From Noah's Sons to Abraham: The Nations and Babel (Part 3 of 4)

Three Brothers, a Whole World

Part 1 traced Noah's line from Adam to the flood. Part 2 covered the covenant and the night in Noah's tent. Now Genesis zooms out. Part 2's chapter ended with a summary that sets up everything in this post: "These three were the sons of Noah, and from these the people of the whole earth were dispersed" (Genesis 9:19).

Genesis 10 opens a new family record: "These are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Sons were born to them after the flood" (Genesis 10:1). Then it does something no other ancient text does. It lays out the whole known world as one family tree.

Notice the order. Genesis usually names the sons as Shem, Ham and Japheth, but chapter 10 goes in reverse: Japheth first, then Ham, then Shem. That's a pattern in Genesis. The family lines that branch off are listed first, and the line the story will follow comes last, so the narrative can flow straight into it. Shem is saved for the end because Shem's line leads to Abraham.

In this post we'll walk through the Table of Nations son by son, separate the identifications scholars are confident about from the guesses, look honestly at popular charts that link modern peoples to Noah's sons, climb the Tower of Babel, and trace Shem's family down ten generations to Abram.

How the Table of Nations Works

Before we look at the names, it helps to understand what kind of list this is. Each son's section ends with the same formula. Here's how Ham's ends: "These are the sons of Ham, by their clans, their languages, their lands, and their nations" (Genesis 10:20). The chapter closes with a summary of all three: "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" (Genesis 10:32).

That four-part formula tells us the list is organized by more than bloodline. Mishpachah means a clan or extended family. Lashon, literally "tongue," means language. Erets is land or territory. And goy is a nation or people. The Table of Nations is a map of the world drawn as a family tree, combining ancestry, language, geography and political identity.

That's why many of the names aren't really individuals. Some have plural endings that mark them as peoples: the Kittim, the Ludim, the Caphtorim. Others are described with "-ites": the Jebusites, the Amorites, the Hittites. Some are clearly places, like Sidon and Tarshish. In the ancient Near East, saying a people "descended" from someone could describe kinship, but also alliance, language family or shared territory. The NET Bible notes and most commentators read the list this way.

The number seventy

If you count the nations in the list, not counting Noah and his three sons, you get about seventy. The Catholic NABRE study notes observe that the number of the nations is seventy, and that Israel's family also numbered seventy when it went into Egypt. Genesis 46:27 says, "All the persons of the house of Jacob who came into Egypt were seventy." Israel was a small model of the whole world.

This is the number behind Deuteronomy 32:8, which we explored in the divine council post: "When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God." And it may stand behind Jesus sending out a second, larger group of disciples after the twelve: "After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them on ahead of him, two by two, into every town and place where he himself was about to go" (Luke 10:1). Some ancient manuscripts of Luke read "seventy," and the Greek Septuagint's version of Genesis 10 counts seventy-two nations, matching both possibilities. Either way, the message seems clear: Jesus' mission was for all the nations.

A note on order

Genesis 10 mentions different languages before Genesis 11 tells the story of Babel, where languages were divided. That isn't a contradiction. Chapter 10 is a summary of the result, and chapter 11 goes back to explain how it happened. Genesis often tells the big picture first and the story behind it second, just as Genesis 1 gives the overview of creation and Genesis 2 zooms in on Eden.

The Sons of Japheth: North and West

"The sons of Japheth: Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshech, and Tiras. The sons of Gomer: Ashkenaz, Riphath, and Togarmah. The sons of Javan: Elishah, Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim. From these the coastland peoples spread in their lands, each with his own language, by their clans, in their nations." (Genesis 10:2–5)

Japheth's line covers the peoples to the north and west of Israel: Asia Minor (modern Turkey), the Black Sea region, the Aegean islands and Greece, and the Iranian plateau. "Coastland peoples" translates iyye haggoyim, the islands and coasts of the nations, the Mediterranean world as seen from Israel.

Here's how the identifications break down.

Confident. Madai is the Medes, who lived in what is now northwestern Iran; the same Hebrew word is used for the Medes throughout the Bible. Javan is the Ionians, the Greeks of western Asia Minor and the Aegean; later Hebrew uses Yavan simply to mean Greece, as in Daniel's vision: "the goat is the king of Greece" (Daniel 8:21). Kittim is Kition, a city on Cyprus, and by extension Cyprus and the western islands. Tubal and Meshech appear together in Assyrian records as Tabal and Mushki, kingdoms in central and eastern Anatolia. The NET Bible notes identify Meshech as the people known in Assyrian records as the Musku.

