Author : Keith Sharp
Bible Survey : Lesson Six (Genesis 10-11)
Remember that the purpose of the Bible is to show us how to be saved from our sins and to go to live with God in heaven in eternity. To do this, the Lord inspired Moses to give us a brief history of all mankind up to the time of Abraham, at which point he narrows the story to the descendants of Abraham and only tells about other peoples as they had an impact on Abraham’s family. We will see that god chose to bring the Savior, His son Jesus Christ, into the world through Abraham.
Genesis chapters ten and eleven give us the historical background for Abraham. They contain a very brief outline of the history of mankind from Noah to Abraham.
It is very interesting that, in giving this short overview, Moses leaves the only record we have of where the various kinds of people and the different languages people use came from. Why is it that there are so many different kinds of people with such a wide variety of languages? Let’s find out.
Noah had three sons – Shem, Ham and Japheth. Each of them had sons. As these families left the high country around Mt. Ararat in modern Eastern Turkey, they traveled south to the plain in the land of Shinar, in the Southern part of modern Iraq, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.
God had commanded Noah and his sons to repopulate the earth. But the people of this time wanted to stay together. They began to build a great tower that could be the monument to keep them united.
But the Lord frustrated their rebellious plan. He caused them to begin speaking different languages. They couldn’t understand each other, so, just as people do today, they gathered in groups according to language. They called the place where the tower was located “Babel,” which means “confusion”.
Apparently each group was also descended from a common father. They began to travel out from Shinar to the other places around and eventually into all parts of the world.
Generally speaking, the descendants of Japheth traveled to the north. They are the people the rest of the Old Testament deals with the least.
Eventually Ham’s family traveled west and south. The descendants of Canaan, Ham’s son whom Noah cursed, settled along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, including Palestine. Other descendants of Ham traveled to Southern Arabia or Africa.
The family of Shem over time settled closest to Mesoptamia, the general name for the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the heart of the present nation of Iraq. They are the ones the Old Testament deals with the most. Thus, most Old Testament peoples are Semitic, meaning they descended from Shem.
From the line of Arphaxad, one of the sons of Shem, eventually a man named Terah was born. He became the father of Abraham, from whom Jesus Christ descended.
We learn from Genesis chapters ten and eleven where all the different kinds of people on the earth originally came from and how all the many languages got started. But, though this is fascinating and important, we learn something much more important from these chapters. We learn that every person on earth, regardless of language, skin color, facial features, body build, or culture, came from one common set of parents, Noah and his wife (and ultimately Adam and Eve). As the apostle Paul stated of God, “And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26). Despite all our differences, we are all basically the same. You are I are kinfolks, and so are all people on the earth.
