Seventy Nations

The flood is over. Noah's family has come out of the ark, received the covenant of the rainbow, and then disgraced itself in a tent. Chapter 9 ended with a blessing and a curse spoken over Noah's sons; chapter 10 shows what became of them. It is the fifth of the "account of" sections that structure Genesis, and it reads like an atlas — Japheth's line to the north and west, Ham's through Egypt and Mesopotamia and Canaan, Shem's to the east. Israel first heard this after four centuries in Egypt, with Canaan ahead of them. Nearly every name here was a nation they knew: a trading partner, an occupier, a border, an enemy. It is a family tree, and it is also a map of the world they were walking into.

Read it as an ancient reader would and the first surprise is that these are mostly not individuals. Adam Clarke points out that many of the "sons" are grammatically plural — Mizraim is a dual form, and Ludim, Naphtuhim, Casluhim, Caphtorim and the rest are peoples, not men. Genesis is naming nations by their ancestor, and sometimes by their region. The Canaanite entries in verses 15-18 are simply the tribal names Israel would meet on the other side of the Jordan.

The second surprise is the arithmetic. The Tyndale commentary counts seventy names — seven times ten, a number of completeness. Jacob's household would go down into Egypt as seventy persons (Genesis 46:27). A family of seventy, called to bless a world of seventy nations. Nothing in the chapter says this out loud. The reader is left to notice.

The third is the order. Shem is named first in verse 1 and handled last, because the narrative is funnelling toward him — toward Eber, toward Peleg, toward Abram. And the Table stands *before* Babel even though Babel is what produced it: verses 5, 20 and 31 already speak of separate languages, which chapter 11 has not yet explained. Tyndale reads this reversal as deliberate. The spread of the nations is presented first as the blessing of chapter 9 working itself out, and only then as the judgment of chapter 11.

Then the list breaks for six verses about Nimrod (10:8-12), whose kingdom began at Babylon and reached Nineveh — precisely the two powers that would one day carry Israel and Judah into exile. Whether Nimrod is a villain is less obvious than sermons often make it. Clarke thinks him "very likely... a very bad man," connecting his name to the verb *marad*, *he rebelled*, and citing ancient Jewish paraphrases that make him a rebel and a murderer of innocent men. But Clarke also preserves the objection against his own view, quoting Richardson's blunt question of where the authority for these aspersions is, since they are not in the originals or the versions. The Hebrew itself says only: mighty, before the LORD, builder of cities.

A list of nations is not neutral bookkeeping. Deuteronomy 32:8 and Paul at Athens (Acts 17:26) both say God himself fixed the boundaries and seasons of these peoples — so chapter 10 is a map of the field before the seed is sown. Two chapters later God calls one man out of this crowded world and tells him that in him all its families will be blessed (Genesis 12:3; 18:18). Everything in between — Israel, exile, the manger, the cross — is God keeping that promise. The nations here are not background scenery. They are the reason Abraham is called at all, and the reason the risen Christ says *all* of them.

Father, you set the times and the borders of every people, and you have never lost track of a single one. Forgive me for the categories I use to avoid knowing people. Teach me to see the ark and the promise behind every face I meet today, and make me part of the blessing you swore to Abraham. Amen.

Jesus keeps pressing past the surface of the law: not only no murder but no unreconciled grudge, not only no adultery but no lust, not only legal divorce but faithful marriage, not only kept oaths but speech so honest that oaths are unnecessary. The Westminster Confession takes both of the last two seriously: its chapter on lawful oaths (WCF 22) cites these very verses, and its chapter on marriage and divorce (WCF 24) grounds the same teaching in Jesus' words on marriage in Matthew 19. Righteousness here reaches the heart, not the paperwork.

Peleg (פֶּלֶג) — division

Verse 25 explains the name: in his days the earth was divided. Tyndale reads this as anticipating the scattering into language groups at Babel (11:1-9), which is why Peleg's brother Joktan is placed on the far side of that story while Peleg's line runs on to Abram. Clarke notes that some have instead taken it of a physical dividing of the land masses. The text does not settle the question, and neither should we; what it does settle is that a division is coming, and that the promise runs through it.