Probable. Gomer is likely the Cimmerians (Assyrian Gimirrai), a horse-riding people who swept into Asia Minor from north of the Black Sea in the eighth century BC. Ashkenaz is likely the Scythians (Assyrian Ashkuza); Jeremiah names it alongside Ararat: "summon against her the kingdoms, Ararat, Minni, and Ashkenaz" (Jeremiah 51:27). Togarmah is associated with eastern Anatolia and Armenia, and Armenian tradition claims descent from him under the name Torgom; Ezekiel mentions "Beth-togarmah from the uttermost parts of the north" (Ezekiel 38:6). Dodanim is likely a copying variant of Rodanim, the people of Rhodes, which is how 1 Chronicles spells it: "The sons of Javan: Elishah, Tarshish, Kittim, and Rodanim" (1 Chronicles 1:7).

Uncertain. Tarshish was a distant trading port, famous as the place Jonah tried to escape to: "But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD" (Jonah 1:3). Proposals include Tartessos in Spain, Tarsus in Asia Minor, or Sardinia. Tiras has been linked to the Thracians or to a seafaring people called the Tyrsenians, but no one knows. Riphath and Elishah are also uncertain, though Elishah may be Alashiya, an old name for Cyprus.

Magog and the prophecy question

Magog deserves special mention, because it matters to many Bible prophecy readers. Ezekiel prophesies against "Gog, of the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal" (Ezekiel 38:2). The ESV footnote offers an alternative: "the prince of Rosh, Meshech, and Tubal." Many popular prophecy teachers have read "Rosh" as Russia and Magog as the lands of the former Soviet Union. Here, fairness matters. The ancient historian Josephus identified Magog with the Scythians, who lived north of the Black Sea, so a northern location has old support. But "Rosh" is most naturally the ordinary Hebrew word for "head" or "chief," which is why the ESV and most modern translations render it "chief prince." And the English name "Russia" comes from a medieval people called the Rus, not from Hebrew. Gog and Magog may point to a coalition from the far north, but tying them to a specific modern nation goes beyond what the text says.

One more interesting footnote: medieval Jewish writers used Ashkenaz as a name for Germany, which is why Jews of central and eastern European descent are called Ashkenazi today. That's a later naming convention, not evidence that the biblical Ashkenaz settled in Germany.

The Sons of Ham: South, and the First Empires

"The sons of Ham: Cush, Egypt, Put, and Canaan." (Genesis 10:6)

The ESV translates Mizraim as "Egypt," because that's simply the Hebrew name for Egypt. Elsewhere the Bible even calls Egypt "the land of Ham": "Then Israel came to Egypt; Jacob sojourned in the land of Ham" (Psalm 105:23). Ham's line covers the lands to the south and southwest of Israel, but, as we'll see, it also reaches into Mesopotamia and the land of Canaan itself.

Cush is Nubia, the ancient kingdom south of Egypt in what is now Sudan, which the Greeks called Ethiopia. Cush's sons, including Seba, Havilah, Sheba and Dedan, are generally placed in Arabia and along the Red Sea coasts of Africa and Arabia; Sheba is the homeland of the queen who visited Solomon. Egypt's descendants include the Pathrusim, the people of Upper (southern) Egypt, and the Caphtorim of Crete, with a note that the Casluhim were the people "from whom the Philistines came" (Genesis 10:14). Amos confirms the Philistines' island origin: "Did I not bring up Israel from the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor?" (Amos 9:7). Put is most likely Libya, though some suggest Punt on the Horn of Africa.

Canaan's line covers the peoples of the Promised Land:

"Canaan fathered Sidon his firstborn and Heth, and the Jebusites, the Amorites, the Girgashites, the Hivites, the Arkites, the Sinites, the Arvadites, the Zemarites, and the Hamathites. Afterward the clans of the Canaanites dispersed. And the territory of the Canaanites extended from Sidon in the direction of Gerar as far as Gaza, and in the direction of Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboiim, as far as Lasha." (Genesis 10:15–19)

These are the nations Israel would later face in the conquest. Notice how diverse Ham's line is. The Canaanites spoke a Semitic language very close to Hebrew. "Heth" is the ancestor of the Hittites, a name also used for a great Anatolian empire whose language was Indo-European, related to Greek and Latin. And as we're about to see, Ham's line also built the first cities of Mesopotamia. The Table of Nations doesn't group people by skin color or language family. It groups them by history and geography.

