Scripture Daily

Context No. 960 of 4322 · Genesis

Context · Reflection

Genesis 10:6-14: in context

6The sons of Ham were: Cush, Mizraim, Put, and Canaan. 7The sons of Cush were: Seba, Havilah, Sabtah, Raamah, and Sabteca. The sons of Raamah were: Sheba and Dedan. 8Cush became the father of Nimrod. He began to be a mighty one on the earth. 9He was a mighty hunter before the LORD. Therefore it is said, “like Nimrod, a mighty hunter before the LORD”. 10The beginning of his kingdom was Babel, Erech, Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar. 11Out of that land he went into Assyria, and built Nineveh, Rehoboth Ir, Calah, 12and Resen between Nineveh and the great city Calah. 13Mizraim became the father of Ludim, Anamim, Lehabim, Naphtuhim, 14Pathrusim, Casluhim (which the Philistines descended from), and Caphtorim.

This is part of the table of nations after the flood, tracing the descendants of Noah's sons who become the peoples of the earth. Here it is Ham's line, and the list pauses on one figure: Cush fathered Nimrod, who became the first great power on the earth, a mighty hunter before the LORD, so that his name became a saying. His kingdom began at Babel in Shinar, and from there he built the great cities of Assyria, including Nineveh.

In a list of bare names, the narrator stops to make Nimrod stand out, and the details are pointed. He is the first man described as building an empire, the founder of Babel, and later of Nineveh, the two cities that will become scripture's great symbols of human pride against God. Babel is where humanity will try to build a tower to heaven and make a name for itself, and Nineveh is the capital of the empire that will one day devour the northern kingdom. So the Bible quietly plants, in a genealogy, the origins of the world's proud imperial cities in one aggressive, kingdom-building man. Even the phrase before the LORD carries a shadow; whatever Nimrod's fame as a hunter, it was all lived out in God's sight, and the cities he founded set themselves against God's purposes. The point buried in the list is that the story of human empire, of accumulating power and making a name, starts early and runs against the grain of God from the beginning.

Where does the Nimrod instinct, to build something impressive and make a name for myself, run quietly through my own ambitions, and against what does it set itself?

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