Join us for part 1 of a long conversation on Genesis chapters 10 and 11!
Journey by Faith
Genesis Part 23: Noah to Abram part 1
You're listening to Journey by Faith, the official podcast of Faith Bible College in Norfolk, Virginia. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Here we go. Welcome back, everybody, to the Faith Bible College podcast. We are right in the middle of Genesis. Working through chapter 9, we're going to get into chapter 10 today, just as a preview what we're going to talk about. We are going to read chapter 10. Now this is not necessarily one of the more objectively exciting passages in chapter 10. This is one of those genealogies. We have a list of names. Now we absolutely believe that the whole Bible is valuable. The whole Bible is authoritative, has value, so we're not going to skip it, but there's not going to be as much specifics to go into. There are parts that we're going to highlight, but we are going to read it because we want to be faithful on this podcast to read through Genesis. So we're not going to skip over it, so you'll hear some of that, you'll hear a lot of these names when we get to chapter 10. So just as a preview, that is what we're going to do today. We're going to do a little review to start. We're going to back up to Genesis 9, verse 24. This is after Noah has left the arch, he's planted a vineyard, and something shameful has happened between Noah and his son Ham. And now there is, again, we're going to just reiterate what we talked about last time. Just as a recap, verse 24 says, "When Noah awoke from his one and knew what his youngest son had done to him." Again, that's his youngest son Ham. He said, "Cursed be Canaan, a servant of servants, shall he be to his brothers." So we have a few more things to say about this, so let's look at what this curse means, why this curse happens. So there are a few more details we're going to hit today. Yeah, so once again, we notice that unlike what a lot of people think, we often refer to this as the curse of Ham, and that is not the case. The curse is on Canaan, which is a specific son of Ham. And you might say, "Well, does that make a difference? It makes a world of difference, especially as we will see that many people over the years have taken this curse of Genesis 9 and used it as, well, I'll just call it an excuse for slavery and for racism, claiming that Ham and his descendants basically ended up being dark-skinned people, primarily in the area of Africa, and therefore this is a curse upon black people. And understood as Ham, you might be able to make that argument, still a stretch, but maybe. Yeah, but understood as Canaan, that argument completely goes out the window. So cursed be Canaan. And again, we can say, "Well, why did Noah curse Canaan instead of Ham who did the deed of dishonoring Noah?" Well, again, this is a prophecy. God knows what he's doing. We really can't get into the head of Noah here, except that God directed him to curse Canaan and his descendants. We could say, as many as speculated, Canaan had some of the same personality traits and attributes of it as his father Ham, but Scripture doesn't tell us, so we can't be dogmatic about that. But what we do find here is that Canaan, a servant of servants, shall he be to his brothers. Now, again, we realize that it's not his actual brothers that we're talking about here. And we know that because in the next verse 26 and then 27, we go into the area of Shem and Japheth, who were not the brothers of Canaan, but rather the uncles to be technically correct. So Canaan or the Canaanites are going to be a servant of servants were told. Now, if we go down to chapter 10, verse 6, we find the sons of Ham were Cush, Egypt, or Mizram, Coot, and Canaan. All right. So we know that Ham here has at least four sons. Cush is typically associated with the territory of Ethiopia in northern Africa. Mizram or Egypt, obviously, is also in northern Africa. Poot has been associated with the territory of Libya, also in northern Africa, and then Canaan, and the Canaanites in what is today modern day Palestine, which we are very familiar with because of much of the historical books of the Old Testament, talking about the Canaanite peoples and especially in the books of Joshua and Judges. So Canaan is going to be the servant of servants, and you say, "Well, what does that mean? Does that mean he's going to be the lowest servant?" It could be understood that way, but I think as we go on, what we find here is that verse 25 is an opening statement that summarizes verses 26 and 27. Okay. That makes sense. So servant of servant means he's going to be the servant of one who is therefore going to be the servant of another, and that's exactly what we see here in