Nimrod, the first empire-builder

In the middle of Ham's line, the list pauses for a story:

"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.' The beginning of his kingdom was Babel, Erech, Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar. From that land he went into Assyria and built Nineveh, Rehoboth-Ir, Calah, and Resen between Nineveh and Calah; that is the great city." (Genesis 10:8–12)

"Mighty man" is gibbor, the same word used for the "mighty men" of Genesis 6:4. Nimrod is the first person in the Bible to build a mamlakah, a kingdom. His cities are real places: Babel is Babylon, Erech is Uruk (one of the oldest cities in the world), Accad is Akkad, capital of the first Mesopotamian empire, and Nineveh and Calah became Assyrian capitals. The ruins of Calah are still called Nimrud today, a name later given in his memory. Micah even calls Assyria "the land of Nimrod" (Micah 5:6). Since this Cush is linked with Mesopotamia, the NABRE notes suggest it may here refer to the Kassites, a people who ruled Babylon, rather than Nubia.

Who was Nimrod historically? Proposals include Sargon of Akkad, the Assyrian king Tukulti-Ninurta I, or a memory of the Mesopotamian war-and-hunting god Ninurta. None is certain.

Was Nimrod good or bad? "Before the LORD" can mean "in God's sight" in a neutral or even positive sense, and Genesis itself doesn't explicitly condemn him. But Jewish tradition took a dark view. Josephus made Nimrod the instigator of the Tower of Babel, a tyrant who turned people away from God (Antiquities 1.113–114), and some ancient Jewish writers linked his name to the Hebrew marad, "to rebel." That etymology is a wordplay, not proven. But the cities Nimrod founded, Babel above all, become symbols throughout Scripture of human power set against God, all the way to "Babylon the great" in Revelation 17:5.

The Sons of Shem: East, and the Hebrews

Shem's list begins with an unusual introduction:

"To Shem also, the father of all the children of Eber, the elder brother of Japheth, children were born. The sons of Shem: Elam, Asshur, Arpachshad, Lud, and Aram." (Genesis 10:21–22)

Before naming a single son, the text tells us Shem is "the father of all the children of Eber." That's the line Genesis cares about most, and we'll see why in a moment. (The Hebrew of verse 21 is ambiguous about who was older, Shem or Japheth, which is why some translations read "the brother of Japheth the elder.")

Shem's sons settled mostly to the east and northeast of Israel.

• Elam is the ancient kingdom in southwestern Iran, centered on the city of Susa, where the book of Esther takes place. Interestingly, the Elamite language isn't Semitic at all, another reminder that this list isn't a language chart.
• Asshur is Assyria, in northern Iraq. Notice that Nimrod, from Ham's line, built Assyria's cities, but the people are listed under Shem. Again, ancestry, territory and political history overlap in complicated ways.
• Arpachshad is uncertain. Some connect the name with Chaldea, the region of southern Mesopotamia where Abraham's hometown of Ur was located.
• Lud may be Lydia in western Asia Minor, though that's debated.
• Aram is the Arameans of Syria, whose language, Aramaic, became the international language of the Near East and the everyday language of Jesus.

Eber and the Hebrews

The line that matters runs through Arpachshad: "Arpachshad fathered Shelah; and Shelah fathered Eber" (Genesis 10:24). The name Eber (Ever) comes from the root avar, "to cross over." From it comes the word Ivri, "Hebrew," which may mean "descendant of Eber" or "one from beyond," someone who crossed over from the other side of the river. The first person in the Bible called a Hebrew is Abraham: "Then one who had escaped came and told Abram the Hebrew" (Genesis 14:13). Abraham's family is the line of Eber, and Genesis has been building toward him since chapter 10.

Peleg: "in his days the earth was divided"

"To Eber were born two sons: the name of the one was Peleg, for in his days the earth was divided, and his brother's name was Joktan." (Genesis 10:25)

"Peleg" comes from palag, "to divide." What was divided? There are three main views.

