourth argument of why I believe Moses included this in Genesis chapter 10 is that the nations are the mission filled. I want you to catch this. The nations are the mission filled. Genesis chapter 10 ends with 70 nations spread across the earth. And that number echoes forward to the Great Commission of Matthew chapter 28. The mission of the people of God from Abraham being told that all nations would be blessed through them, and the 70 disciples sent out by Jesus to the book of Revelation, where every nation stands before the throne, is to take what God established in Shem's line and bring it to every family, every language, every land, and every nation of Genesis chapter 10. Genesis chapter 10 is not just the historical backstory, it is the mission brief. These are the people God loves, these are the people that God wants to reach, every single one of them. That includes you, and that includes me. Now make no mistake, no other ancient document does what Genesis chapter 10 does. We established this in lesson one of Genesis chapter 10. But it's worth pressing the comparison a little bit further. The Sumerian king list, one of the oldest documents ever found, lists kings and their reigns. It was a political document and it tells you who ruled, not where people came from. The Egyptian records of the New Kingdom period list the people of Canaan and nearby regions, and they are geographically local, but they do not attempt a comprehensive account of. Of all of humanity. The Akkadian geographical list names rivers and mountains and regions, and they are topographical. They're not dealing with ancestry here. Only Genesis chapter 10 attempts a comprehensive account of the origin of all of the people of the known world from a single family. And what is remarkable is not just its comprehensiveness, but its accuracy. Scholars who have compared Genesis chapter 10 to the archaeological and historical record have consistently found that the people listed, the regions described, and the relationships implied match exactly what we know from ancient history with a remarkable degree of accuracy. In fact, it was David Luckinville who studied Assyria, who noted that Genesis chapter 10 correctly identifies Asher as the ancestor of the Assyrian in a way that's consistent with Assyrian records going all the way back to the third millennium BC. The study, a man by the name of Kenneth Kitchen, who's an expert in Egypt, Egyptian history, one of the foremost authorities in the ancient Near East, pointed out that the Hamatic people listed in Genesis chapter 10 aligned with what Egyptian records and archaeology tells us about the people of Northeast Africa. Genesis chapter 10 is not mythology, it is a document, the only historical document that stands up to scrutiny of where the nations came from, and it's remarkably accurate. Now, here's an apologetic angle that's worth developing carefully. And I want you to hold on to this as well. Modern genetics has established something extraordinary in just the last three decades. The Human Genome Project and subsequent genetic research has confirmed that all human beings alive today share a remarkably recent common ancestry. The genetic diversity of the entire human population is surprisingly narrow. Secular geneticists have identified what they call the mitochondrial Eve. It's a single female ancestor from whom all living human beings inherit their mitochondrial DNA. And Y chromosomal Adam, a single male ancestor from whom all living men inherit their Y chromosome. All of humanity traces to a single pair of people, an Adam and an Eve, just two people. Genesis has been saying this since Moses first wrote it. If you remember Acts chapter 17, verse 26, it says, from one man God made every nation. And Genesis chapter 10 goes a little bit further. It shows us how the diversity of the people arose from that single family, from Noah's three sons in the space of a few generations. 70 distinct people groups spread across the ancient known world. Now, modern population genetics confirms that human populations diversified rapidly from a small founding group. And the genetics and the and the Genesis, they're not in conflict. They're actually telling the same story. Then verse 5 says the nations were separated according to their languages. Verse 20 repeats it, and verse 31 repeats it again. So languages are central to the identity of the people in Genesis chapter 10. And the study of modern linguistics has developed or identified major language families that broadly correspond to the three lines of Genesis chapter 10. The Japheth people correspond broadly to the Indo-European language families. This would be like your Greek and Latin and Persian and their descendants. The Hamatic people correspond broadly to the ancient Egyptian languages. The Semitic people correspond to the Semitic language family, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Akkadian, and a few related tongues. The correspondence is not perfect and the categories are not identical, but the broad alignment between the three sons of Noah and the three major language superfamilies of the ancient world, they're remarkable for a document written 3,000 years before modern comparative linguistics even existed. The ancient Hebrews did not have all the tools of modern linguistics, but the table they produced in Genesis chapter 10, the table of nations, reflects the actual structure of human linguistic diversity in a way that no other ancient document ever even approaches. Now, we need to look briefly as we start trying to wrap this up at the New Testament fulfillment. The line we traced in Genesis chapter 10, uh, from Shem to uh Ark Pashad through Shelah to Eber to Peleg continues in Genesis chapter 11 and it leads us directly to Abram in Genesis chapter 12. And Luke traces it all the way to Jesus in Luke chapter 3, verses 34 through 36. Every name that appears in Genesis chapter 10 and Genesis chapter 11 is in the genealogy of Jesus that runs directly back to the table of nations. That means the Savior of the world came from a very specific family, a specific line, a specific people who traced their ancestry through Eber the Hebrew, through Shem through Noah, all the way back to Adam, the son of God, as Luke chapter 3, verse 38 concludes. The table of nations in Genesis chapter 10 is not peripheral to the gospel. It is the family tree of the one who came to save every family that was listed in the table of nations. And so Genesis chapter 10 ends with the 70 nations separated on the earth after the flood. Revelation chapter 7, verse 9 ends with those nations gathered back together. Every nation, every tribe, every people, all tongues. The four categories of Genesis chapter 10, families, languages, and nations, appear in Revelation chapter 7 as the categories of those who have been redeemed. Every people group listed in Genesis chapter 10 has a representative before the throne of God. The table of nations in Genesis chapter 10 is the guest list for the great gathering of Revelation chapter 7. And the reason they are there is the Lamb, who is the seed of Shem, the descendant of Eber, son of Abraham, who purchased them with his blood from every tribe and tongue and people and nation. That's Revelation chapter 5, verse 9. Genesis chapter 10, Revelation chapter 7, the same story. The scattering and the gathering, the separation and the reunion. The nation spread out, and the Lamb who came from one of them, bringing all of them back home together. Now, let me bring all of Genesis chapter 10 together for you. Genesis chapter 10 is the chapter again, I've said this multiple times that most people still. The list of unpronounceable names and places and genealogies, territories, and languages. But Genesis chapter 10 is actually one of the most important chapters in the entire book of Genesis because it answers three questions that every person, every generation has asked. Where do we come from? Why are there so many different people groups? And does God care about all of them? And the and Genesis chapter 10 answers all three of those. We came from one family, and there are many people because God designed diversity into the human family after the flood. And God cares about all of them so much that he sent Jesus through one of those families to save the rest. Now, next week we're going to be in Genesis chapter 11, and we're going to look at some amazing things. We're going to look at the Tower of Babel, a city. We're going to look at Nimrod's kingdom reaching its fullest expression of rebellion. We're going to look at the confused languages and the scattering of the nations. And then at the end of Genesis chapter 11, there's a name that changes everything. That name is Abram, the son of Terah, the lion of Shem, the family of Eber, the man from whom God will begin the long journey back home. Now I hope you learned something new from the lesson today, and I pray that it draws you closer to the Lord. Until next time, have a blessed day.