verses 26 and 27. So in verse 7 of chapter 10, we're told the sons of Kush were Siba, Havela, Sabtah, Rahama and Sabtecha, and the sons of Rahama, Siba and Dedan, and you say, "Well, okay, here again we go into these names," and this is really a difficult chapter to examine without having a map in front of us. Right. But-- And you have a map in front of me. Those can help our listeners. Yeah. And at that point, even an ancient map, modern day maps, not going to hell, but the sons of Kush end up being in the area of Arabia, which again is not in Africa, it's part of the continent of Asia, about what we would consider to be the Middle East. We have to go down to verse 15 in chapter 10 to get to Canaan. Yes, right. Canaan fathered Sidon, his firstborn, and half, and the Jebusites, the Amorites, the Gurga Shites, the Hivites, the Arkites, the Sinites, the Arvedites, the Zemorites, and he goes on. And notice the difference here. For the other parts of the genealogy, we have the names of children. Right. And in verse 15, under Canaan, we have Canaanite people groups. Right. These are the people groups, right. Yeah. Again, the Jebusites. They obviously lived in the ancient territory of Gibus, which is now modern day Jerusalem. And later on in Scripture, David would be the one to conquer Gibus and rename it Jerusalem. And take it over from the Jebusites. Like what we're seeing here is, like you said, this list of people who later on in the Bible, we see that God uses the descendants of Shem, being the Israelites, to judge these people. Right. Yes. One example I thought of this was in my notes. I'm not sure if it, you might have had this too, but I've looked forward to Deuteronomy 7. It's one place that I looked forward. And it says this in Deuteronomy 7, when the Lord your God brings you into the land, you're entering to take possession of it and clears away many nations before you. The Hittites, the Gurga Shites, the Ammonites, the Canaanites, the Parazites, the Hivites, the Jebusites, seven nations more numerous than mighty than you. And when the Lord God gives them over to you and you defeat them, you must devote them to complete destruction. Right. So again, if you want to read the whole biblical story, which we encourage, of course, you see that this curse on Canaan in Genesis 9, God promises it again in Deuteronomy 7. Absolutely. Like you said, and you mentioned David judging the Jebusites and defeating them, right? You can see these places. So not only should we read the text as it is and understand it in context and understand that this isn't a curse on Ham, there really is no curse on Ham, that's not a real thing. Not only is this only a curse on Canaan, we see it prophesied again, or commanded again by God and then fulfilled in the Old Testament as well. So we look at the whole biblical picture to interpret things rightly. And so that's why we believe this is the right interpretation. Yes. You know, so moving on to verse 26, blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem. And so here we have Shem and we say, okay, well, who's Shem? Well in chapter 10, we come to verse 21 and we find Shem being the father of all the children of Eber, the older brother of Japheth, and then going on Shem, Elam, Asher, and you say, all right, I don't recognize any of this. Well, later on in chapter 11, beginning in verse 10, we get a more focused picture of the descendants of Shem, and when we come to verse 26 in chapter 11, we find that one of the descendants of Shem is a man by the name of Tara, and at the age of 70, he gives birth to Abram, or Abram, and we of course know Abram better as Abraham. And we have the Abrahamic covenant and we know that Abraham is the father of many peoples and especially the father of the nation of Israel. So Shem here is representative of Abraham. And so let Canaan, verse 26, be the servant of Shem. In the year 1400, or thereabout, Israel begins the conquest under Joshua going across the Jordan River, entering into the promised land and taking out conquering these people. Now there's a problem here, and the problem is once again the disobedience of man. God had given Joshua and the people of Israel, or in this case, the descendants of Shem, and order a command to conquer and possess. And as you quoted from Deuteronomy 7, that possession meant wiping them out. Well, as we go on and look at the book of Joshua and then later Judges, we find that Israel only obeyed part of that. And they conquered them, they took some possession of the land, but they didn't destroy them. And you say, well, why not? Well, the Bible tells us Israel looked and said, hey, these people would be good slaves. Let's enslave them rather than remove them. And there are other reasons as well that