The nations at Babel. Most interpreters connect this with the scattering of the peoples at the Tower of Babel in the next chapter. The same root appears in a prayer that echoes Babel: "Destroy, O Lord, divide their tongues; for I see violence and strife in the city" (Psalm 55:9).

Land divided by canals. As a noun, peleg means a water channel. It's the word in Psalm 1:3: "He is like a tree planted by streams of water." Some scholars suggest Peleg's name recalls the digging of irrigation canals that divided the land in Mesopotamia.

Continents splitting. Some popular writers have suggested Genesis 10:25 refers to the continents drifting apart. There's no textual support for this; the word describes the division of people, land or water, and the verse is part of a list about nations and clans.

Peleg's brother Joktan fathered thirteen sons whose names, including Sheba, Havilah and Ophir, are associated with tribes of southern Arabia. Ophir became famous for its gold, which Solomon's fleet brought back: "they went to Ophir and brought from there gold, 420 talents" (1 Kings 9:28). Peleg's line, as we'll see, continued toward Abraham.

Popular Charts and DNA Claims

If you've spent time in Bible prophecy circles or online, you've probably seen charts that assign modern nations to Noah's grandsons. A typical one, from a popular Bible study site, places Gomer in Eastern Europe, and along the Rhine and Danube valleys, Ashkenaz in Germany, Tarshish in England or Spain, Magog in Russia, and Cush in Black Africa. How much of this holds up?

The three-continent scheme

The oldest and most common simplification says Shem's descendants are Asians, Ham's are Africans, and Japheth's are Europeans. This idea goes back at least to the early Middle Ages. The seventh-century scholar Isidore of Seville helped popularize the "T-and-O" world map, which divided the world into three continents and labeled them Asia for Shem, Africa for Ham and Europe for Japheth.

But the Table of Nations itself doesn't work that way. Ham's line includes the Canaanites, who lived in Asia and spoke a Semitic language, and Mesopotamian cities like Babylon. Shem's line includes Elam, whose language had no relation to Hebrew. Japheth's line, as described, centers on Asia Minor, the Aegean and Iran, not on northern and western Europe at all. The writer of Genesis was describing the world as Israel knew it, roughly from Greece to Iran and from the Black Sea to Nubia. Peoples outside that horizon, like the Chinese, the native peoples of the Americas, or Australia's Aboriginal peoples, simply aren't mentioned. That doesn't mean they aren't descended from Noah; it means Genesis didn't set out to trace them.

Royal genealogies to Japheth

Some writers have gone further. The British creationist author Bill Cooper, in After the Flood (1995), argued that medieval European king lists, especially Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies, trace actual ancestry back to Japheth. Those genealogies do exist. Some Anglo-Saxon lists end with a figure called Sceaf, said to have been born in Noah's ark. But historians generally see these as medieval attempts to connect local royal families to biblical history after Christianization, not as independent records reaching back thousands of years. They show that Christian Europeans wanted to belong to the biblical story, which is understandable, but they can't verify specific lines of descent.

DNA and Noah's sons

Genetics has entered the discussion too. Studies of human DNA show that all living people are remarkably closely related, and that the Y chromosome (passed father to son) and mitochondrial DNA (passed mother to child) each trace back to a single ancestral line. Some creationist scientists, such as geneticist Nathaniel Jeanson in Replacing Darwin (2017), have proposed mapping major branches of the human Y-chromosome family tree onto Noah's three sons. Mainstream geneticists date these branches over far longer timescales and reject that framework. Either way, these proposals don't directly confirm the Table of Nations, because Genesis 10 describes ancient peoples and territories rather than genetic lineages, and no ancient Israelite could have tracked DNA.

What we can say confidently

Some identifications are solid: Javan with the Greeks, Madai with the Medes, Mizraim with Egypt, Cush with Nubia, Aram with the Arameans, Asshur with Assyria, Canaan with the peoples of the Promised Land. Others are educated guesses. And modern ethnic charts, especially ones that assign today's nations to specific grandsons of Noah, go well beyond the evidence.

The Bible's own big-picture point is clearer and more important than any chart: every nation comes from one family. As Paul told the Athenians, God "made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place" (Acts 17:26).

