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Context No. 1442 of 4322 · Genesis

Context · Reflection

Genesis 10:21-32: in context

21Children were also born to Shem (the elder brother of Japheth), the father of all the children of Eber. 22The sons of Shem were: Elam, Asshur, Arpachshad, Lud, and Aram. 23The sons of Aram were: Uz, Hul, Gether, and Mash. 24Arpachshad became the father of Shelah. Shelah became the father of Eber. 25To Eber were born two sons. The name of the one was Peleg, for in his days the earth was divided. His brother’s name was Joktan. 26Joktan became the father of Almodad, Sheleph, Hazarmaveth, Jerah, 27Hadoram, Uzal, Diklah, 28Obal, Abimael, Sheba, 29Ophir, Havilah, and Jobab. All these were the sons of Joktan. 30Their dwelling extended from Mesha, as you go toward Sephar, the mountain of the east. 31These are the sons of Shem, by their families, according to their languages, lands, and nations. 32These are the families of the sons of Noah, by their generations, according to their nations. The nations divided from these on the earth after the flood.

This passage is part of the table of nations, tracing the descendants of Noah's son Shem: Elam, Asshur, Arpachshad, and their lines, down through Eber, from whom the Hebrews would come, and Peleg, in whose days, the text notes, the earth was divided. The list ends by summing up the whole: these are the families of the sons of Noah, according to their generations, in their nations; and from these the nations spread abroad on the earth after the flood. Behind the many peoples and languages stands one family.

A genealogy of ancient names is easy to skip, but the table of nations makes a claim worth pausing on: all the peoples of the earth, in their many nations and languages and lands, spring from one family. Beneath the divisions that would come, the different tongues and territories and eventually the enmities, there is a common origin; every nation traces back to the sons of one man, Noah, and further back to the one pair God made in the beginning. Scripture insists, at the head of its whole story, on the unity of the human family. This is not a small thing. It means that the foreigner, the stranger, the person of another nation or language or color, is not fundamentally other but kin, a member of the same family descended from the same origin, made by the same God. The divisions among the nations are real, and much of scripture and history is the story of their conflicts; but they are divisions within one family, not differences of kind. To hold that truth is a quiet corrective to every impulse to regard other peoples as essentially alien, less human, outside the circle of those we owe regard. The table of nations, dull as it looks, is a declaration that there is one human family, and that the God who made it is the God of all its branches. And the whole story will move, in the end, toward the gathering of every nation and tongue and people back into one, before the throne of the one God who made them all.

Do I regard people of other nations, languages, and origins as fundamentally other, or as kin, members of the one human family that scripture traces to a single origin and a single God, and does that truth shape how I treat the stranger?

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