Israel didn't obey God, but the fact that Israel did not remove these people groups has been a thorn in the side of Israel for many, many years. The fact, even still today, because we notice that the land that can be referred to as Palestine, Palestine is a translation of the word Philistine. So the Philistines were one of the Canaanite people groups that lived along the border of the Mediterranean Sea, what is today known as the Gaza Strip. And the fact that Israel under Joshua did not wipe out the Philistines, the Philistines would be the arch enemy of Israel for many, many years, and never completely wiped out. And in fact, the current day Palestinians are descendants of Canaan and the Canaanites. And so, you know, part of the problem today is that, well, you know, we have Americans that are siding with Israel and Americans that are siding with the Palestinians and saying the Israelites came in and colonized them and so forth. And yes, they did, but under the command of God. And if Israel had obeyed God in the very beginning, there wouldn't be a Palestinian people around today to cause the uprising and to be a home base for Hamas. And, you know, we don't have time to get into this. But as if we were to go into the Old Testament prophets, we find that there is a prophecy that says that Israel will destroy the Philistines in Palestine and conquer it and own it. Now, whether that's talking about our time today or sometime in the future, the fact is the Bible's already told us who owns and who's going to win the ultimate victory in this war. Yeah. Right. And I said, we always hold the Bible as above anything else. So what God has said, we must trust it. You know, something I was teaching in my theology class, I kind of joke about it, but I was teaching yesterday to my students here, Hampton Christian is basically is a, I was talking about a certain topic and I said, look, it's God's universe and we're living in it, right? We don't get to tell him what we think. It should be. Right. He is God. We, all we can do is worship him and be in his, that's all we can do and take him at his word. Take him at his word. Yeah. Exactly. And you know, in this case, I don't know if any of our listeners are, you know, thinking and saying, well, you know, I don't really know who to back and support in this Israeli Hamas conflict. Well, I can tell you what the Bible says. We just did and I would just say, be careful that you don't back the wrong horse, you know, yeah. Yeah. All right. God has already told us what's going to happen and what his will is. Yes. We definitely don't have time to get into dispensationalism and all of that. So I don't even touch that, but and I probably wouldn't in the first place. Yeah. There's way too much there to even begin. And yeah, right. I agree with you too. I probably wouldn't go there, but there's a lot of topics. And that's just, we're not, we're not getting into that. That's not what the purpose of this is. The purpose of this is this is what the Bible says, right? Yeah. And so we have to trust it, whatever it is that the Bible says, we want to present it to you. You know, there are other topics that are important, of course, but for this podcast, we want to read what the Bible says and that's what we're doing. So these are all the things that come up and you do have to think about. And I think that's a good point that we make here. As you're reading the Bible, these are the things that, you know, we don't just read it to read it. We read it to apply it to our lives. Right. Does it affect what we do today? So reading it rightly will lead us to those right conclusions. So again, it's good for us to think about these things, but, you know, if you're looking for an answer to that conflict, we're not going to have it on this podcast, basically. Right. Now, let's come back again to the curse because we're not done with it yet. Right. We've learned 27. May God enlarge J. 5th. So as we look at J. 5th again in chapter 10, we find his sons, Gomer, Maygog, Maydai, Javan, Tubal, Meshach, and then we have even more mentioned there. And so what we find is that J. 5th and his descendants become what would be modern day Europe. Okay. Yeah. In Western Europe. And so what do we find? Well, verse 26, Canaan and his descendants are going to become the servant or be conquered by Shem, which is, in this case, the nation of Israel. And then may God enlarge J. 5th and let him dwell in the tents of Shem. Now, there are a couple of different ways to understand that phrase, dwell in the tents of it can refer to there as a guest, you know, later on in Genesis, we see three individuals coming to visit Abraham and he invites them into his tent and feeds them as his guest. And so some have taken it that