The Tower of Babel

Genesis 10 told us the nations spread out "each with his own language." Genesis 11 goes back to tell us how:

"Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, 'Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.' And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, 'Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.'" (Genesis 11:1–4)

Details that fit Mesopotamia

Shinar is southern Mesopotamia, the land of Babylon and Sumer, modern southern Iraq. The building details are accurate for that region. Mesopotamia has almost no building stone, so people built with mud brick, baked hard for important structures, and used chemar, bitumen or natural tar, as mortar. The writer even explains this for readers in stone-rich Canaan: "they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar." In Hebrew there's a playful sound pattern: nilbenah levenim, "let us brick bricks."

The "tower" (migdal) was most likely a ziggurat, a massive stepped temple platform. Mesopotamian cities built them as artificial mountains where heaven and earth met, a stairway for the gods to come down to their temples. Babylon's great ziggurat was called Etemenanki, "House of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth." The tower "with its top in the heavens" fits that ideology perfectly.

What was wrong with it?

Their stated goals tell us. First, "let us make a name for ourselves." The Hebrew word for "name" is shem. Humanity wanted to make itself famous apart from God, like the "men of renown," the "men of the name," in Genesis 6:4. Second, "lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth." God had told Noah's family to "fill the earth" (Genesis 9:1). Babel was a deliberate refusal: stay together, build up, grab heaven.

God comes down

"And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built. And the LORD said, 'Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another's speech.' So the LORD dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth. And from there the LORD dispersed them over the face of all the earth." (Genesis 11:5–9)

There's gentle irony here. Humanity built a tower to reach heaven, and God had to "come down" just to see it. And notice the wordplay in the name. In Babylonian, Bab-ili meant "Gate of God," a proud name. Genesis connects it instead to the Hebrew balal, "to confuse" or "to mix up." The city that called itself the gate of God becomes the city of confusion. The English word "babble" sounds similar, but that resemblance is a coincidence.

The judgment was also a mercy. By scattering the peoples, God prevented a single united humanity from concentrating its power and pride in one place, and He set up the conditions for the next stage of His plan: one man, chosen from among the scattered nations, to bless them all.

Babel reversed

The prophets looked forward to a day when language would no longer divide God's people: "For at that time I will change the speech of the peoples to a pure speech, that all of them may call upon the name of the LORD and serve him with one accord" (Zephaniah 3:9).

At Pentecost, it began:

"And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. And at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one was hearing them speak in his own language." (Acts 2:4–6)

The Greek word for "bewildered" in Acts 2:6, synchyno, is the same verb the Septuagint uses in Genesis 11:7 for God's decision to "confuse" their language. At Babel, God confused human speech to scatter proud people. At Pentecost, the Spirit worked through human speech to gather people from every nation into one family. The languages weren't erased; they were redeemed. Revelation's final picture keeps them: "a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages" (Revelation 7:9).

From Shem to Abram

Right after Babel, where people tried to make a name (shem) for themselves, Genesis turns to a man actually named Shem: "These are the generations of Shem. When Shem was 100 years old, he fathered Arpachshad two years after the flood" (Genesis 11:10). The point is hard to miss. God will give a lasting name not to the tower builders, but to the line He chooses.

The genealogy runs ten generations, just like the one from Adam to Noah in Genesis 5, and ends this way: "When Terah had lived 70 years, he fathered Abram, Nahor, and Haran" (Genesis 11:26). Then comes God's promise: "I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing" (Genesis 12:2). The name Babel grasped for, God gives as a gift.

Shrinking lives

The lifespans in Genesis 11 tell a story of their own. Before the flood, men lived about 900 years. After it, they fall in stages: Shem lived 600, his next three descendants lived more than 400, and then at Peleg they drop by nearly half, to 239. By Abraham's day, they're under 200, and by Moses' time they're near the 120 years of Genesis 6:3; Moses "was 120 years old when he died" (Deuteronomy 34:7). The psalm attributed to Moses describes the new normal: "The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty" (Psalm 90:10).

Overlapping lives

If you take the Hebrew numbers at face value and add them up, some remarkable overlaps appear. Noah lived 350 years after the flood (Genesis 9:28). Abram was born either about 292 years after the flood, if Terah fathered him at 70, or about 352 years after it, if Abram was the youngest son and left Haran after Terah died at 205, as Stephen implies in Acts 7:4: "after his father died, God removed him from there into this land."

