Genesis 10-11: Genealogies and the Tower of Babel

The Genealogy of Shem, Ham, and Japheth

Genesis 10 gives the genealogy of Noah’s sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Genealogies can be boring reads, but if you pay attention, some interesting details can emerge. Some things to note here:

• Each son’s genealogy is summed up by saying they spread into clans and nations, with their own languages and territories. (This fact will come into play later.)
• Fun fact: Ham was an ancestor of Nimrod, the mighty hunter and warrior. This is also the source of the name “Nimrod” which is used as an insult today. The best explanation I could find for this development was that in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, Bugs Bunny called Elmer Fudd a “Nimrod” referring to the great hunter, and from there, the name started being used to describe a dumb jerk like Elmer Fudd 🙂
• Ham (the son whose decendants were curse by Noah in chapter 9) was an ancestor of men named Egypt and Canaan, presumably the ancestors of the nations of Egypt and Canaan, who become notorious bad guys later in Genesis.
• Shem’s genealogy is also given in this chapter, but the significance of his descendants is not revealed until the next chapter, when the genealogy is told again.

You can read Genesis 10 in full here.

The Tower of Babel

Genesis 11 begins with the story of the Tower of Babel. The world is said to have all spoken one language, and all decided to build a tower reaching to the heavens, “so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” God thinks mankind has become too powerful, so he confuses their language, causing them to scatter around the earth instead of continuing to work together to build the tower. Some questions:

• Why was it so wrong for mankind to desire to unite and build together?
• In the genealogies told in chapter 10, it was stated that the descendants of Noah spread throughout the world with their unique nations and languages. Why does chapter 11 begin with a story that seems to give a different account, of mankind sharing one language and only splitting apart because of the Tower of Babel and God’s deliberate scattering of humanity?

You can read the story in Chapter 11 here:

Another Genealogy of Shem

After the story of the Tower of Babel, Shem’s genealogy is given again, showing his descendants leading to Abram. Cool thing – the word Semites comes from the name Shem – the Semites are descendants of Shem!

I kinda geek out when I see how these things tie together – Adam to Noah to Abram, leading to the Jews we know today. It’s not that I believe these stories, but I love to see a connecting thread from the past leading up to today, and also a connecting thread between the various stories I was taught as a kid – I never understood how they all tied together, but seeing it tie together actually makes each individual story more interesting.

After the second genealogy, there is more detail about Abram’s family. His brother Haran has a son named Lot. After Haran dies, Abram’s father Terah takes Abram and Lot, along with Abram’s wife Sarai (who is unable to conceive), away from Ur towards Canaan, but they stop in Harran instead and settle there, where Terah later dies.

An awkward flow

In Chapters 10 and 11 there is more awkward and somewhat contradictory accounts. First, we see the genealogy of Noah’s sons, telling the clans, languages, territories, and nations that spread from each of them. The genealogy ends with

These are the clans of Noah’s sons, according to their lines of descent, within their nations. From these the nations spread out over the earth after the flood.

Then Chapter 11 begins

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech.  As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

Chapter 10 gives a genealogy of Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and states that the nations that came from them spread all over the earth with different languages, then right after that, at the beginning of chapter 11, we read of the world’s people united with one language in one location. Then the story of the Tower of Babel which scattered the peoples of the world, and immediately after that, another genealogy of Shem.

Repetitive, contradictory, confusing :/

This is fascinating to me as a document from history, as a part of the development of the complex cultures and religions in conflict today whose conflicts can be seen all the way back to the beginnings of these religions in the Middle East. But reading this, as I keep pointing out, I struggle to understand how one can feel that this is the Word of God.