Genesis 9:1-10:32

I bet Genesis 10 is one of those chapters that is hard to read.  Not so much Gen. 9: here you have the end of the story of the flood, the covenant of the rainbow, and something that's not often given much attention: the first time God gave man permission to eat meat.  (That's right, meat-lovers.  Before the Flood, man was vegetarian.  And... that's right, vegetarians!  Meat is God-given to man to eat.  But that's a whole other post we'll likely not get to until the New Testament.  That's a few years in the making...)

Genesis 10, however, is another of the lineage chapters that make parts of several Old Testament books difficult to read: namely Numbers and Joshua, but also Genesis and Exodus.  Here Japheth begot Gomer, Magog and Madai; Ham begot Cush, Egypt, and Canaan; Shem begot Elam, Ashur, Arpachshad...  And those are just a selection.  One thing to remember, though, is that this is chronicling how one small family managed to repopulate an earth devastated by flood waters.  And if you saw the Midwest after the flood of the early 90's, or even Tennessee and its neighbors after the past week, you can see that restoring after a flood is a lot of work!  Now, consider that when there are only eight of you!  From these descendants of Noah's sons came the nations.  It kind of makes me want to break out a map and a few commentaries (because those people are more educated than I am and know where these tribes settled and who they are referring to on the world history stage) and figure it out.  Japheth had the northern tribes, which as time went on likely migrated then into Europe, namely Greeks, Crete, even western Spain.  Ham had the more southerly tribes across North Africa and Arabia from which the empires of Egypt, Cush, and even, eventually, Babylon came from (as some of these descendants apparently moved into that territory).  Shem's descendants ranged across modern Palestine and into areas of Persia and beyond.  From my reading I understand that the Assyrians, some tribes of Arabia, and Lydia (Turkey) come from Shem.  As well as... Israel.  In fact, Semitic is the term referred to the languages of the descendants of Shem, of which Hebrew is part of the Semitic language family, and where we get the term antisemitic. 

This constitutes most of the civilizations we know from the Ancient World on that side of the globe!  They stayed in and around that area until... well, until they were forced to move farther out.  After all, the commandment was to populate the face of the Earth, not the Fertile Crescent.  But that... that is tomorrow.

Reading for tomorrow: Genesis 11:1-32