On the earlier date, Noah was still alive for the first 58 years of Abram's life, and Shem outlived Abraham by about 35 years. On the later date, Noah died just before Abram was born, but Shem was still alive when Abraham was 150, and Eber, the ancestor of the Hebrews, outlived Abraham. Either way, Noah outlived his descendant Peleg, and the patriarchs after the flood weren't distant legends to Abraham. Some were living relatives.

Were there gaps?

Not everyone reads these genealogies as a complete, unbroken chronology. Biblical genealogies sometimes skip generations; Matthew's genealogy of Jesus, for instance, leaves out several kings of Judah (compare Matthew 1:8 with 2 Kings 8–15). "Fathered" in Hebrew can mean "became the ancestor of." Many evangelical scholars think Genesis 5 and 11 may be selective, arranged in ten generations each for symmetry, while others hold to a strict chronology. The overlaps above assume no gaps.

The extra name in Luke

Here's a detail most readers miss. Luke's genealogy of Jesus includes a name Genesis doesn't have: "the son of Shelah, the son of Cainan, the son of Arphaxad, the son of Shem, the son of Noah" (Luke 3:35–36). In the Hebrew text of Genesis, Arpachshad is Shelah's father. Where did Cainan come from? The Septuagint, the Greek translation Luke's readers used, includes a Cainan between Arpachshad and Shelah in Genesis 11. Luke followed his Greek Bible. Some take this as evidence that the Hebrew genealogy has a gap; others think Cainan entered the Greek text by a copying error. It's one more reminder that the earliest Christians read these lists closely, and that the line from Noah to Jesus was precious to them.

Was Shem Melchizedek?

If Shem was still alive in Abraham's day, a fascinating question follows. In Genesis 14, after Abram rescues his nephew Lot, a mysterious king-priest appears:

"And Melchizedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine. (He was priest of God Most High.) And he blessed him and said, 'Blessed be Abram by God Most High, Possessor of heaven and earth; and blessed be God Most High, who has delivered your enemies into your hand!' And Abram gave him a tenth of everything." (Genesis 14:18–20)

Malki-tsedeq means "my king is righteousness" or "king of righteousness," and Salem (Shalem) is related to shalom, "peace." He has no introduction, no genealogy, and he disappears as suddenly as he came. Who was he?

The Jewish tradition

Ancient Jewish interpreters had an answer: Melchizedek was Shem. The identification appears in several Aramaic translations of Genesis, the Targums, including Targum Neofiti and Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, and in rabbinic writings. As Irish scholar Martin McNamara explains in a study of these texts, Melchizedek was identified as Shem mainly because of the life-span assigned to Shem in Gen 11. The logic is appealing: who better to be a priest of the true God in Abraham's day than the son Noah blessed with "Blessed be the LORD, the God of Shem"? The church father Jerome reported this Jewish view, and some later Christians found it attractive too.

The objections

The New Testament's own treatment of Melchizedek points the other way. Psalm 110 promises a coming king who will also be priest: "The LORD has sworn and will not change his mind, 'You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek'" (Psalm 110:4). Hebrews applies that verse to Jesus and builds an argument on Melchizedek's mysterious silence in Genesis:

"For this Melchizedek, king of Salem, priest of the Most High God, met Abraham returning from the slaughter of the kings and blessed him, and to him Abraham apportioned a tenth part of everything. He is first, by translation of his name, king of righteousness, and then he is also king of Salem, that is, king of peace. He is without father or mother or genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but resembling the Son of God he continues a priest forever." (Hebrews 7:1–3)

That argument depends on Genesis giving Melchizedek no family line. But Shem has one of the most detailed genealogies in the Bible, with a father, sons, a birth and a death. If Melchizedek were Shem, the writer of Hebrews couldn't say he was "without father or mother or genealogy."

Hebrews also argues that Melchizedek is greater than Levi's priesthood because Levi, in a sense, paid tithes to Melchizedek through Abraham, "for he was still in the loins of his ancestor when Melchizedek met him" (Hebrews 7:10). That point works best if Melchizedek stands outside Abraham's family line entirely. If he were Shem, Abraham himself would have been a descendant of Melchizedek, which muddles the argument. Hebrews says plainly that Melchizedek was one "who has not his descent from them" (Hebrews 7:6).

