The Table of Nations in Genesis 10 is an account of the sons of Noah, listed according to their "clans and languages, in their territories and nations" (verse 4). This then is the beginning of the division and organisation of the human race. The beginning of civilisation. Simple really, but one does wonder where all these people came from. Many people have commented on the implied incest here - after the flood, only eight people remained to repopulate the earth, four of whom were blood relations - but there would have been no need to marry closer than cousins. That may sound wrong, but it was allowed by Jewish law and is in fact still legal in most countries. And anthropological studies suggest that the founding population of humanity was relatively small, and so some inbreeding would have been necessary. So it does work. Sort of.
But it's interesting that even as humanity began to divide itself into clans and nations, interbreeding would have meant that they were all still pretty closely related. It just goes to show how arbitrary these distinctions were. Still are, if you ask me.
I'll be honest here. I always used to hate passages like this - they were just long lists of unpronounceable names - but it strikes me now that each one of those names represents a life. We may not know much about these people, but we know they existed. And that means they lived and loved and laughed. The pages of the Bible are bristling with life. Quite thrilling.
But onto Genesis 11 and the Tower of Babel. This story presumably took place during the time of the sons of the sons of Noah, because it explains why they split into their separate "clans and languages". It all starts when men begin to work together to build a city with a tower in order to "make a name" for themselves (verse 20). People often talk about how the men who built the tower wanted to be gods, but that is not their express intent. I don't think they were trying to be God, I think the real problem was that they were trying to be great without God. The tower was their own idea built for their own glory.
When God saw this, and realised that while men worked together there was nothing they could not accomplish, he decided to "confuse their languages" and scatter them across the face of the earth. I don't believe He did that to stop us achieving anything, I believe He did it to stop us achieving everything. Why? Because not everything is right or good for us. And in an age where progress appears to have increased at an exponential rate and everything seems possible, it's an important lesson. Improved communications and the spread of the English language mean that we are close to having a common speech again, and people are working together across national boundaries to build new towers of science and medicine and technology. That sense of global community is fantastic, and there are people doing some incredible things, but we must careful that we do not cross the boundaries of what is right and good, and to do that we must involve God at every step.
Genesis 11 ends with a more detailed account of the line of Shem as far as Abram, whose story will be the focus of my next few blogs.
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