way. But I think the rest of this verse points us to the other interpretation. And that is dwelling in the tents is the idea of conquering. So J. 5th is going to conquer Israel, not remove them, but dwell in their land. Okay, and notice Canaan is going to be his servant. So the Canaanites who are already the servants of the Israelites will end up being the servants of the descendants of J. 5th, which are Europeans. And again, if we go back in history, we see this taking place when a European whose name we're all familiar with, that of Alexander the Great moves out of Europe and into Asia. And in order to conquer the Persian Empire at that time, and in doing so takes control of all of Palestine and all of the nation of Israel. And so Israel will come under the oppression or the dominance of the Greeks, not only under Alexander the Great, but under those who take over after Alexander, namely in this case the Ptolemaic and solution dynasties, and from there Greece will lose power or concede power to another European Empire, which we know as Rome. And so for years, both Greece and Rome were going to be the oppressor, the superior of both the nation of Israel and intern the people of Canaan, because of this prophecy. So it did take place just as God had said, it would be years later. But and in fact, none of those that were alive at the time of this prophecy would see it take place. But we with the advantage of history, being 2020 vision can look back and see, yeah, this happened exactly as God said it would. That's right. As things always do. Absolutely. That's right. To finish up this chapter, it just verse 28 just tells us, and I think we said this last time just to reiterate, after the flood Noah lived 350 years, all the days of Noah were 950 years and he died, follows the same pattern talking about the other figures here in Genesis. And so it gives us the time he lived after the flood, his total number of years, and then Noah passes away. Yes. So now we'd like to go ahead. We've referred to some parts of chapter 10. Now's the part where we are going to just read through this passage in chapter 10, just so we can, yeah, just as we are going through reading Genesis. So I will read the first part and before we do that, let me just make another comment. From a chronological or timeframe perspective, chapter 10 and chapter 11 are reversed. Okay. In other words, the events of chapter 11 take place before the spreading out of chapter 10. Okay. And so chapter 10 keeps us in line with Shem Ham and J. 5th and tells us where there are people groups were finally settled down. But the reason why they're migrating away from each other is because of the events of chapter 11. So because of the curse of God again in chapter 11 and God dealing with sin, the geography of chapter 10 is what takes place. And we can talk about that a little bit more when we get to chapter 11. We may get to chapter 11 next time is what it seems like. Yeah. Okay. Good. Yes. That's very helpful to know. Yeah. So this is a spreading out that happens after the events of chapter 11. All right. I will begin reading in verse one. These are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem Ham and J. 5th. Sons were born to them after the flood. Probably going to mispronounce some of these, but we'll just go with it. They're not here. So they don't care. There you go. The sons of J. 5th, Gomer, Magog, Madai, Jovin, Tubal, Meshach and Tiras, the sons of Gomer, Ashkenaz, Rip, Ripa, yeah, I can't say some of these, Rip, Ripa, Togamar, the sons of Javen, Elisha, Tarshish, Chidim and Dodanim. From these, the coastland people spread in their lands, each with his own language by their clans in their nations. Just as a note, it mentions each in their own language, which again, just points to what you said about this coming after the events of chapter 11. Yes. Yes. The sons of Ham, Kush, Egypt, Putt and Canaan, sons of Kush, Siba, Havela, Sabta, Rama and Sabekta, sons of Rama, Shiba and Dodan, Kush fathered Nimrod. He was the first on earth to be a mighty man. You may know Nimrod from the Bugs Bunny cartoons, because Elmer Fudd Nimrod turned into calling Nimrod was a negative term, but it really, he was just calling, you know, making fun of him as a mighty warrior. Right. That's an interesting fact. There you go. Well. Bugs Bunny refers to Nimrod. Let's talk about Nimrod. Let's do it. It's not a moment. The Bible doesn't go into a lot of information about Nimrod. We're going to meet him again in chapter 11, because it is Nimrod. That's going to be the leader of the people in building both the city and the Tower of Babel. Okay. But we're told here in verse eight, Nimrod was the first on earth to be a mighty man. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord, therefore it is said like Nimrod, a mighty hunter before the Lord. The beginning of his kingdom was Babel, Eric, Akkad and Kalei in the land of Shinaar. So again, we're getting a little bit of a preview here from chapter 11. Right. But this Babel is the same Babel as the Tower of Babel with him. Yes. Exactly. And is that later on? We'll get to it. Is that later on point to Babel on? Is that similar or do we? Is that a? It's in the same territory. Yes. All right. Yes. Okay. Now, a little bit about Nimrod. That's a great name. Again, you know, his name has become one that is associated with foolishness and stupidity. But Nimrod was anything but that. Right. Yes. There is some research out there that has been done over the years, primarily by a man by the name of Alexander Hislop, which is H-Y-S-L-O-P. He wrote a book a number of years ago, which has been in and out of print called the two Babylon's. Hmm. Okay. And what he does in that book is he talks about what you just refer to, Babel and Babylon. And the connection between the ancient Babylonian Empire and the Neo-Babylonian Empire under King Nebuchadnezzar, which is one that most people are more familiar with. Right. But the ancient Babylonian Empire would develop into Mesopotamian Empire. Right. According to this book and his research, Nimrod is married to a woman by the name of Samarimus. Okay. And Nimrod becomes the political leader and he causes Samarimus to be the religious leader. Hmm. Now, let me just say before I go any further that there is debate out there over the accuracy of this. Sure. Yeah. You know, the two Babylon's is the primary source of this information, but it is the two Babylon's is the primary source of this information, but, you know, it is very interesting. So anyway, we have Nimrod and Samarimus who are ruling over the people of the earth at this time, and they have a son by the name of Tamuz. Now what Hislop does is he traces all of the false religions of the world back to Nimrod, Samarimus, and Tamuz. Wow. Okay. Interesting. To this picture, Tamuz will be killed and from that comes a time of 40 days of mourning to when he is resuscitated or brought back to life. Coming to this, Samarimus introduces the idea of confession where the people will confess to her and her priests in order to hold them under their thumb. Samarimus and Tamuz would then begin to take on different names, depending upon the location. So in Canaan, Samarimus would become known as Astra or Astardate, and Tamuz would become known as Baal, or recognize those names, yes. And from there, you know, to Greco-Roman mythology, they would take on yet other names. And what Hislop is doing here is he is showing, and again, let me just say, there is great dispute over the accuracy of this, but what Hislop does is he takes this and he shows that this becomes the primary religion, false religion of the world, just different names. And we know that to be true. In fact, in the Old Testament prophets, the Israelites are told, do not worship Samarimus as the queen of heaven and do not worship Tamuz and give bread for him. But Hislop will take all of this and connect all the dots and show that what comes out of this is the Roman Catholic Church. Interesting. With the 40 days of mourning for Tamuz becoming Lent, the idea of Samarimus, one of the names that she takes on is Ishtar, and from that comes the idea of Ishtar eggs, eggs being the picture of new life, Tamuz coming back to life, and from there, the idea of Ishtar eggs, the institution of confession, and so forth, and so well. Very interesting stuff, obviously the Roman Catholic Church argues that it's not accurate and not true. But we do know, however, that under the time of Constantine, which is really the beginning of the Roman Catholic Church, there was a lot of syncretism and compromise that took place. So, for example, we know that December 25th is what we refer to as Christmas. That was directly related to the festival of Saturnalia, which was a pagan holiday, and simply adopted by the church at that time to become a Christian holiday. The word Easter is not in the Bible, but certainly is a derivative of Ishtar. So, there is some truth here in this, how much of it is accurate, well, that's a different story. Yes. Good information to have. But like you said, there is some debate over it, is it true, is it not? That is for the reader to decide, I would say, yes. And if you can grab a copy of the two Babylons, if you can find it someplace, probably at a used bookstore, I would pick it up and read it. It is extremely interesting. Yes. Good, good. That wraps up part one of our discussion on Genesis 10 and 11. Join us next week as we continue the conversation in part two. [MUSIC]