Some scholars also think the rabbinic identification served a purpose in debates with early Christians. By making Melchizedek simply Shem, a known ancestor, it removed the mystery Christians found so meaningful. Others think it was just an attempt to explain how Shem fit into Abraham's world.

Where that leaves us

The Shem identification is ancient, respectable and chronologically possible on the Hebrew numbers. But it doesn't fit how the New Testament reads Melchizedek, and most Christian interpreters have set it aside. What both views share is the conviction that in the generations after Babel, the knowledge of the true God hadn't disappeared. Before Abraham was called, there was still a priest of "God Most High" in Salem, the city that would later be Jerusalem.

All the Families of the Earth

Genesis 10 and 11 end with seventy nations scattered across the map and a confused tower left half-built on the plain of Shinar. Humanity tried to make a name for itself and failed. Then, in the very next chapter, God speaks to one man from Shem's line:

"Now the LORD said to Abram, 'Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.'" (Genesis 12:1–3)

Listen to the word "families." In Hebrew it's mishpachot, the plural of mishpachah, the very word translated "clans" all through the Table of Nations. Genesis 10 listed the clans of the earth. Genesis 12 promises that all those clans will be blessed through Abram. God didn't choose one family in order to abandon the other seventy. He chose one family in order to reach all seventy.

Paul says this promise was the gospel in seed form: "And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, 'In you shall all the nations be blessed'" (Galatians 3:8). And Jesus' last command sends His followers back out to the whole Table of Nations: "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations" (Matthew 28:19). The Greek panta ta ethne, "all the nations," is the same phrase the Septuagint uses when God repeats His promise that Abraham will become a great nation, "and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him" (Genesis 18:18).

So here's the arc of this series so far. In Part 1, a promised line survived a corrupt world. In Part 2, God made a covenant with every living creature, and a family's sin brought a curse. In Part 3, that family became every nation on earth, rebelled together at Babel, and was scattered, until God called one man to bring blessing back to all of them.

Next in the series: In Part 4, we go looking for the ark itself. We'll sort Scripture from legend on the mountains of Ararat, examine town names and relics, and take a hard, fair look at Ron Wyatt, the Durupinar site, and the scanning project working there right now.

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References and Further Reading

Scripture. Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Key passages: Genesis 6:3–4, 9:1, 9:19, 9:28, 10:1–32, 11:1–32, 12:1–3, 14:13, 14:18–20, 18:18, 25:7, 46:27; Deuteronomy 32:8, 34:7; 1 Kings 9:28; 1 Chronicles 1:7; Psalms 1:3, 55:9, 90:10, 105:23, 110:4; Jeremiah 51:27; Ezekiel 38:2, 38:6; Daniel 8:21; Amos 9:7; Jonah 1:3; Micah 5:6; Zephaniah 3:9; Matthew 1:8, 28:19; Luke 3:35–36, 10:1; Acts 2:4–6, 7:4, 17:26; Galatians 3:8; Hebrews 7:1–10; Revelation 7:9, 17:5.

Ancient sources

• Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 1.113–114 (Nimrod and Babel) and 1.122–147 (the nations).
• Targum Neofiti and Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 14:18 (Melchizedek as Shem).
• Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, book 14, and the T-and-O world map.

Study notes and scholarship

• Genesis 10, NABRE study notes, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
• Genesis 10, NET Bible notes.
• Allen P. Ross, "The Table of Nations in Genesis 10: Its Structure" and "Its Content," Bibliotheca Sacra 137 (1980) and 138 (1981).
• Martin McNamara, "Melchizedek: Gen 14,17-20 in the Targums, in Rabbinic and Early Christian Literature", Biblica 81 (2000).
• Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1–15, Word Biblical Commentary (Word, 1987).
• Kenneth A. Mathews, Genesis 1–11:26, New American Commentary (Broadman & Holman, 1996).
• John H. Walton, Genesis, NIV Application Commentary (Zondervan, 2001), on ziggurats and Babel.

Popular works discussed

• Bill Cooper, After the Flood (New Wine Press, 1995).
• Nathaniel T. Jeanson, Replacing Darwin (Master Books, 2017).
• The Table of Nations, Jack Kelley, Grace thru Faith (example of a modern-nations chart).